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The lost wheel map of Ambrogio Lorenzetti
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1996 by Marcia Kupfer
On Catalan-style charts and on complete mappaemundi that absorbed this tradition, the pictorial notation of inland features (mountain ranges, rivers, towns) and of rulers or peoples complements the rotatable writing of coastal place-names. When north is at the top, images in the southern sector are, as a rule, the right way around, and vice versa. Far less consistently, images may also be positioned so that some will appear the right way around when east or west points upward. The principle of rotation was so crucial to this cartographic tradition that symbols for selected towns (variously; on different maps, Venice, Paris, Toulouse, Fez, Baghdad, and on the Catalan Atlas, Beijing) were frequently doubled, thereby allowing them to appear right side up however the map was turned.(70) Thus, Italy with Naples at top and Milan at bottom (though disorienting to us) was merely the logical extension of the boot-shaped peninsula viewed the other way around; neither position was cartographically privileged. Rather the "direction of honor" from which place-names and images would appear correctly oriented at any one time depended on the eye of the viewer. Portolan charts had accustomed Lorenzetti's patrons and audience to picture maps that needed to be rotated to be fully read, and hence to the concomitant inversion of geographic forms, epigraphy, and imagery.(71) In sum, this body of cartographic material could well have functioned as an intermediary between the long-familiar tradition of the stationary wall map on which the circle of the world was inscribed and the novelty of an actually revolving wheel.
A map adapted from the tradition of portolan charts would allow for a centralized placement of Italy, hence of Siena, as deduced from eighteenth-century descriptions of the vestige of the disk. Can observers' use of the term carta topografica also be reconciled with a portolan-based map? I believe so, provided that the question turns on the recognizability of selected features rather than on the quantity and pictorial elaboration of chorographic detail.
Superimposed over the geographic delineation of the continental coastlines, particularized vignettes of certain major sites on Lorenzetti's map could have replaced conventionalized town symbols. Italian chart makers were the first to incorporate recognizable portraits of major architectural monuments: with a representation of the church and campanile of St. Mark's the Pizigani brothers indicated their native city on their 1367 chart; Francesco Pizigano similarly epitomized Venice and, by depicting cathedral and lighthouse, Genoa in the calendar of his 1373 Atlas.(72) Not surprisingly, though, architectural portraits were at times more evocative than rooted in observation: on the 1367 chart, for instance, a cathedral similar to that marking Santiago de Compostela also appears at St. Catherine's in the Sinai, and the interior rotunda of a mosque recalling the Dome of the Rock is transposed to Mecca. By substituting for standard pictographic notation real or imagined likenesses of buildings with which places were identified, Italian cartographers modified the Catalan tradition in the direction of greater local specificity. Conceivably, then, a miniature view of Siena as in Figure 15, though perhaps larger than other towns, could have been accommodated within the format of a map based on the portolan tradition (see, e.g., [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 17 OMITTED!) as it could have been within the two sorts of radial composition (the schematic terraqueous disk or continuous landscape) discussed above.
