Translating travel narratives into cartographic images: America in Le Testu?s Cosmographie Universelle (1556)

MARTINEZ, CAROLINA

Belo Horizonte

Congreso; International Congress on the History of Cartography; 2017

Imago Mundi ICHC

The present study aims to analyze how America was shaped as a geographical region with an identity of its own in Guillaume Le Testu?s Cosmographie Universelle of 1556. By so doing, it proposes to observe the way in which Le Testu translated into a singular cartographic image the descriptions of Pars Quarta published in the travel narratives of the early XVIth century. The Norman pilot and cartographer, who dedicated his Cosmographie to the Admiral of France in the prime of French overseas expansion, represents America through a series of images whose origins lie in contemporary cartographic representations as well as in the information provided by the first voyagers to the New World, spread throughout Europe in travel compilations or individual publications of great editorial success. Both, the travel narratives as well as the cartographic images of Norman (and rival) workshops with which Le Testu shaped his Cosmographie Universelle, appear as elaborated versions of American topoi (such as nudity and cannibalism) adapted to please Admiral Gaspard de Coligny: an addressee who clearly represented the interests of France in America. Out of the 56 in-folio manuscript maps that integrate the Cosmographie, 15 are dedicated to America. The precision with which the coasts have been outlined in the latter show the influence of the Portuguese portolan charts. Regarding the iconography present in the interior of this Quarta Pars, the 15 maps seem to translate into images the recent history of the Portuguese and Spanish explorations of Peru, New Spain, Brazil and the south end of America, as well as the French voyages to Canada. Because these lands had ?not been seen by the Ancients?, the images of America in this cosmography have had to do without the knowledge of Classical Antiquity as well as without the wonders portrayed in Marco Polo?s Milione. The resource, instead, have been the travel narratives of contemporary voyagers: the presence of men of great size in the south end of America (or the ?Royaume de Giganton?), for instance, owe much to Antonio Pigafetta?s accounts. The ?American? images found in Le Testu?s Cosmographie should be thus read in historical perspective: that of the French attempts to establish themselves in marginal areas compared to the great political centers in which the Iberian crowns had settled in America. From the perspective of Cultural History, the Cosmographie Universelle also sheds light on the circulation of knowledge and the criteria of truth used to select the travel narratives that would be turned into cartographic images. It is on these less frequented aspects that this presentation will focus on.