The number of inhabitants in the southern continent is probably more than 50 million (…) it is in total an area of 8,567 km2, larger than the whole civilized part of Asia, from Turkey to the eastern tip of China”. In the 18th century Alexander Dalrymple, a Scottish geographer, described the existence of a hypothetical undiscovered continent in the South Pacific, the Terra Australis Incognita. Proponent of the theory of the existence of this supercontinent in the southern hemisphere, Dalrymple reported its form and existence in his work of 1770-1771, A historical collection of the various voyages and discoveries in the South Pacific. The hypothesis of the materialization of a huge mass of southern land was not a novelty in the eighteenth century, but rather a construction that took shape in Ptolemy’s vision of the world, in the second century of our era, later, in the Middle Ages, in the conception of countries, antipodes and later Renaissance maps. The southern presence of a Terra Australis was based on the idea that the continental regions of the Northern Hemisphere should have a simultaneous similarity in area with those in the Southern Hemisphere territories. A continental configuration expressed in the work published in Antwerp on May 20, 1570. Theater Orbis Terrarum, considered the first modern Atlas, signed by the cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius, a native of the former Duchy of Brabant, located in the south of the Netherlands and north of present-day Belgium. In the 31 editions released up to 1612, Ortelius’ Atlas would grow from 70 maps and 87 first references to 167 maps and translation into seven languages. The Terra Australis Incognita seems sovereign Typus orbis terrarumoval world map of the cartographer who would be appointed geographer to the King of Spain, Philip II, in 1575.
In that same year, 1575, a planispheric representation of the Earth, inspired by Ortelius’s map, stood out in the work of the French cartographer Jean de Gourmont. The oval map of Ortelius, with his Terra Australis, plays an anthropomorphic role in Gourmont’s work by embodying and replacing the face of a court jester. This directly fixes the interlocutor, each of us, with what was one of the map representations of the known and supposed world of the 16th century. It is believed that around the same time between 1580 and 1590 an engraver in Antwerp was working on the map depicting the sinister nature of Gourmont’s Jester. Informally known as the World Map of Fools, this planisphere representation of the world, which measures approximately 14 by 18 inches, remains a mystery to cartographers and historians to this day. “The inconvenient truth being told in this map is that the world is a dark, irrational, and dangerous place, that real life is nasty, cruel, and short. The world is literally a silly place,” writes journalist and author Frank Jacobs , author of the 2009 book, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities. (About Frank Jacobs, visiting his articles on maps published in the magazine The New York Times under the title “Limits“).
There have been several theories about the origin and authorship of the World Map of Fools for centuries. The court jester, in his eccentric attire, openly criticized power through the use of humour, music, narration, puns, stereotypes, and imitation. According to Frank Jacobs in the article The Fool’s Cap map of the worldpublished in place Big Think, the jester, received “a form of criticism that was only possible if neutralized by the madman’s grotesque appearance – preferably a hunchbacked and slightly crooked dwarf, i.e. one not to be taken too seriously”.
Among the hypotheses about the map’s authorship, the one that refers to it as a creation by the hand of Oroncé Finé, a 16th-century French mathematician and cartographer, who presented his version of the map in 1531 prevails. Terra Australis, an area crossed by rivers. Among the numerous inscriptions that we find on the map, the name of the Gallic scientist stands out in the upper left corner of the image. A hypothesis of the paternity of the representation of a world incarnated in a court jester contradicted by the date of Finé’s death, the year 1555, then 50 years old, about three decades before the appearance of Mapa-Múndi dos Folos.
The enigmatic character of the map is emphasized by the many epigrammatic expressions with scathing and satirical allusions to the torso, head and objects wielded by the court jester. Sentences complaining about the outward appearance of the world as the latin phrase Vanitas, vanitatum and omnia vanitas (“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”); the eloquent quote Preacherbook of the Old Testament, and which we can read at the bottom of the map, Stultorum numerus is infinite (“The number of fools is infinite”); the phrase attributed to Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, a Roman Stoic philosopher of the 1st century AD, Auriculas asini quis non habet (“Who doesn’t have donkey ears?”) or the Latin phrase Nosce to ipsum (“Know Thyself”), at the top of the card.
A list of expressions with a quote from Pliny the Elder, taken from book two of his natural history of the first century: “This is the world, and this is the substance of our glory, this is its seat, this is where we hold positions of power and covet wealth, and stir up mankind and unleash wars, even civil ones.”
Ayesha Ramachandra, professor of comparative literature at Yale University, takes a detailed look at the Map of the World of Fools in her article in the journal New Literary History, published in the framework of Johns Hopkins University in the United States. In the text How to Theorize the “World”: An Early Modern ManifestoRamachandra lacks any parallelism between the reality synthesized in the 18th-century map and the present day: “the picture allegorically explores the relationships between the global and the local, the universal and the specific, through the vast abstraction of the mapped world. reconcile it with the peculiarity of the people who live there (…) The map comes to us as a remnant of a parallel era of an information explosion and a new global consciousness, which faced the same challenge of reconciling a multitude of integrate new details into a coherent whole”.
Source: DN
