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Why the artificial shapes for the smaller islands on the portolan charts (1330-1600) help to clarify their navigational use / Tony Campbell in Cartes & Géomatique, n° 216 (juin 2013)  

Public [article]  inCartes & Géomatique > n° 216 (juin 2013) . - pp 47 - 66 Titre : Why the artificial shapes for the smaller islands on the portolan charts (1330-1600) help to clarify their navigational use Type de document : Article/Communication Auteurs : Tony Campbell, Auteur Année de publication : 2013 Article en page(s) : pp 47 - 66 Note générale : Bibliographie Langues : Anglais (eng) Descripteur : [Vedettes matières IGN] Cartographie ancienne [Termes IGN] carte marine [Termes IGN] forme caractéristique [Termes IGN] île [Termes IGN] navigation maritime [Termes IGN] portulan [Termes IGN] précision des données [Termes IGN] toponyme [Termes IGN] toponyme nautique Résumé : (Auteur) Portolan charts have been studied for more than a century and a half, and intensively so in recent years. Yet several basic questions remain unanswered; indeed, some have never been asked. A detailed investigation, focusing in particular on the place-names, and the shapes of the medium and small islands, has been carried out over the past few years. This has made possible a new understanding of the charts' development and a fresh explanation of both their purpose and longevity. Portolan charts contain an unexpected mixture of surprising geometric accuracy and apparently frivolous invention. Their toponymy was static enough to include in 1600 three-quarters of the names that can be seen 300 years earlier. Yet at the same time they were dynamic enough to introduce many hundreds of new, and subsequently repeated, names over that period, and to discard hundreds of others. It will be demonstrated that the portolan charts -leaving aside their land-based roles as decorative mercantile or prestige objects - were an essential tool for sailors. Their uneven 'accuracy' can be explained in terms of three distinct shipboard uses: first, when on a long sea passage out of sight of land, second, when working from headland to headland along a coast, and third, when picking a way through an archipelago - particularly those in the Aegean Sea. The strange, clearly unnatural shapes given to many of the small and medium-sized islands, especially in the Aegean, have been barely noticed by previous commentators. It is suggested that these should be seen as 'mnemonic substitutions', simplifying work for the chart copyist and providing the medieval helmsman with an easy way to memorise the position of scores of islands. That these shapes were neither random nor restricted to a single chartmaking family or production centre, but were instead standardised and widely repeated, sometimes for centuries, provides evidence, in the author's view, that the 14th-century chart-makers had the imagination to create a convention-defying cartographic device. This was apparently without precedent, and not imitated elsewhere. It is ironical that the charts' continued relevance for merchant shipping can be attributed to the reverence with which every small hydrographical detail of the original workshop model was faithfully copied through perhaps ten generations, rather than to any adaptability in response to what we might have supposed were evolutionary pressures. Only the vital, and ever-changing toponymy contradicts that statement. Numéro de notice : A2013-430 Affiliation des auteurs : non IGN Thématique : GEOMATIQUE Nature : Article nature-HAL : ArtAvecCL-RevueNat DOI : sans En ligne : http://www.lecfc.fr/new/articles/216-article-5.pdf Format de la ressource électronique : URL Permalink : https://documentation.ensg.eu/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=32568 [article]

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