Magnificent Maps at the British Library, NW1
Maps are the precursors to the landscape paintings that flourished after the 17th century. They are works of art




The art of map-making is an ancient one. It’s hardly surprising: over the centuries, as cartographers crept their slow way across the surface of the planet, the pictures that they created helped people to fit the myriad scattered fragments of a sprawling geographical puzzle into place. But, as the face of the world has grown ever more familiar, have we come to think of the map merely as a literal translation? Accurate, objective and useful it may be but where, many may wonder as they anticipate the British Library’s latest exhibition, is the creative flare that can turn a dry topographical record into a fertile territory for imaginative exploration?

Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art is a show to overturn such expectations. It leads the visitor — a bit like some erstwhile explorer — on a creative adventure around the back of that flat piece of paper we think of as the world. Drawing on the finest collection of maps on this planet — the British Library has more than four million to choose from, the vast majority of which are only very rarely, if ever, put on public display — the exhibition sets out to make clear that these pictures are about far more than mere physical description. They are a series of subjective images, each shaped by the beliefs and desires, the ambitions and prejudices, the passions and anxieties of its period.

The spectator looks at the world from myriad perspectives. “Which is more important — the Last Judgment or the correct placement of Birmingham?” asks the curator Peter Barber who, even in the 30 years that he has worked at the library, has probably managed to examine barely a third of its collection. What tells you more about a country: a picture of a dog-headed cannibal or a description of its coastline? The visitor is invited to wander through a world before it was charted, into lands where the unknown is as vivid as the observable fact.

Nothing is fixed — not even magnetic North. The show is not chronological. Wall texts are minimal. There is no audio guide. Rather, rambling through sections that set out to conjure the sort of spaces in which maps would once have been displayed from the splendid audience rooms of boastful rulers to the private “cabinets” of the educated, the spectator is encouraged to discover the complex variety of purposes maps have been made to serve.

The map comes in all shapes and sizes and forms, from Queen Mary’s dolls-house miniature to the massive 17th-century Klencke Atlas, which stands taller than a man. Here is the world captured in eye-confounding monochrome mazes, in glowing watercolour pictures and richly-gilded charts, in rare surviving fragments of once far larger carvings, in medals and globes and manuscripts and tapestries.

There are maps (or precious surviving fragments of them) from the medieval era when the mystic and philosopher Hugh of St Victor declared the world to be like a book written by the finger of God, including a vividly coloured replica of the Hereford Mappa Mundi (the original is never lent): a complex knot of earthly marvels that bear testimony to the power of their divine maker. Alongside it hangs a contemporary version by the artist Grayson Perry, in which the rays of light that illuminate mere terrestrials stream from his sphincter in the middle of the picture.

Maps, as this show makes plain, are art works. It does this most directly when it hangs a cartographical commemoration (complete with all the gory details including pillage, hangings and torture) of the 1625 surrender of the besieged town of Breda to the Spanish alongside an image of a Velázquez painting of the same subject. Maps follow the prevailing styles of the period, from the Baroque extravaganza of a chart of Bohemia to the meticulously observed records of a pupil of the 18th-century map-maker Paul Sandby. Maps are the precursors to the landscape paintings that flourished after the 17th century.

But their artistry serves a purpose. Far from objective, scientifically created records, these images have an imaginative agenda. Together they tell a story of power, plunder and possession. They are made to keep watch over spreading dominions, to assert forceful ownership or project a sense of civic pride. Maps — from the medieval visions of a king as a godlike power to the blatant posters of the Bolsheviks — serve as propaganda. The more ornate, the more striking, the more pleasing they look, the more persuasive and easily swallowed their message becomes.

A watercolour of Dover harbour illustrating proposed plans for the prevention of erosion need not have been so delicately accomplished. But this map was dispatched to Privy Counsellors who, if so inclined, would put up the money for improvements. The counsellors were far more likely to find the money if the image appealed.

This is a show to be interpreted at a deep cultural level. The more closely you examine the objects, the more you find yourself embroiled in the ambitions and intrigues of their subtle worlds. Maps, this show argues, are as much to do with philosophy as geography. They are not two-dimensional pictures of the world but windows on to a subtle and complex world view.

Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art is at the British Library, London NW1 (020-7412 7676), from Friday to Sept 19.

The BBC Four Maps Season continues on Sunday (9pm) with Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession