It was inevitable that today’s referendum on Scottish independence was also going to lead to some examples and The Economist’s 2012 effort shines brightly. Robert Dighton’s Geography Bewitched makes good use of Scotland as a map shape which was featured in MapCarte 43. We’ve featured a number of fantastic satirical maps in MapCarte as artists, illustrators and commentators make good use of maps to convey a pithy message. Posted in MapCarte | Tagged birds eye, city, historic, MapCarte, perspective MapCarte 261/365: Skintland by The Economist, 2012 Painting, engraving and mathematics underpinned Barbari’s work. Whatever you use to design and make a map, knowing how to apply the tools to a high standard goes a long way to ensuring the result will be high quality. These are techniques not adopted for many years to come. Instead, Barbari must have used trigonometry and then applied foreshortening to generate his oblique perspective. Given Venice is built on water traditional techniques of measurement (physical rods or chains) wouldn’t have been used to gain measurements. What the map perhaps fails to convey is the way in which it was constructed. Every building, church and piazza is shown and such is the attention to detail that one could easily use the map then and now to navigate around the city.īarbari’s skills as a painter and engraver show how mastery of one’s tools is fundamental to great cartography. The detail is exquisite with almost no stone unturned – literally. Produced from wood-block printing on several large sheets, this birds-eye map shows the city of Venice with the Alps acting as a distant horizon. That fact alone makes this map, produced some 350 years earlier even more of a monumental cartographic achievement than its beauty alone suggests. The very first aerial photograph was taken by French photographer and balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournacho, in 1858 over Paris.

Worlds adrift interactive map