Page 321 - Eye of the beholder

Till the time chromolithography and colour printing came into vogue, manuscript maps were sold uncoloured. Mapmakers however soon discovered that colouring helped sell the maps at a premium. The best of the manuscript maps of this age, including the “MMI”, were therefore hand coloured immediately before use. Hand colouring
was an extremely skilled and laborious process, and followed certain conventions that changed very little over the centuries. Forests, woods, and estates were coloured in green; hills in brown or black; towns in red; seas, lakes, and rivers in indigo – and so on. Although the colours used did not change over the centuries, the pattern of usage
and the mode of depiction did undergo transformation. Till the mid-1500s, the
sea was described by swirling lines; then stippling came into vogue, and later still a wash of plain colour was used.
The renowned scholar C. Koeman made an estimate of how long it must have taken Janszoon Blaeu to print his Atlas Major. Assuming a relatively small print run of
300 copies of each of the first three editions of the Atlas (Latin, French, and Dutch), Koeman concluded that the composition
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and typesetting, with eight full-time workers, would have taken 1,000 working days; the letterpress printing (of the text parts of the book), involving nine printing presses, 330 working days; the copperplate printing, involving six printing presses, 900 working days; and the binding, involving three full-time workers, 300 working days. “The planning involved in printing the three editions...within a span of three or four years,” Koeman concluded, “exceeds the range of our imagination.”
The making of any map, in short, is
a painstaking process, and the amount of skill and attention to detail that went into the making of the “MMI” is remarkable (figure 2). Since the map is largely a political map depicting a vast area, smaller details have been omitted. The subject area of
the map, i.e the kingdom of the Mughals,
is demarcated from everything else by a uniform shade of light ochre yellow. The seas, as was the norm in those times, are depicted by a wash of plain colour. The trajectory of the rivers is amazingly accurate for the most part, and their size corresponds roughly with the thickness of the lines depicting them. Hill ranges have been
2
This detail of the “ MMI” shows
the amount of attention that has gone into the making of the map. Geographical features such as hills, forests, and rivers are represented pictorially by very fine line etchings. Particular attention has been paid to enhance aesthetic and visual appeal, as is evident from the depiction of decorative elements like the ship.
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An Early Manuscript Map
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