Topography, from topos, is the practice of describing place through language, the features of the land, the inhabitants, and the accumulation of history. Specific to locality and the perspective of the person delineating, describing, or collecting materials, topography counters the worldliness of geography while also offering a potential tool to multiply singular approaches. Over a day-long workshop, approaches to place from Indigenous and European perspectives and interrogate the frame of ‘topography’ in global contexts were examined. Working with special collections, the day included three talks and object viewing sessions that focused on the Americas, the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe, and included descriptions of military campaigns, fortifications, settlements, urban cartographies, city views, forests and hunts, palaces, religious structures, markets, peoples, coastal views, weather, maps, and more.
The workshop was organized by Holly Shaffer (History of Art & Architecture, Brown University), Cynthia Roman (The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University), Neil Safier (The John Carter Brown Library, Brown University), and Shahzad Bashir (Religious Studies, Brown University).
Session 1: 10:00 am – 1:00 pm (John Carter Brown Library)
John Lopez (Assistant Professor of Art History, University of California-Davis), “Renaissance Cartography and the Mapping of the Environmental Crisis at Viceregal Mexico City”
When the Spanish founded Mexico City in 1524, they inherited from the Aztec an island site that flooded. After following in the footsteps of their pre-Columbian predecessor, by rebuilding the hydraulic web of causeways, dikes, and floodgates, Spanish colonial authorities sought an alternative solution to the city’s propensity to inundate. In 1607, the cartographer-turned-hydraulic engineer Enrico Martínez implemented the desagüe, an engineering project to drain the lakes that surrounded the city into the Gulf of Mexico. As part of his response to environmental crisis, Martínez produced Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna. Martínez’s map represents a defining moment in Mexico City’s history because it is the first drawing made by a professional mapmaker in the service of flood control. Made under the guise of environmental concern and technological prowess, Descripción de la comarca de México aids understanding how flooding was a problem posed by New World nature to Renaissance cartographic analysis, where science and mathematical abstraction were mobilized to end Mexico City’s centuries-old problem of chronic flooding.
Samira Sheikh (Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University), “The Languages of Gujarati Maps”
Terrestrial maps produced in Gujarat in the 18th century drew from and “translated” cartographic vocabularies available in this highly connected and trade-rich province of the Mughal empire. With the extension of the East India Company’s influence over Gujarat, local mapmakers veered towards conventions that often looked European on the surface. In response, Samira Sheikh argued that Gujarati cartography, informed by religious, maritime, scientific, and painterly conventions, was in fact the site of multiple, cross-cutting translation projects.
Ünver Rüstem (Assistant Professor of History of Art, Johns Hopkins University), “Mapping Cosmopolitanism: An Eighteenth-Century Printed Ottoman Atlas and the Turn to Baroque”
In 1732, İbrahim Müteferrika — founder in Istanbul of the first Turkish-language Ottoman printing press — published the Cihānnümā, an illustrated world atlas filled with copperplate maps. While in some ways replicating the art of traditional manuscripts, the Cihānnümā’s makers derived their maps from European printed atlases, even adapting the latter’s Baroque cartouches. Ünver Rüstem discussed these cartouches as sites for the emergence of a distinctly Ottoman reinterpretation of the Baroque that anticipated by several years the use of the same mode in Istanbul’s public architecture. Focusing on the plates signed by the Armenian engraver Mıgırdıç, Ünver Rüstem highlighted the special role of non-Muslim Ottomans in mapping this global style onto the empire’s visual culture.
“Viewing Urban Cartographies” with Bertie Mandelblatt (Curator of Maps and Prints, John Carter Brown Library)
Lunch break: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Session 2: 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm, John Hay Library
“Viewing the Minassian Collection” with Shahzad Bashir (Aga Khan Professor of Islam and the Humanities, Brown University) and Holly Shaffer (Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture, Brown University), and graduate students in Tracing Translations (HMAN 2400R)
“Viewing the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection” with Peter Harrington (Curator of the Military Collection, John Hay Library)
This workshop was sponsored by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, the John Hay Library, and the Lewis Walpole Library; it was part of the programming for the Collaborative Humanities course, Tracing Translations: Artistic Migrations and Reinventions in the Early Modern World, and was part of a series on topography organized by the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University.