Page 16 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

The Realms of Pride and Awe

by Daniel]. Boorstin

In our age of overweening pride in man's other sovereigns before he allowed himself to the other hand, recent champions of Portuguese
power over the physical world, this exhibit can be enlisted by Ferdinand and Isabella. The maps primacy in the American voyages have dared to
balance our view of human nature and be an he relied on had their origins in the carto- use the very absence of documentary evidence
antidote to the contagion of science. By opening graphic efforts of Jewish mapmakers at least a as proof that the Portuguese discoveries must
our eyes to art in the Age of Exploration, Circa century before, and of the Greek Ptolemy long have been too valuable to share.
1492 can remind us how much of the world before that. His voyages were conspicuous feats In the long run secrecy could not prevail. For
that we enjoy and admire lay outside the Dis- of organization and command, holding the Discovery, this realm of science, was by its very
coverer's ken, even when man's discovering crews together and keeping up their morale nature collaborative and cumulative. Europe's
energies were at full flood. Here we bring under threats of mutiny. Columbus relied on community treasurehouse of geographic knowl-
together some of the best mementos both of the best manuscripts and printed books of his edge from the past was inevitably international.
Man the Discoverer and Man the Creator, the time to impress Isabella's experts. Despite the Columbus was a young man of seventeen at
Realms of Pride and Awe. Seldom have these limits to his information, and the misinforma- the death of Gutenberg, in 1468. Now printed
two realms of human fulfillment been so richly tion which made his voyage seem possible, it books, themselves potent products of this Age
displayed in one museum, and perhaps never was the community of scientific knowledge of of Exploration, made knowledge even more
before have they been so gloriously shown in his time, the accumulating heritage of centuries, fluid, more mobile, more difficult to confine.
a single exhibit. that sent him across the ocean. The barriers of language, multiplied by the
In both the sciences and the arts the Age of The other grand voyages of the Age of change from Latin to the vernaculars of emerg-
Exploration was an era of spectacular achieve- Exploration were also products of international ing nations, threatened to be more obstructive
ment. But the usual rituals of the quincen- collaboration. In 1498 Vasco da Gama might than rivers and mountains. But these barriers,
tennial year of Columbus' voyage are liable to not have succeeded in his voyage around Africa too, were soon penetrated by the newly-
be a festival only of pride in man's ability to to India, proving the error in the Ptolemaic flourishing arts of translation. And the ver-
brave the unknown, to increase his knowledge maps that had made the Indian Ocean into an nacular languages became widening currents
and mastery of the world. Our National Gallery enclosed sea, had he not been able to enlist an of exchange.
exists to show us that such a celebration would Arab pilot at Malindi to guide his fleet the Despite all obstacles, news of Columbus' first
recognize only one side of man's adventuring twenty-three days across the treacherous Ara- voyage spread speedily across Europe. Colum-
nature. Neither then nor now could man live bian sea to Calicut. An unsung godfather and bus' "letter" describing what he thought he
by science alone. catalyst of all these voyages had been the seden- had accomplished, first written in Spanish and
Here we have an opportunity without tary Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal. printed in Barcelona about i April 1493, was
precedent to see how disparate, though some- Though a reluctant navigator himself, he had translated into Latin as De Insulis Inventis
times complementary, are the Culture of marked the adventuring paths for European sail- and published in Rome before the end of that
Discovery and the Culture of Creation. The ors and cheered them on their way. Henry, too, month. By the end of that year there were three
Discoverer's work is often the prosaic charting had found clues for the design of his miraculous more editions in Rome, and within the next
and measuring and extrapolating, to define "caravels" which rounded Africa, in the Arab year six different Latin editions were printed in
where man has already reached. The exhilara- "caravos" long used off the Egyptian and Tuni- Paris, Basel (cat. 136), and Antwerp. Soon there
tion of his work requires the artist or poet. It sian coasts, and modeled on the ancient fishing was a translation into German, and by mid-
took Keats to remind us of the "wild surmise" vessels of the Greeks. The printing press, which June 1493 the Latin Letter had been translated
awakened in had come to Europe only decades before Colum- into a 68 stanza poem and published in Tuscan,
bus' voyage, was an unprecedented vehicle the dialect of Florence. The Aldine Press in
... some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken; for sharing knowledge, spreading information Venice and others across Europe prospered by
(and misinformation) to people who earlier
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes diffusing knowledge.
He stared at the Pacific... had been grateful for only a trickle. Discovery was obviously a progressive sci-
Geographic knowledge, a product of discov-
Silent upon a peak in Darien. ence. How to add your bits of new knowledge to
ery, was a precious international currency, others' in the never-ending battle against ignor-
This exhibit, too, can remind us of the oceans coveted by everyone, easily stolen, and valuable ance? In this exhibit we see the many ways
of ignorance, the vistas of human creation still to hoard. Anybody's new bit of information in which Circa 1492 was an epoch of scientific
unknown to Europeans in the Age of Explora- about an easy passage or a treacherous shore advance and climax. Cartography, the proto-
tion. And so help us reflect on the scope and could be added to anybody else's in the race for science for explorers, was making great
promise of these two ways of fulfillment. gold and glory. The secrecy rigorously enforced progress. Ptolemy was still the patron saint
Columbus' life and work offered an allegory on the fruits of discovery must have cost the of astronomy and geography. But by 1459 the
of the Culture of Discovery — international, lives of many an indiscreet sailor. The Portu- Venetian Fra Mauro's planisphere map for the
collaborative, and progressive. The Genoese guese "policy" of secrecy was itself so secret King of Portugal made in his workshop near
Columbus had sought support from several that some have even denied that it existed. On Venice revised Ptolemy's version which had

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