In 'Maps' Exhibit, The Journey Is The Destination

BALTIMORE -- "Maps: Finding Our Place in the World" at the Walters Art Museum has the one from the 1883 edition of "Treasure Island," which leads to buried gold, X marking the spot.

The visions that map induces (curved cutlasses, the bounding main, the parrot of the pirate), the memorably vivid characters it summons (Blind Pew, Long John Silver), and how far away it takes us, make that printed fabrication a map-as-work-of-art.

Maybe you remember it. Romantic and particular, it did what great maps do. It led, if you could read it, to riches out of sight. It had you dig to find them, and it took your mind adventuring. So does this show.

Its organizers (in Chicago, at the Field Museum and the Newberry Library) set out to get the 100 best maps in the world, and got close.

They've got the oldest road map known of all the roads that lead to Rome. And the flight chart that Charles Lindbergh unrolled on his lap as he flew the Atlantic in 1927. And the first town plan drawn to scale (1 inch = 1,000 feet) -- a Babylonian scribe scratched it in wet clay 3,300 years ago.

Gerard Mercator in Flanders figured out a way to show the spherical Earth on one flat piece of paper; we still use his projection, and the map on which he showed us how in 1569 is in the Walters show.

So is the first full-view photograph of Earth taken from space (Apollo 17, 1972).

Before that, if you wanted the view from very high above you had to climb a tower, ascend with a balloon (the oldest surviving balloon shot, from 1860, is in the exhibition) or use your imagination. In 1644, Jan Christaenszoon Micker imagined himself flying birdlike over Amsterdam. Displayed on his map are all the city's buildings seen in overhead perspective, and since he had imagined how the shadows of the clouds slid across the landscape, he put them in there, too.

Not long ago, old maps weren't often seen in art museums. They mostly stayed in libraries -- rolled up among atlases, antiquarian tomes, travelers' reports -- and may not be your cup of tea. Oil paintings, it is true, are easier to see. It takes little mental effort to recognize Saint George and his dragon, or a vase of flowers. Reading maps is work. Their beauty may be visual, but it's never only visual. You have to use your mind.

Conceptualism has helped them. Maps feel more like art now than they did long ago. They're partially abstract. They're pictures of ideas. They're conceptual art.

Speaking of art: Do you know Vermeer's "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher" (1662), that glowing Dutch interior in which a side-lit map, a map of lower Germany, yellowing and crinkled, hangs on the back wall? Well, Vermeer's painting isn't here -- it's in the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- but its map is.

Maps are made for voyaging, and not only for actually getting up and going, but also staying where you are and letting your mind trip. The Walters's show encourages the latter sort of travel. It's amazing where you go, and whom you meet.