ABSTRACT
There has been a turn, in some recent critical discourse on early-modern visual and spatial culture, against the written word. The more phenomenologically inclined of recent accounts would have us reach at least for some extra-textual, ‘performative’ perception in our understanding of, say, colonial geography.1 Materialist histories of art and science seek to expose the implication of these praxes and their products in what they seem to take to be the equally extra-textual, equally performative field of commerce. Presuming her reader’s complicity with a Romantic idealisation of Renaissance art, Lisa Jardine asks: ‘What kind of difference does it make to our view of the Renaissance to understand that a masterpiece like Giovanni Bellini’s portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan was a strictly commercial piece of work, produced in accordance with a whole network of social obligations and power relations in fifteenth-century Venice?’2 The difference it makes, presumably, is that we do not swallow entirely whole the frequently enunciated textual claims (made both then and now) that Renaissance art, and indeed science, was free from worldly concerns. We are growing used to being warned of the complicity of Tillyard, Burckhardt, and even post-structuralist and New Historicist readings of ‘Renaissance’ art with early-modern fantasies of cosmic, and by extension social, order.3 But might we not worry that some critical materialisms threaten to bias interpretation similarly incommensurately in favour of relations of commercial exchange? Free trade, in an early-modern Europe still tangled up in pre-capitalist political knots, was no less an object of abstracted fantasy than the cartographer’s or painter’s abstract geometric grid. In a similar way, the modern e-capitalist dreams of the collapse of distance and the nation state, while the rest of the world lives very much at their mercy. Whilst I will not be concerned with such retrospectively conceived ‘high art’ as Renaissance
painting, what I want to suggest here is that the original meanings of such privileged visual objects as mathematically constructed Renaissance maps, and such privileged practices as mathematical surveying, were not invested wholly in the ‘high’ or in the ‘low’. Rather, they were determined most importantly in a vacillation between the ideal and the material; between liberality and use. I will argue, moreover, that the simultaneous authority and agency of those who made and owned such objects was determined in a correspondent double vision, reproduced in and through discourse and the text. I will not be looking at maps or mapping as such in this essay, but at discourses on mathematics that I believe significantly conditioned the purchase available to such mathematical applications as surveying and cartography in early-modern culture.
