Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and homogeneous world of geographical objects, attributes, and patterns
is made visible, produced. The geopolitical gaze triangulates the world
political map from a Western imperial vantage point, measures it using
Western conceptual systems of identity/di
erence, and records it in order
to bring it within the scope of Western imaginings.
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Several other events paralleled and reinforced the Renaissance and
Enlightenment rationalization of space. The magnetic compass, for example,
enabled sailors to calculate direction and distances without relying exclusively
on astronomical observations. Likewise, Mercator's projection became wildly
popular due its narrative power to encapsulate the entire globe within a single
view as well as the use of rhumb lines to show direct routes; in this sense, it
formed part of a much broader, more ambitious project to develop a univer-
sal system for measuring time and space, including a universal chronology that
would integrate the insular and fragmentary histories of the world (Boorstin
1983; Monmonier 2004). On land, surveying arose as a means of imposing
the modernist vision of regularized, absolute space over emerging national
territories. Thus, Jacques Cassini initiated a widespread rationalization of
French territory between 1739 and 1744 using systematic triangulation “with
the aim of creating across France a smooth, rational space over which circu-
lation would be uninterrupted by 'accidents' of nature” (Cosgrove 2001:202).
In each case, time and space—the measurement of which could not be separ-
ated—became abstracted from the natural environment, reframed under
the totalizing discourses of Western colonialism as absolute, regularized,
standardized, and predictable.
A third European intellectual response to the early modern wave of time-
space compression occurred within the visual arts, which underwent a pro-
found transformation as bourgeois values became increasingly hegemonic
(Cosgrove 1984). The key discovery of the Renaissance was the invention of
linear perspective,
first demonstrated by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1425, which
involved the ability to represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional can-
vas. Some aspects of perspective painting, like so much else in the Renaissance,
may have been acquired from the Arabs, in this case Alhazen, a philosopher
in Basra who wrote about the subject in 965 (Macey 1989:96). Far from sim-
ply constituting an artistic detail, the use of perspective undermined the sym-
bolism of medieval art, which subordinated accuracy to religious dogma, and
coincided with both the widespread use of oil painting as well as the transla-
tion and recovery of Ptolemy's in
fi
uential
Geography
and its geometric grids.
In 1435, Leon Battista Alberti and fellow Florentine Toscanelli formulated
the geometric rules of perspective that remained in place for the next 400 years.
Thus, “Linear perspective vision was a
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fifteenth-century artistic invention for
representing three-dimensional depth on the two-dimensional canvas. It was
a geometrization of vision which began as an invention and became a con-
vention, a cultural habit of mind” (Romanyshyn 1993:349). Notably, this
process was not automatic, but conditional upon the people and places that
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