From Word to Image. Depictions of Peru in two 16th century Norman maps.

MARTINEZ, CAROLINA

Montevideo

Simposio; VI Symposium of the International Society for the History of the Map; 2022

International Society for the History of the Map (ISHMap)

The Spanish conquest of Peru, conducted by Francisco Pizzarro towards 1532, led to the publication of numerous texts in which the Spanish “exploits” and the defeat of Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, were narrated. The accounts, written by those who had witnessed the Spanish feat and published within the realms of the Spanish monarchy, were soon translated into different languages and printed across Europe, reaching widespread circulation in the next couple of decades. As a consequence of the descriptions present in these texts, the historical figure of Atahualpa became of interest to both readers and publishers. In the second half of the 16th century, his clothes were illustrated in costume books (Boissard, 1581; Bruyn, 1581), his portrait and life were included in André Thevet’s Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins et payens (1584), and his murder in the hands of Pizarro became a topic of choice to illustrate the region of Peru among some mapmakers of the Norman “school” of cartography. Regarding this last case, this paper presentation aims to analyze the process by which a historical event narrated in a literary genre such a chronicle or a travel account was transposed into a cartographic object. In order to do so, it will examine the representations of the “Kingdom of Peru” in two Norman manuscript maps produced in the mid-16th century. On the one hand, it will study the section dedicated to that South American region in the world map dedicated by Pierre Desceliers to Henry II of France towards 1550. On the other, it will observe the images present in the map of Peru (Folio L verso) and its accompanying text in Guillaume Le Testu’s 1556 Cosmographie Universelle. Of the set of sources that may have been available to these cartographers to illustrate this specific event on their maps, special attention will be paid to the Histoire de la Terre neuve du Péru en l'Inde occidentale, published in Paris in 1545, and the engraving made by Nicolas Denisot that was included in it.