For Immediate Release PR Contact: 312.665.7100 or media@fieldmuseum.org Gallery Two: Mapping the World Lindbergh based his map in part on that of another great traveler, a name many visitors will recognize: Gerard Mercator, whose system of mapping lives on in nearly every American classroom. In gallery two, visitors will come face to face with his 1569 world map, the famous Mercator projection that is still used to navigate the seas…and now, outer space. Mercator’s projection is one example of the scientific approach to map-making that began with Ptolemy, one of whose maps is here as well. These are displayed along with Captain Cook’s chronometer and an astrolabe, inventions that, along with the compass, allowed navigators to keep track of their latitude and longitude in navigating the seas. A computer animation lets visitors see for themselves what happened when cartographers brought these instruments together to create what we now know as modern world maps. In this gallery visitors will also see how diverse cultures have sought to visualize not only the physical earth but spiritual realms. Maps representing the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, and Christian traditions show how different people incorporated geographic knowledge into their religious worldviews. A medieval European map of the world, for example, shows Jerusalem at the center, while on a Hindu globe the continents emerge like lotus leaves from the central pole of Mount Meru. Gallery Three: Mapping Places In Jacobo de Barbari’s beautiful woodblock print – a bird’s-eye view of Venice from the Italian Renaissance – we see the city, with its magnificent ships and buildings, in monumental aspect. This gallery, the largest and most diverse in the exhibition, shows what maps can tell us through the mapmaker’s choice of materials and representational styles. From the ancient Babylonian city of Nippur to modern Europe, from the Peruvian Andes to central Africa, maps of communities, cities, nations, and specific regions cast light on what was important to those who made them. The gallery includes maps drawn on clay tablets, molded into pottery, drawn on papyrus and deerskin, carved into wood, and painted in reindeer blood. A video illustrates the basic process of surveying, translating the physical lay of the land; visitors will see that while technology has moved from optics to lasers, fundamental principles such as triangulation are timeless. Here visitors will encounter the oldest identifiable city plan, a map of the town of Nippur in what is now Iraq; inscribed on a clay tablet, the map dates to about 1500 BCE. They’ll see objects we would scarcely recognize as maps, such as a papyrus text dating from the fourth century BCE and a lukasa memory board, a carved map of spiritual geography as well as earthly space that could be interpreted only by members of an elite secret society in the eastern Congo. Among the many stunning and historically important objects in this gallery are fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a monumental Roman map cut in marble; Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches for the street plan of the city of Imola; maps from The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes, a twelfth-to-thirteenth-century Arabic manuscript that came to light just a few years ago; and a British national treasure making its first appearance outside the United Kingdom: the Gough map, a thirteenth-century map of Britain believed to be the first large and generally accurate map of a European country. Continue>>