Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art: The British Library

3:18pm Wednesday 21st July 2010

By Theresa Thompson

I found myself poring over my maps when I got home from the British Library. I spent ages comparing them and places I knew with what I’d seen at the fascinating Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art exhibition. Of the 100 maps on view, one will especially appeal to The Oxford Times readers. It’s a tapestry Map of Oxfordshire made around 1663. Covering a whole wall, at 445 x 600cm, it is the biggest map I’ve seen. It was originally in a set of four made for the Sheldon family of Warwickshire, a series mapping the counties of Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Worcestershire, where the Sheldons and their friends and relatives had lands.

The Sheldon family homes, and thus probably their tapestries too, suffered damage during the Civil War. After the Restoration, the original owner’s grandson (also Ralph, 1623–84) commissioned two replacements based on the first printed maps of the area by Christopher Saxton in the 1570s. This is the map in the show.

It was enjoyable looking at the detail, though hard because of the tapestry’s age. The map stretches from Cropredy and ‘Cleydon’ in the north, across the rounded hills of the vale of Aylesbury in the east, as far west as ‘Cheltnam’ and Stroud. To the south east, it goes as far as London, with widening Thames with one bridge, a domed St Paul’s, and Hampton Court Palace in a bend of the river upstream. County borders highlighted in red indicate the old boundary with Berkshire.

The bird's eye view of Oxford in the centre shows steeples, crowded streets, the castle on its hill, a few bridges, including Magdalen, river cuts, and further out, ‘Wolvercot’ with its church tower, the woods surrounding Marston, Woodeaton and Kennington. Spaces are filled in with details such as hills, encircled parkland (Blenheim, unnamed, shows as walled parkland), and the White Horse in its eponymous vale. Perhaps in the 17th century they didn’t appreciate the beautiful linearity of the 3,000 year-old chalk horse for this one is a bit like a cart horse.

Around 80 of the maps are wall maps, plus globes and atlases. Most were originally made as works of art, intended for display alongside fine paintings and sculpture to show off the owner’s power, position, and knowledge. Dating from 200 A.D. to the 21st century, many are rare and most have not been seen before. All come from the 4½ million maps held in the British Library’s collections.

Maps can be works of art, propaganda, and indoctrination. The exhibition makes it interesting by placing maps in the settings for which they were made. We see them in the palace, from show galleries to the inner sanctum of a royal’s bed chamber, in the schoolroom, merchants’ homes (as in Vermeer paintings), the street, as Government maps. And grasp how subjective maps are, how they express a huge variety of world views, how their size and beauty is used to convey messages of status and power. Geography often takes second place. Adjectives abound in this show — first, largest, smallest and so on — here’s a few: the first great modern world map (The Fra Mauro World Map of circa 1450, copied in 1804 for the British East India Company); the largest atlas in the world (the almost six-feet tall Klencke Atlas, 1660, presented by an Amsterdam merchant to Charles II on his restoration); the smallest atlas in the world (made for Queen Mary’s dolls house: eight maps of the British Empire); the largest wood cut print ever made (a bird’s-eye view of Venice, 1500); the first map devoted entirely to the Americas (made in 1562 to flatter Phillip II of Spain who literally rides the waves); from 1783, the first American-made map of America, with stars and stripes and the prime meridian in America, not Greenwich; the earliest surviving school map, c.1400-10, which begins with Adam and Eve and ends with an oversized England and English Calais.

Among the propaganda maps are two ‘octopus’ maps, one of 1877 visualising octopus-tentacled Russian foreign policy, and a Nazi propaganda map from Vichy France, 1942, depicting Churchill as a demonic cigar-smoking octopus with bleeding tentacles.

The Mappa Mundi from Hereford, which never travels, is not in the show, but a clear digital copy is. A contemporary version, however, is Grayson Perry’s Map of Nowhere, 2008, an anatomical cosmos that has, instead of Christ at the top, a portrait of the artist. Like his pots, Perry covers it in scrawly figures, slogans, imaginary place names, Hubris, The Sadness of the Excessively Logical — comments on the beliefs and attitudes of the modern world. Another modern work is Stephen Walter's The Island, 2008. This satirical London-centric view of the capital is so smothered in minute sketches and words that it needs a magnifying glass to interpret. Seeing what he thinks important, interesting or shocking about them is fun. From the island’s west coast the Oxford ferry leaves across the Sea of Buckingham; a sign reads ‘Queues likely’. ‘Tea Revives the World” declares Macdonald Gill’s 1940 poster. An intriguing view of the times, its message is that tea, and by association the Allied effort, can cure a sick world. The caption for Darwin, Australia, did it for me. “A cup of tea greets air travellers on arrival,” it said. Just the thing, I thought — and went to the café for tea.

This is an exhibition to be enjoyed and interpreted at many levels. It’s free, and on until September 19. For events see: www.bl.uk/whatson