The Donation of Constantine, Cartography, and Papal Plenitudo Potestatis in the Sixteenth Century: A Paper for Salvatore Camporeale

Abstract

Historians of cartography have observed that the proliferation of maps and mural map cycles in 16th century Italy is evidently intertwined with the shifting configurations of political and territorial hegemony that mark the early modern period. These maps trace and celebrate the expansion of Europe into Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and document claims to territorial possessions within both Europe and its newfound lands. They appear in paintings as accoutrements of political power, they fresco the walls of the private quarters and public chambers of powerful rulers and regimes. Most of them use Ptolemaic techniques to create mathematically proportioned projections and scales; the resulting precisions imply that the jurisdictions and polities they document are precise and realthat they are legitimate and historically stable and continuous. But frequently these maps are in fact graphic representations of what Eric Wolf once called imagined entities, rather than actual jurisdictions or polities. As such, they are polemical and controversial-fluid rather than frozen in time and space. In this paper for Salvatore I want to look at