Art to Science: America and the Southeast in Early Maps. Selections from the Map Collection of Dave M. Davis, M.D., F.A. P.A.
Melba Remig Salterelli Exhibit Room
Rare Book Collection, 3rd floor, Wilson Library
Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. and Saturdays, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m., except holidays
Exhibition will run through January 1, 2004. For information, call: 919-962-1143.
This exhibition traces the mapping of America and particularly the Southeast from the earliest printed maps up to the American Revolution. The maps from Dr. Davis's collection offer a visually compelling record of the development of the science of navigation, the evolution of art of cartography, and an enduring spirit of exploration and discovery. The Great Age of Discovery introduced a fourth continent and transformed crude and fanciful renderings of a mystical Terra Incognita into inexact charts, based on the reports of the latest voyages. The New World soon would bear the name America. Though fraught with geographic fallacy, the early outlines of the islands and coasts began to emerge. As more precise instrumentation, more meticulous methods of observation, and advances in mathematics combined with ongoing exploration and settlement, the mapmaker was able to produce more detailed coastline and provincial maps. Even as the cartographer's art became more "exact" and "scientific," the lands and native life of America and the Southeast offered subjects profoundly suited to the Enlightenment engraver's art. By the eighteenth century maps incorporated new information including the location of native tribes, roads and trading routes, and documentation of land grants, battles, and boundary claims. The finest maps have always been accurate, influential, and often copied. These beautiful and historically significant maps show that while the application of scientific method to navigation and cartography improved accuracy and authority, the greatest maps have ever been the offspring of imaginative art and analytical science.
