| This study asks why sixteenth-century Italians chose to buy maps in the first decades after the cartographic revolution and concludes that maps became a central tool in the effort to impress one's neighbors. Just as family portraits were commissioned to emphasize desirable characteristics, maps became a short-hand way to show one's connection to a place or knowledge about the world. In this way, maps became a new form of cultural capital in the sixteenth century----owners consciously deployed maps to construct their identity through the selection and display of cartographic materials. These maps were flexible objects that could promote a family's power, a military career, trade connections, or show that one was an educated, modern and worldly person.;"Worldly Consumers" examines the ways both producers and consumers negotiated the balance between the symbolic meaning attached to maps and the growing expectation that cartographic works accurately reflect the world. I challenge the widely-held perception that early modern maps were most important as tools of state imperialism by showing how individuals purchased and displayed maps as a deliberate act of self-fashioning, revealing that maps were valued not only for their geographical content but also for their ability to shape the public persona of their owner. These maps were not intended to be used for navigation, travel, or to feed imperial ambitions---rather, they were shown in the homes of worldly consumers who used maps to claim their place in a new culture of cosmopolitanism.;My examination of the expanding market for maps as consumer goods utilizes a variety of sources, including maps, epigrams, dedications, household inventories, catalogues and advice manuals in order to reconstruct the value of sixteenth-century maps to their buyers. This method demonstrates how Renaissance Italians of all classes used material goods to craft a public identity, providing a unique perspective on individuals who often go unnoticed in history, like the Venetian woolworker Andrea Baretta who decorated his home with maps of Asia, Africa, Europe and America. |
