CIS Seminar 11/20/24: Chet Van Duzer - Unpuzzling a Nautical Chart of Africa - Multispectral Imaging

Unpuzzling an Anonymous Portuguese Nautical Chart of Africa of c. 1520 using Multispectral Imaging
Chet Van Duzer
Abstract: The Portuguese quest to sail down the western coast of Africa to reach the Indian Ocean, and thus the riches of India, was one of the great maritime enterprises of the late fifteenth century. An unstudied Portuguese map of West Africa in the Krauss Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, which has been dated c. 1520, offers an opportunity to study the evolution of Portuguese knowledge of that coast in the following decades, but many of the place names on the map have faded to illegibility. In this talk I will take a fresh look at the map using multispectral imaging to see what its damaged place names can tell us, and in particular what we can determine about the purpose of the chart.
Bio: Chet Van Duzer is a historian of cartography and a board member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester, which brings multispectral imaging to cultural institutions around the world. He has published extensively on medieval and Renaissance maps; his recent books include Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence, published by Springer in 2019, and Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta marina of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends, published by Springer in 2020. His book Frames that Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps was published by Brill in Open Access in 2023. His current projects are books about self-portraits by cartographers that appear on maps and the historical cartography of the Indian Ocean.