[...] at once, with his clever/intelligent finger, using measure, weight and number ... because God is not a God of disorder, but wants everything to proceed in a proper manner and with the proper differentiation.” (translated in Vision of Persia, p.123)


illustrious predecessors
through their patronage and linked to the noble art of geography

the map is framed by scale bars (the cartouche [of title] rests on a kind of architectural base in which a scale bar is contained)***
(graticules, more details,)
typography plays a role in emphasizing (novelty?)
geographical purview (meydan-e did, چشم رس، ميدان ديد) of the rulers

map and approval

different layers of information in the map: by looking at it all at once, it is difficult to comprehend the entire story that the author/artist are trying to tell. by examining individual visual elements in the map, and then linking them to the text, one can trace the different narratives extant--manifest and latent--in the work (Brancaforte on Olearius cartographic work)
(this visual rhetoric is also what i am using in my storytellings) (i also need to be careful with my collages: (not?) to map out creations that are totalities much greater than its author's own appreciation or conscious knowledge of them; to emerge an often confused and paradoxical but signatory “self” in the liminal/marginal areas of the page)
•“the mass of textual material that accompanies single-sheet or atlas maps tends to reveal its ideological perspective in the gaps between a silent, spatial, schematic rendering of an area (in visual form) and a voluble (por-harf پرحرف، روان، سليس، چرب و نرم، خوش زبان), copious (mofasal مفصل), emphatic (mo'akad تاکيد شده), printed discourse that strives to tell of the invisible history that the image cannot put into words.” (Conley)


grid, superimposed on the map

a common topos in Persian painting: a male protagonist expecting the female to pour wine or some other liquid into the shallow bowl he is holding
this ‘anticipation of drink’ is construed (in the title of Olearius map of persia) as a gesture of welcome and hospitality; providing the viewer with an iconic image of two “typical” inhabitants and their form of dress --> “promise and peril” [riches to be found + dangers encountered; treasures + giant snakes]
this continues today: the image of an iranian woman in native dress

on the Persians’ inner nature and customs

the dedicatory cartouche's [special effects]: ruler's name, capitalized, special style of italics
establishing the Duke's geographical purview --> linked to foreign territories


through ‘knowledge’ and ‘discovery’ --> learn about Safavid Persia

(Conley)
(cartography during early modern age afforded to) the emerging self and the self's relation to the idea of national space
between raw perception and creative imagination
surveying and plotting the world
the drama of european literature: an unforeseen theatricalization of the self in the 15th-17th century
-the self seems to be produced in the form of a subject, as a paradoxical being divided between a representation of the conditional relations it is producing and the composite nature of the simultaneously aural and visual medium of print
-growth of cartography parallels that of the coming of autobiography --> mapping is responsible for the consciousness that leads to the production of the fashioned self

rise of:
•autobiography
•opera
•natural history


Olearius multiplicity of roles
artist, geographer, historian, tourist, merchant, diplomat,

Olearius's production of self
mantle of artist is passed on to the author, who asserts himself and his new status in pictorial form
[in the corner of the map of Flensborg from Newe Landsbeschreibung] a hat obscures the specific character traits of the individual [artist/cartographer], and the image opts instead to emphasize the professional activity of the geographer [==> *expert: a new subject ruled by laws of classification or ideology, an expert cosmographer or topographer]
+ beautiful theories of a fire that burned in the human heart



he stick to his calculations despite the criticism he receives from colleagues and friends

Olearius's scientific reticence (kam-guyi کم گويى)
he quotes (without attribution) Athanasius Kircher: “some think that the earth, as well as the heavens have their intelligent angels or spirits which move inside them and thus bring the waters out of their depth” (Vision of Persia p.153)
therefore the waters were driven by a natural power through the hidden veins of the earth and rose up into the mountains, just as in a human being the blood rises from the liver to the heart and moves upward to the head through the vena cava. --?--> Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood


...cartographic literature both reflected and brought about changing perceptions of the world

about Marco Polo
Gabriel: Marco Polo did not have the influence on geography that one might have expected [...] he had no corresponding education, had been unable to make astronomical observation, and the results of these thrown-together maps was complete chaos [!]


the shape-shifting Caspian sea


*** Tabula Asiae ***

Olearius's travel account also seeks to be encyclopedic
...describe and judges the deviations from the European norm

common
barbarous
destruction of the body itself

Munster's final judgment:
“[Perisans] do not speak much and are more apt to act than to speak. they like the uncleanness or lust of the body; they are measured in their eating habits; they seldom keep to what they promise unless it is to their advantage” --> a laconic (mojez موجز) group of people who are frugal (sarfeju صرفه جو) in their habits, rarely keep their word unless it is to their advantage and are also oversexed ==> they are indeed different from the Europeans


discourse of analogy
cartographic evidence

a book of others

the ways it fashions received information

“Ortelius's innovation in the science of cartography is that he attends less to the “big picture” of the world than to putting together an illustrated summery of possibly infinite number of fragmentary parts (Conley)
--> “segmentable” units of an infinite possibility of scale and focus (#Goolge maps)


[]
Blue Map of Persia


influence of Ptolemy on the early islamic cartographers, in the time of Ma'mun

the notion of the inhabitable world being divided into seven horizontal bands called ‘climata’ or agalim/aghalim/ اقلیم(a geographical model derived probably from Persia)

*encircling ocean* surrounded the known world, and that usually have south at the top, probably to emphasize the importance of Mecca

system of Climes

(book of) notification: tanbih تنبیه


...pioneer on the road toward a (geographically) correct picture of Persia
_Persienbild_

...................................

“drawn from life”

the imagery and allegorical figures found on the frontispiece are learned signifiers belonging to a visual world that reflects and prefigures the verbal description that forms the body of the work

Olearius designs a brilliant visual program
visual table of contents
his nascent (dar tavalod درحال تولد) nationalist feelings
he translates both:
•the literature of the Persian poet
•the visual code of the land (he has visited)

traces of the author within the map
signs of the hidden power relation
depiction of the exotic “other” --> represented visually and typologically categorized, be it within the map itself, or in the boundary areas, in the margins of the representational space**

--?--> Timuri jiz

patronage
naming


“es gab eine lustige perspective”

of note in this scene [shah Safi's banquet for the Hostein embassy] is the woman alongside the right wall, who seems to be flirting coquettishly with a German looking in her direction, thus establishing a kind of contact between the two cultures

the monarch's true nature is laid bare

“you see me from the outside, as a pleasant young[...]