In 'Maps' Exhibit, The Journey Is The Destination

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, April 10, 2008

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.

You go to Zanzibar, Oaxaca and Oz. With one map made of curved sticks (representing ocean swells) you navigate your low outrigger canoe across the Pacific. With another, on paired rollers, you rattle in a biplane flying over France during World War II. A third, prepared in England for 13th-century pilgrims (most of whom stayed home but used this map for meditation), takes you all the way from London (via Dover, Paris, Rome) to the harbor of Apulia, where you board a ship to sail to the Holy Land.

With short lengths of dark wood carved to the topography of Greenland's rocky coast, Inuit in kayaks could find their way by touch.

Nearby is a later "physiographic diagram" (1957) that pulls you underwater, down beneath the waves, until at last you find yourself among the steep mountains and the valleys of the Atlantic Ocean floor.

One mind-travels a map not only for the sights, but also for the people, and the exhibition murmurs with the implied presences of many special people whom you have glimpsed before:

Bilbo Baggins, Napoleon, Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, John Smith and Pocahontas, Gulliver, Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln (all three of them cartographers), Captain Ahab, Louis XIV and Winnie-the-Pooh -- there are more celebrities in the Walters exhibition than in People magazine.

One map on exhibit tells a crucial truth about the Emperor Napoleon. Devised by Charles Joseph Minard in 1869, it shows a line whose thickness and extent simultaneously display the line of march he took to Moscow and the troops he took along. As the conqueror leaves France in 1812 the line is at its thickest, which represents his army of 422,000 men. When he gets back to Paris the next year, it is skinnier by far. That's because 412,000 are dead.

Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit, is in the exhibition because so are three small maps of Middle Earth sketched by J.R.R. Tolkien, its creator.

If you wish to meet the Pooh, you should seek him in a map (1926) of the Hundred Acre Wood.

For Ahab there's a whale map. Matthew Fontaine Maury, its cartographer, had interviewed the whalers returning to Nantucket to determine where their hunts had proved most successful. His "Global Distribution of Sperm Whales and Right Whales" appeared in 1851. Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" was published the same year.

Not quite whale-size, but huge, is an atlas of Dutch wall maps (like the one in the Vermeer) that was assembled for the Duke of Prussia in 1659. The book is six feet high. Opened on a table it would be 9 feet wide. Bound in gold-embellished leather, it weighs 275 pounds.

It nonetheless feels lightweight -- at least when it's compared with a more famous map of ancient Rome. This one, which displayed all the city's streets and structures, was carved in thick gray marble 1,800 years ago. It was said to be 40 feet tall and 60 wide, and this isn't just a legend. Bits of it survive. They're included in the show. One displays the oval track of the Circus Maximus where chariots raced in those days. You can almost hear the crowds.

Most world maps made in our own land show America in the middle, with China on the left and Europe on the right. Other cultures, understandably, had other notions of centrality. The Greeks placed the omphalos, the navel of the world, at the oracle's temple in Delphi. The British like to see the world as spreading out from Greenwich. Islamic maps, accordingly, put Mecca at center, while cosmologies from India (Buddhist, Jain and Hindu) prefer to see the world as pivoting around the peak of mythical Mount Meru.

We're lucky. Thanks to jet planes and computers and the (still quite new) art exhibit industry, grand museums hereabouts have been letting us explore not just little bits of the history of art, but all of it at once. "Maps: Finding Our Place in the World" is as generously scaled. Boundaries dissolve, or seem to keep retreating, as one moves among its objects, as if there were no edges to this thought-transporting show.

Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, at the Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St., Baltimore, through June 8. The Walters is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. (8 p.m. Fridays). Admission to this exhibition is $12; seniors $8; college students $6; under 18 free. See http://www.thewalters.org or call 410-547-9000.