THE AUSTRAL CONTINENT ON 16TH CENTURY MAPS / AN ICONOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION

Abstract

Maps can be viewed as documents from which can be interpreted various philosophical, cultural or symbolical values of the society that produced them. This premise is explored, using a set of 16th-century maps and globes as the subject of study and the art historians' iconographical method of analysis. Specifically, the representation of terra australis as an enormous landmass occupying up to one-third of the southern hemisphere is discussed in terms of its form and meaning in Renaissance culture. The argument is made that the oversized southern continent reflected the pervasive influence in that culture of classical Greco-Roman themes. Greek cosmology had assumed the existence of southern lands on philosophical and aesthetic grounds, and these principles were manifest again centuries later in maps of the Renaissance.