Ships on Maps: Pictures of Power in Renaissance Europe

Ships appearing on sixteenth-century maps were symbols of the European conquest of the seas. Cartographers commemorated the new found dominion over the oceans by putting the most technically advanced ships of the day all over oceans, estuaries, rivers, and lakes on all kinds of maps. Ships virtually never appeared on maps before 1375: this dramatic change from medieval practice had roots in practical problems but also in exploration and new geographical knowledge. Map-makers were producing beautiful works of art and they decorated them with the accomplishments which set Europeans apart from their classical past and from all the other peoples of the world. Ships on Maps investigates how, long admired but little understood, the many ships that came to decorate maps in the age when sailors began to sail around the world were an integral part of the information summarizing a new age.