They should be location-defining and trend-setting. Since there are cave drawings, maps are created and used for this purpose. For thousands of years, the location and appearance of regions, cities, countries, later continents, and the world has since been mapped out. Maps condense complex notions of space, scale, topography and territorial claim. World and nautical charts from the past are fascinating testimonies of how our world, our knowledge and our perception of the world have changed.
Historical maps of cities such as Ghent, Bruges or Bremen still bear witness to their impressive role in the Middle Ages. On historical maps, the changes on site can be read well and clearly illustrated. Maps of Asia and China document how explorers gradually succeeded in pushing boundaries and not just broadening our horizons. Traveling through the map with your finger can also be a journey into the past.
The cartographic art, which in its beginnings was often able to supplement "white spots" with coats of arms, emblems or imaginative representations and ornaments, moves back to the representation of imagined landscapes through the empirical-scientific presentation and the geographic, true-to-scale documentation with contemporary art. By means of the so-called "Mindmapping" big cities like Paris, New York or London are represented strongly reductionist. For example, Anne Smith's "Map of London" bundles the sights of the English capital in a relatively loose arrangement, without following a single mathematical standard.
Cartography does not have to be an exact science that accurately and faithfully reduces a three-dimensional object to two dimensions. Maps are interpretations of the surrounding world, which can always give people information about their own point of view and their experience.
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 and Frans Hogenberg (1535-90) 1570 - (MeisterDrucke-199733).jpg)
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 and Frans Hogenberg (1535-90) c1572-1617 - (MeisterDrucke-159579).jpg)
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 an illustrated itinerarium of the road network in the Roman EmpireDetail of Italy from the Peutinger map copy - (MeisterDrucke-110655).jpg)
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