The Truth About Maps

The great lie that maps cure us of is that you can separate imagination from reality. People claim maps are built with mathematics, statistics, and outlines of the real, actual landscape. However, in my view, maps are like love. They take things in, rearrange it all, and then present to the world an image part truth, and part imagination.

The painter Vermeer seemed to know this well. He repeatedly included a map of the United Netherlands in his paintings, even though the republic ceased to exist long before his last brushstroke. The map itself takes many forms. In A Girl Asleep, there is only the bottom pole and a small strip of the map’s parchment. Woman in Blue Reading a Letter shows about half of it, but the boundaries are blurred into a sea of gray and brown. About a third of a blurred map is shown in Young Woman with a Water Jug. In The Art of Painting, the map is whole. However, it is not only blurred, but also wrinkled and cracked.

It is in Officer and a Laughing Girl that we finally see it all: a whole map with the provinces of the Netherlands painted in clearly. Each of these maps is a copy from an original. They may all be different maps, but what makes their separateness disappear is that they all are tinged with Vermeer’s imagination.

Vermeer was only 16 years old in 1648, the year the Netherlands was formally divided into northern and southern provinces. His art, then, may have been an attempt to reunite a divided culture. Vermeer saw a rapidly changing world outside, so he painted a more stable one inside. This may have had everything to do with his love of maps, or maybe nothing at all. It doesn’t matter. Vermeer’s maps are like his windows. Each is a way into his home, and a way out into the world. The direction each path takes depends entirely on how you view it.

But what of the original maps, the ones he copied in his paintings? What of the maps we use on a daily basis to navigate and understand the world? Even with all the technological advances and supposed “land discoveries” drawn into place, there are still no “objective” maps. Any map of the Israeli-Palestinian area is almost certainly tinged with politics one way or the other. Global maps tend to still suffer from various distortions that enlarge certain continents and/or diminish others. Even the hyper modern Google maps suffer from time decay. They strive to capture the world, but never keep up with the endless change of it.

As such, maps can be considered autobiographies of the makers. Some are more “personal” than others, but they all have something of the people involved contained within them.

What is autobiography? Webster’s New World Dictionary defines it as “the story of one’s own life,” or “the art or practice of writing one’s own biography.” Practice implies frequency: a repetition of something in order to learn or make a habit of it. This seems grounded in reality. However, art implies imagination: a creation of something with a form and beauty that is distinguished from the world around it. So, if autobiography is both an art and a practice then it is not THE telling of one’s life. It is A telling, a story made in the service of one’s imagination.

Cartography, on the other hand, has supposedly developed into a science, driven by facts agreed upon as being true. And yet it’s also an art and a practice, also driven by the story, or many stories – conscious or unconscious – of the mapmaker(s).

As such, even though the map you use to get from point A to B today is much closer to some objective truth about the world than the ones in Vermeer’s paintings, they all still, partially, imaginations. We dream them into reality by agreeing that they represent reality.

There is no map of the truth as humans experience it apart from us.

Photo Credit:

Officer and a Laughing Girl by Jan Vermeer van Delft via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

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