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Aesthetic Aspects of Early Maps
Inspiration from Notes by Univ. Prof. Karel Kuchař
Jan D. Bláha
Department of Geography, J. E. Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem
České Mládeže 8, 400 96 Ústí nad Labem
Department of Applied Geoinformatics and Cartography, Charles University in Prague
Albertov 6, 128 43 Prague,
Czech Republic
jd@jackdaniel.cz
Abstract
The contribution is a tribute to Czech Univ. Prof. Karel Kuchař and re-
minds us of the 35
th
anniversary, counted from his last public lecture
named Aesthetics of Map Production. Unfortunately, Prof. Kuchař was not
able to elaborate the issue of aesthetic aspects of cartographic production
in further detail. The aim of this contribution is to categorize and summa-
rize this knowledge. The first part mentions the traditional, and we can
also say never-ending, discussion on cartography and early maps being a
form of art. It is followed by a summary of aesthetic aspects of (not only)
early maps (map format, sheet composition, use of space, shapes of map
fields and structure of outlines, form of compositional elements, map con-
tents, cartographic language, thematic cartography methods, use of colour
and font in maps, author's style and handwriting). Finally, several pieces
of evidence are offered confirming that “early maps” and “computer map
production” are not incompatible.
1- Introduction
In autumn 2009 (12 November) it was 35 years since the last public lecture
was given by prof. Karel Kuchař (1906-1975), who worked for almost 50
years at the Faculty of Science of the Charles University in Prague (
Figure 1
).
The lecture was given to an expert group of the Czechoslovak Geo-
graphical Society and dealt with a relatively rare aspect of cartographic
