Morten Tolboll: The Cartographer Who Stole Lucifer´s Dreams

Friday, February 18, 2022

The Cartographer Who Stole Lucifer´s Dreams

"Smoke from the Monastery of Light and Darkness".

Photo by Morten Tolboll. Location: Cannaregio, Venice, Italy

In his novel, "A Mapmakers Dream - The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice", James Cowan writes the story that in sixteenth-century Venice, in an island monastery, a cloistered monk experiences the adventure of a lifetime - all within the confines of his cell, the book tells the story of fra Mauro and his struggle to realise his life´s work: to make a perfect map - one that represents the full breadth of creation. News of his project attracts explorers, pilgrims, travellers, and merchants, all eager to contribute their accounts of faraway people and places; and as Mauro listens to their strange tales, his map begins to grow and take shape. In the process, the boundaries of his world are pushed to the extreme, raising questions about the relationship between representation, imagination and the nature of reality itself.

It is a known fact that Fra Mauro, who died in 1459 at a very old age, worked in a sort of map-making laboratory with his assistants in the convent of San Michele; in addition to the fabulous map of the world, it produced a cosmographic map commissioned directly by King Alfonso V of Portugal, and another magnificent work now conserved in the Apostolic Library of the Vatican.

How this monk could draw his maps without ever having travelled is history shrouded in mystery.

The chronicles say, as Cowan writes, that he used information brought to him by Venetian navigators, but popular legend says that he captured his information from dreams, not his own, but the devil´s dreams. The monk in fact had the extraordinary ability to concentrate Lucifer´s dreams over the island by projecting them onto the clouds when the sky was particular overcast.

It is well known that throughout time the Devil´s creations have often slipped out of their creator´s control. This was true of his dreams too: they often raged through the skies on medieval nights, terryfying mortals and pointing the way to the sabbath to flocks of witches, larvae and evil spirits. Fra Mauro had discovered how to capture them and use them to learn about the far reaches of the world, which were still mostly uncharted. They represent the turmoil of the vision of the world held in that era, which Lucifer - in his dreams - had unchained.

Captured to paper by the cartographer monk who read their profiles and bright colors on the clouds, in the moments of fury which preceed every thunderstorm, they may still be seen floating in the distance over the cemetery during the fiercest thunderstorms on summer nights.

And beware of the waters surrounding this sinister island, watch for the lights which flicker before your eyes on the days and nights shrouded by November fog. They might belong to the candles which burn on the floating casket of The Girl Who Was Never Buried.