CENTRES AND CENTRALITIES
Centrality as narrated in art(s)
“Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam” “Ubi Caesar, ibi Roma” (Old Roman proverbs) All roads lead to Rome, to the centre, to the political centre. This Roman principle is well known and today...
Our short post is to spotlight a small, maybe banal, yet very interesting, representation of the Crimea is US-and-Russia dialectics, usually a subject of imagination, even speculation, in political drama TV series. The Crimea, in one of the programme’s episodes, is presented as part of Russia, and not Ukraine.
The European Age of Discoveries has given us astonishing maps. Power relations of our present world were shaped out during that age. Today we have a short passage on the interesting power relations as shown in the Gemma Frisius’ and Peter Apian’s Charta Cosmographica from 1544. This map is a developed version of a famous precursor, Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographica, but with some different interesting features that can attest some shift in the centre of the map: we will show how the centre of the map shifted from knowledge (Waldseemüller’s) to power (Frisius’) and how cartography, being knowledge, served to build power and just power.
This map shows the circumnavigation journey of the ship Victoria of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition, from and to Sevilla, thus the first ship ever to circumnavigate the Planet (1519-1522 CE).
Quand Paris s’enrhume, l’Europe prend froid (“When Paris sneezes, Europe catches a cold“, Prince Klemens von Metternich) Paris is hit for a second time in 2015, and this time the victims are way more...
Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life (Oscar Wilde, in the Decay of Lying) Continuity of the centre, in the policital sense of the word, can be expressed at numerous scales, one of...
Geography is the science which studies space and its construction, not only its physical construction but also its social/political one. In other terms geography can be the discipline in quest for meaning of space. And cartography is the science of interpretation of power relations and communicating it via maps. In the light of these tow definitions we exposed, on this site, the rapports between the political centre, space and representation in some famous maps. First we worked on the maps of Heinrich Bunting: Jerusalem and Europe. Then we saw the Dutch Lion of Visscher.
Today our map is the BOHEMIAE ROSA, by Chr. Vetter, Vienna, 1668, a map representing Bohemia as a rose centred on Prague.
Dutch cartography has been one of the most elaborate and most refined in the world since the XVIth Century. A magnificent example of this cartography is the Leo Hollandicus map (1648) by Claes Janzsoon Visscher of Amsterdam, a striking representation of the Province of Holland embedded with political/ideological meaning (Figure 1). We analyse centrality as it is represented in this map and then we draw some results and horizons for further reasearch .
Dans un poste précédent nous avons vu Marianne en étant la figure emblématique centralisante de la France. Aujourd’hui nous allons parler du bonnet phrygien de Marianne et qui symbolise sa liberté et sans lequel...
The map we are presenting here is spectacular: Le tour du Monde en un clin d’oeil (the world in the blink of an eye) is an example of how “we” tend to put ourselves...
