Abstract
Abstract The angel was a recurrent marginal embellishment on hundreds of maps made in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, whose innovative commercial mapmaking dominated the international market. This essay explores how the mapmakers adapted pervasive conventions of cartographic angelology as a means to explore the expanding possibilities as well as the limitations of their own practice. The peculiar pictorial partnership between cartographers and their guardian spirits was a means to delineate cartography as inspired work. However, an interrogation of the implications of this spiritual service tracks the angels’ descent as downfall. The migrations of this ubiquitous visual device across numerous maps and representations of Amsterdam reveal the various ways that spirits were enlisted into their earthly ministry to the global mapping enterprises of the Dutch trading empire.
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