ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the world was first represented by an unusual cartographic projection; a new form of map projection was used to depict the world. In a series of maps, the world was portrayed as a human heart. Cordiform map projections can be seen as an integral part of the revisioning of the world that people call the Renaissance. The Renaissance embodied new forms of individual expression and self-consciousness and the emergence of nation-states and overseas empires. The revisioning of the world of the Renaissance also involved a revisioning of the human body. The human body was a focus of concern, a site of representation, a source of shapes and forms for the new gaze being worked out in art and science. The cordiform maps were not only part of a new way of representing the world; they also embodied an older conception of the cosmos, a conception referred to as the macrocosm—microcosm.
