STEPHAN HORMES

Director

Cartography

Ideas

Conception

Development

Design

For centuries, cartography was closely linked to the visual arts: Painters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Dürer also created maps and, conversely, cartographers followed aesthetic principles related to those of veduta and landscape painting. But despite all their similarities, maps and paintings were subject to different paradigms even in the heyday of cartography in the 16th century. With the claim to objectivity that emerged in the 18th century, this difference intensified and reached its climax with the scientification of cartography in the 19th century. The map was now regarded as a neutral medium, bound solely to objective criteria, diametrically opposed to the work of art. That this neutrality is the effect of a complex rhetoric and that a map always contains implicit interpretations and evaluations, consequently (re)producing specific world views and asserting claims to power, has been demonstrated by critical geography in recent decades. Since then, the relationship between cartography and art has once again become a subject of reflection.

Commentary on the lecture series

"Kartographie zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft" (Cartography between Art and Science)

at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Winter Semester 2014