The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and Print Culture in the Age of Encounters. Alexander Nagel is Craig Hugh Smyth Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, author of The Controversy of Renaissance Art and Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, and coauthor of Anachronic Renaissance.
They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Amerasia, and reported the following:
About page 99:Learn more about Amerasia at the publisher's website.
It is 1507. The final preparations are being made to publish a new edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, the most famous atlas of the world produced in antiquity, with 26 plates showing maps of every region of the world. Fronting the treatise is a map of the world as a whole. But there is a problem. Ptolemy didn't know the whole world, and he knew that he didn't know it. His world map shows half the world, 180° of the globe’s surface, leaving the rest uncharted. Most of the rest of the world was ocean, he believed, but he also knew that there was more of Asia beyond what he knew, though how much more he couldn’t say.
In the 15 years before this edition of Ptolemy, between 1492 and 1507, a lot had been learned about the other side of the world. The geographer in charge of the maps in this edition of Ptolemy, Johannes Ruysch, had actually traveled to the New World in 1499, sailing from England across the ocean to what we know call Newfoundland. So it was decided that Ptolemy’s world map needed an update. A second world map was designed for this edition, a kind of insert that could be folded into the great treatise. This map, known as the Ruysch world map, shows the full 360° of the globe and was meant to be a triumphant contrast to Ptolemy’s world map. On the right side of the spread we see the world known to the ancients, and on the left we see the newly discovered lands. The new world map fairly proclaimed: “In these last years we have discovered the other half of the world!”
What we see on the left half of the map is farthestmost Asia, with places like Tibet, Bengal, and Mangi (a term for southern China). Towards the north we see the very accurately described coast of Newfoundland, here attached to the Asian continent. In the ocean off the coast of China are two islands, Hispaniola, where Columbus established his first colony, and next to it Cuba. An inscription placed in the ocean explains that Marco Polo believed Japan was 1500 miles off the coast of China, and therefore was to be identified with the island of Hispaniola. Columbus‘s colony was on Japan! Below we see a large landmass, not yet called South America, here labeled “Land of the True Cross, or New World.”
The Page 99 Test works well for our book. It explains how the Amerasian half of the world charted by Ruysch went through various changes and expansions in the centuries following the map’s publication, but essentially remained intact, providing an infrastructure for how Europeans thought about the new world as an Amerasian continuum. Moving beyond the content found on page 99, the rest of our monograph considers a series of Amerasian case studies in seventeen short chapters, each of which explores a text, object, painting, print, or map. For instance, an early sixteenth-century Portuguese painting depicts one of the three Magi with costume and adornments from both Brazil and “Calichut”. A copper bell gifted to the traveler Cabeza de Vaca as he made his way from Florida to Mexico City encouraged generations of Spanish conquistadors and explorers to believe that the lands of China lay somewhere beyond the valley of the Rio Grande, beyond the territory that we today call New Mexico. A great variety of early modern maps place Tenochtitlan and Quinsai—or Asia and Mexico—side by side. And pre-Columbian objects such as Aztec feather-shields and codices were described and catalogued as “Chinese” or “Indian” in European collections: labels that stuck for even hundreds of years. Prying open these and other accounts reveals a lost Amerasian continuum, and a way of thinking about the world that has both lain in plain sight and been eclipsed by modern understandings of global geography.
--Marshal Zeringue
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