The vanity of exploration - or, The discovery of Bouvet Island prefigured?

This spring, I am teaching a course on utopian thinking in the Middle Ages. The course is designed for MA students, and to prepare a good foundation for delving into details and focusing on specific themes within the vast umbrella of the course's main topic, my co-teacher and I have dedicated the first seminars to a chronological walkthrough of utopian material, ending with the Early Modern Period and stopping around 1750 for purely practical reasons. One important reason for bringing the early modern material into discussion with the medieval texts, was to highlight how increasing geographical knowledge affects the way utopian places are imagined, and where they are placed on the map.  

Thinking about the development of cartography and geographical knowledge, I was reminded of a detail I noticed in a painting I had the pleasure of seeing up close in January, namely Antonio de Pereda's allegory of vanity, exhibited in Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The painting is an exquisite example of the vanitas genre, one of my favourite types of paintings, as it combines the exuberant display of skill typical of the still life with the sombre and melancholic note of the memento mori artwork of the Late Middle Ages. The genre takes its name from the Book of Ecclesiastes, which is an immensely beautiful and human reflection on the pointlessness of human endeavour: All is vanity, all is in vain. Since part of the point of a vanitas painting is the juxtaposition of numerous and often contrasting pursuits, the genre also offered artists an opportunity to show how skilled they were at drawing complicated things, while also adhering to the iconographical standards of the genre (such as a skull, an extinguished candle, and an hourglass with all the sand in the bottom).       

Antonio de Pereda (1611-78), Alegoria de la vanidad (1632-36)

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Inventory no. GG 771

One detail that particularly fascinates, and pleases, me about Antonio de Pereda's rendition of the vanitas motif, is the way that he has rendered the globe, a detail I only properly realised when I was standing right in front of the painting. As seen below, the globe is placed on its side - its imagined side, rather - with north facing east and the west facing north. The hand of the genius representing the passing of time and the eventual pulverisation of all things mortal and temporal, is pointing towards the tip of the African continent, to a point between Africa and Antarctica. 

The detail is particularly interesting to me in light of the time when the painting was made, namely the 1630s. At this time, the Portuguese had spent generations mapping the coastlines of Africa and the Indian Ocean World, and there had been great strides in cartography. Madagascar - which was merely  a a rumour to medieval Europeans, if even that - is slowly receiving its actual shape, and the interior of Africa is mapped in the minds of European traders through stories encountered in the great Swahili trading cities such as Sofala and Mombasa. Indeed, if we look very closely on the globe in Pereda's painting, we see that the map of Africa represents two cartographic stages, with an earlier phase rendered in a strong green colour - reminiscent of the way Africa is depicted in early sixteenth-century maps - and a more modern, broader outline in weaker grey-green colour, which seems to represent the extent of Africa as known by modern cartography. Further south, moreover, is the great southern continent that was hypothesised by numerous cartographers throughout the medieval and early modern periods. This was a continent expected to exist to the south of Africa, based on the knowledge that the earth was round, and that the lower hemisphere should resemble the upper in climate, and perhaps also in having a large continent that would correspond with Eurasia. It is important to note, however, that by the time Antonio de Pereda painted this allegory, no European had been far enough south to ascertain the existence of this continent.   

In light of Antonio de Pereda's own times, and the increasing cartographic knowledge of the era, how are we to understand the way that the globe is included and rendered in the painting? While I do not know for certain, I suspect that in an age when voyages for trade, domination and conquest were still an important part of the geopolitical and even everyday life of Europe, the mapping of distant shores would be a natural part of the register of motifs that could emphasise the pointlessness of human endeavour. That the outline of Africa is rendered in two versions might be understood as a shorthand of the recent cartographic development of Pereda's times, which, ultimately, is as pointless as the game of cards or the possession of jewelry, since it does not ensure humans that eternal peace and afterlife which can only be attained through spiritual pursuits. Essentially, the painting seems to say: Yes, we know more about the world, but so what? 

 

One detail in the rendition of the globe is particularly amusing to me, as it is a pure coincidence. The finger of the genius is pointing to a location between the southern tip of Africa and the great southern land, the Terra Australis, that corresponds roughly to what we know now to be Antarctica. If we look at a modern map of this area, the finger is placed on, or at least very near, Bouvet Island, known as one of the most isolated places in the world. The first known sighting of Bouvet Island, currently under the jurisdiction of Norway, happened in 1739 during a voyage under Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier (1705-86), and the first known landfall happened in 1822 by American whalers. Consequently, Antonio de Pereda did not know about Bouvet Island, and the placing of the genius' finger is purely coincidental. But it pleases me to think about how human speculation and imagination very often does manage to envision the real world despite lack of certain knowledge.