To collectors' delight, exhibit is all over map

Feeling lost? Flip out the GPS and a soothing voice tells you exactly where you are and how to get where you're going. It'll even draw you a map. No need for that old Rand-McNally in the glove box, with its yellowing folds and so many creases there's bound to be one on just the spot you're looking for.

Nowadays, getting there means going digital.

Yet for thousands of years, printed and painted maps were indispensable tools not only for seafarers, explorers, military commanders and monarchs surveying their realms, but for ordinary people who simply wanted to get from here to there. Maps made sense out of their comings and goings, helped them imagine distant lands and peoples, showed them their place in the world and even directed them toward salvation in the next.

All those uses will be on display Sunday when the Walters Art Museum presents Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, the most comprehensive exhibition on the subject in half a century.

The show will feature some of the world's greatest cartographic treasures from ancient to modern times, including the earliest surviving map of the ancient Middle East, carved on a stone tablet around 1300 B.C.; the first edition of Gerardus Mercator's famous projection map from 1569; Lewis and Clark's historic map of the American frontier; and Charles Lindbergh's chart of his daring 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic.

"One of the things this exhibition demonstrates is that while there is one world, there are many ways of representing it," says Walters manuscripts curator William Noel, "and because of that, maps tell us not just where we are, but who we are."

That's part of the fascination that maps hold for enthusiasts like Larry Pakula, a Towson pediatrician who was bitten by the bug as a 12-year-old in Kansas City, Mo., where he started collecting the railroad maps printed inside train schedules.

What began as a childhood pastime became a passion. Today, Pakula has a collection of 35 to 40 historically significant maps, some of which date to the 1600s. He's devoted a whole room in his house to displaying them, and he and his wife have mounted map-related prints and illustrations on walls throughout their home.

For collectors like Pakula, every map tells a story.

"Maps represent someone's view of a particular point in time and history, so they offer both objective and subjective information about their maker's perspective," says Peter Porrazzo, a retired chemical engineer who serves on the board of the Washington Map Society, the nation's largest association of map collectors and dealers.

Porrazzo, who has a collection of about 40 maps, the earliest of which dates to 1492, says he appreciates the aesthetic qualities of maps as much as the history they embody.

"The old maps were produced to be colored and hung on walls and be pleasing to the eye," Porrazzo says. "A lot of early maps had art in the form of insets and cartouches and pictures that were somehow related to the geography. So if you look at a map from the late 1500s, for example, you'll find things like sea monsters, people in costumes, the ancient wonders of the world, the four elements or drawings of cities - all kinds of things with a lot of eye-catching interest."

The Walters exhibition includes a magnificent example of just such a map, a giant representation of the entire known world by 17th-century Dutch cartographer Pieter van den Keere, which he modestly titled New Map of the Whole Earth Drawn from the Best Authorities.

In addition to the continents and oceans, van den Keere's map presents a cornucopia of information in the form of engravings of people from all over the world, their native costumes, important historical events, famous landmarks, world capitals, even exotic flora and fauna.

"Today, everything is in the form of electronic data, but 500 years ago, they embellished maps with figures, coastlines, the silhouettes of towns and cities, and they were all hand-done," says Bill Stanley, a map dealer and president of the Washington Map Society. "An antique map is not just a map, it's art."

Stanley, a retired historian with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says 19th-century cartographers often employed artists to make sketches of areas to be mapped.

In the 1850s, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey briefly employed American painter James McNeil Whistler to sketch the area around Anacapa Island, off the coast of Southern California, for its navigation maps.

"Whistler was sketching headland views of the coast, which were then incorporated into the charts," Stanley says. "But after three months, the government fired him for slacking off - and the rest is history."

(A note on the National Archives and Records Administration Web site suggests that Whistler's dismissal may also have been prompted by an irrepressible urge to add his own "personal touch" to the official documents he was assigned to prepare. "After he completed this etching [of Anacapa Island] in the approved style, he thought it looked dull," the archives reports. "Therefore, he added two flocks of gulls sailing gracefully over the rocky headland.")

Whistler, of course, went on to become one of the greatest American artists of the 19th century, though he spent much of his career abroad. In addition to his paintings, he is remembered for his magical etchings of London, Venice and other locales, a technique he first mastered as a map artist for the U.S. Coastal Survey.

"Today, a lot of people use global position systems and feel they don't need maps anymore," says Towson collector Pakula. "But I think a certain number of people will continue to appreciate them, if only for their interest as historical documents and beautiful things.

"One of our problems is that we sort of look at where we are today and that's all we think about," Pakula says. "But maps tell us about where we've come from, and I think that will always be important."

glenn.mcnatt@baltsun.com

Related topic galleries: Walters Art Museum, Venice, History, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Hobbies, Photography

• GRAPHIC DESIGN

• DIETARY AIDE

• CONSTRUCTION

• DENTIST - GENERAL

• DRIVERS

• View all Top Jobs