Mapping Spaces is a research project organized by Ulrike Gehring and Peter Weibel for the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe that culminated in an exhibition in 2014 and the publication under review here. Rather than a standard exhibition catalogue that includes entries on each object on view, the book is an anthology of thirty-seven essays by art historians, mathematicians, geographers, historians of science, philosophers, and theologians. These essays develop from and expand upon the research project on the rationalization of space in seventeenth-century Dutch painting that Gehring initiated at the University of Trier in 2006. Gehring’s introductory essay frames the issue and takes up nearly one-fifth of the total page count.

Mapping Spaces takes as its point of departure the seventeenth-century Brussels painter Pieter Snayers’s oil paintings of specific locations, pictured almost from a bird’s-eye perspective with naturalistic figures and trees populating the foreground. These curious pictures are hybrid objects that seem to be both map and landscape. More so, the paintings often center on specific battles so that they also exist as journalistic records, military histories, and artfully crafted pictures. In this way, Snayers’s paintings stand at the intersections between art and science in early modernity. The various contributions to the volume branch out to tackle all manner of these interconnections as they relate to the perception, description, and production of space in Northern Europe, primarily the Dutch Republic and Flanders.

Svetlana Alpers first examined what she called the “mapping impulse” of seventeenth-century Dutch art in her seminal, and highly controversial, Art of Describing. There she posited shared and interrelated interests between paintings and maps, as both are descriptive objects that conveyed and constructed knowledge. Gehring and Weibel test and expand upon Alpers’s hypothesis, arguing vociferously for new conceptualizations of space that were simultaneously and cooperatively explored in maps, surveying manuals, cosmographic studies, landscape paintings, and many other media. The myriad contributors to Mapping Spaces convincingly establish that artists, engineers, scientists, and craftsmen had direct, firsthand contact with each other. And, through these contacts, information was exchanged so that there was tremendous synergy in and across many scientific and cultural productions.

The volume is organized into ten thematic sections with three to five essays each: “A Closed Universe in Dissolution,” “New Cartographic Projections in Maps and Globes,” “The Art of Maritime and Celestial Navigation,” “Early Globalization and the Transfer of Knowledge,” “Spaces of Knowledge: Siege Views in the Era of Pieter Snayers,” “Military Architecture and Technology: Fortifications in the Art of War,” “Leiden University: Dutch Mathematics and the Training of Military Engineers,” “Measuring Landscape in the Early Seventeenth Century: Mathematical Tools and Surveying Instruments,” “The Invention of Landscape: Land Reclamation and Polder Technology in the Visual Arts,” and “Aerial Perspective as a Modern Strategy of Warfare.” My own boundaries of space and time preclude addressing each of the individual essays. Of particular note, however, are Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis’s “Geometries of Space, Dutch Mathematics and the Visualization of Distance” and Hans-Ulrich Seifert’s “From Gunter’s Chain to Systematic Triangulation: Geodetically Generated Landscapes in Early Modern Prints.” Dijksterhuis compellingly connects Jacob van Ruisdaels’s curved horizon lines and use of light to denote distance with emerging formulations of projective and atmospheric perceptions of space postulated in contemporary scientific thought. Seifert probes how geodetic triangulation methods for surveying altered the way individuals experienced and, as a result, pictured space. Together with the other highly readable essays the reader is left with a far better understanding of the seismic shifts that occurred in the consideration of space.

The editors boldly claim in their introduction, “We have not turned the research of art history upside down, but we have formulated conclusions that, after Mapping Spaces, cannot be easily ignored” (17). Indeed, the findings and arguments of Mapping Spaces deserve the most serious attention. Scholars of all disciplines must grapple with artists’ involvement with the geodetic, geometric, and military concerns of the day. As a result, Mapping Spaces is a must read for anyone interested in early modern pictures of space and place, and the ideologies circulating through these images.