A Neglected Type of Medieval Mappamundi and Its Re-imaging in the Mare Historiarum (BnF MS Lat. 4915, Fol. 26v)

Abstract

The article traces the history of an unstudied type of medieval world map, the so-called “V-insquare” mappamundi. These maps are shown to have their origin as an attempt to illustrate one sentence in Isidore’s Etymologiae, while ignoring the rest of Isidore’s description of the world. Attention is then focused on a dramatic three-dimensional artistic re-imaging of this map in a manuscript of the Mare historiarum, a universal history by Giovanni Colonna (1298–ca. 1340), which was painted in 1447–1455 by the Master of Jouvenel des Ursins (Paris, BnF, MS lat. 4915). This map includes depictions the monstrous races in Asia and Africa, and represents a remarkably ethnocentric vision of the world. Evidence is presented that the map was inspired by an illustrated manuscript of Raoul de Presles’s French translation of Augustine’s De civitate Dei. The V-in-square format was probably chosen to render the world as a monogram of the manuscript’s patron, Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins.