Page 17 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

made the Indian Ocean inaccessible by water of scientific instruments, the device had been was a tonic for man's belief in his power to
from Europe, and bore the first mention of used to observe and chart the heavenly bodies. master wind and wave, to find and then conquer
"Zimpago" or Japan on a European map. Wald- Now the astrolabe had become an instrument terra incognita. "The Measure of All Things" in
seemiiller's world map of 1507 was the first to of navigation accurate enough to help mariners this exhibit brings together the maps, astrolabes
put the label "America" on the new world and find their latitude. In the next centuries it and navigating instruments with which explor-
his new edition of Ptolemy's Geography came to would be displaced by the quadrant and the ers added to this increasing stock of knowledge.
be known as the first modern atlas. sextant. In 1484, Martin Behaim was said to
In the fifteenth century, as David Woodward be the first to adapt the astrolabe to navigation. A steady forward march against the unknown
explains in his essay, a new way of looking at He is best remembered for the terrestrial globe is only one sort of human effort. And not the
the earth was coming into being. In place of he constructed in Nuremberg, which is more kind to which our National Gallery is a special
the legendary and theological maps which had notable for its beauty than for its verisimilitude. monument. What our National Gallery cele-
placed Jerusalem at the center, the earth was In this grand universal enterprise of Discov- brates is the Culture of Creation. The happy
being measured, and mapmakers were offering ery all scientists, explorers, and navigators were coincidence that in Europe the epoch-making
new aid to navigators. Now the portolano pilot collaborating willy-nilly, intentionally or un- Age of Exploration was also an epoch-making
books, a product of the newly extensive use of intentionally. All knew that they were working Age of Creation gives us now the dramatic
the magnetic compass, aimed to provide accu- toward the same end, a more accurate map of opportunity in our exhibit to compare the two
rate maps of limited regions. And the portolan the earth. And their efforts bore fruit. The Cultures. Renaissance belief in the inspired
(harbor-finding) charts, first designed to help European "discovery" of America not only pro- unique creator gradually elevated the painter,
Mediterranean sailors find their way along the vided new destinations for Western civilization. equipped with a newly rediscovered science of
surrounding coastlines, began to be drawn for It enlarged and redefined European knowledge perspective, from craftsman to artist. No longer
the west coasts of Europe and of Africa. of the whole earth. Whatever ills feudalism, paid by the hour like other skilled laborers, he
The famous Catalan Atlas of 1375, seen in chivalry and the crusades may have visited on began to be liberated from guild traditions. By
our exhibit (cat. i), though ornate by modern the peoples of the West, the new centuries the end of the period covered by the exhibition,
standards, was a monument to the new empir- never failed to improve cartography. the artist himself was being sought after by
ical spirit. Though a quarter-century after the Still, inherited "facts" had a dignity and a Kings and Popes who left him free to conceive
return of Nicolo, Maffeo and Marco Polo, it is prestige that made them hard to displace. They and execute his personal vision. And we must
the first map to show the informative influence had become the basis not only of myth and lore not allow glib attacks on the Philistinism of sci-
of their travels, and the first to give Europeans but of commercial hopes and political ambi- entists to blind us to the real gulf between the
a reasonably accurate description of East Asia. tions. Discarding the old geographic knowledge two Cultures. Surveying not just the European
Notable for what it omitted, it showed the for the new was always painful, and often arts but the whole world of the arts, mostly still
courage to leave out mythical and conjectural resisted. Columbus found it hard to doubt that unknown to Europeans, Circa 1492 can remind
data that had populated maps for the Christian what he saw on the shores of the Caribbean was us of the limits of the pride-nourishing Culture
centuries. And, in an impressive feat of self- the Terrestrial Paradise. When Vespucci showed of Discovery.
control, the cartographer actually left parts of these figments of ancient desire to be unimag- Peoples competing and collaborating in the
the earth blank, in the spirit of the harbor- ined real continents, he shocked learned Euro- search for knowledge are inevitably converging.
finding portolan charts which gave only infor- peans, but he nourished pride in the advances Discovery is what men everywhere have found
mation useful for reaching a known destination. of their "modern" science. Reports of pagan on our same earth. But Creation is what men
Vast regions once embellished by anthropophagi temple sacrifices and cannibal feasts, docu- have added to the world. Its hallmark is auton-
and mythical monsters remained vacant, wait- mented by sacrificial knives like those in this omy, the freedom to make the new. While there
ing to be filled in by the reports of hard-headed exhibit (cats. 389-395), impressed Europeans are of course traditions and styles and schools
sea-captains. And now at last geographic spaces with their superiority over the heathen. The in the arts, every act of Creation is a kind of
were shaped into the sterile geometry of lati- greatest discovery of an age of discoveries was personal declaration of independence. Which
tude and longitude. Even before 1501, the era of to realize how little of the earth was known to makes the story of art infinitely more confused
"incunabula" when printing was still in its Europe. Never before had such vast areas of and confusing than the story of science, with
cradle, there were seven folio editions of Ptole- ignorance been so suddenly unveiled. countless communities of artists, each daring to
my's classic Geography (cat. 127) which had Discoverers everywhere focused their vision be a community of one. The diversity, the
finally been translated from the Greek and was on the same object —the physical, sensible world diffuseness, the chaos is what makes representa-
continually being revised from the latest travel that all shared. They brought the unknown tive works of art.
reports. The rediscovered Ptolemy provided a down to earth. All were marching in the same In this exhibit the works of artists in Por-
framework on which geographers could hang direction. Ptolemy advanced along the lines tugal, Spain, Florence, and Venice give us
the new bits of discovery. marked by Aristotle, Vespucci on the lines glimpses of Europe's variegated Culture of Crea-
And navigators were continually improving marked by Ptolemy. Discovery reinforced faith tion "Circa 1492." Artists on the other side of
their instruments. The earlier Islamic astro- in human collaboration and human progress. the world richly embellish the fantasy. From
labes, like the one seen in the exhibit, were And it sparked the sense of being born again in Japan the delicate brushwork of Sesshu Toyo
models for the elegant late fifteenth-century a Europe-wide Renaissance. and the masks and ceramics of the prolific
astrolabes of Martin Bylica and Alphanus In this brilliant Age of Exploration European Muromachi era, from China the monumental
Severus (cats. 121,123), which show us how far man flexed his scientific muscles. When had paintings of the Ming imperial palaces, and
the instrument-makers had come from the there been more reason for pride in what man from India sculptures of the still-flourishing
primitive wooden disk suspended by a ring that could do? Or in his capacity to discover new Hindu traditions. These many worlds of the
was familiar to the ancients. One of the oldest areas of his ignorance? This age, "Circa 1492," arts show us a kaleidoscope of visions and of

16 CIRCA 1492