The 38th IMCoS Symposium will highlight the early Belgian contributions to the development of cartography worldwide. These include the introduction of triangulation techniques (Frisius, van Deventer), first world atlases (Ortelius, Mercator) and the first navigation map to use the Mercator projection.

Argument

The 38th IMCoS Symposium will highlight the early Belgian contributions to the development of cartography worldwide. These include the introduction of triangulation techniques (Frisius, van Deventer), first world atlases (Ortelius, Mercator) and the first navigation map to use the Mercator projection.

This extraordinary history will include the Golden Age of Flemish Cartography as well as masterpieces of the later periods, from Michiel van Langren’s work on selenography (seventeenth century) to Count Ferraris’ Austrian mapping activities (eighteenth century), and Vandermaelen’s Map library (nineteenth century).

The visits to Belgian collections will also reveal cartographic works from Dutch, Italian, French and English origins.

The image of the Pythagorean tetrad stems from an early ninth-century manuscript in the Royal Library of Belgium which contains amongst other texts, Isidore of Seville’s De natura rerum. It provides an excellent summary of all topics which will be presented and discussed during the conference: the earth element stands for terrestrial cartography; the air for celestial cartography; the water for the portolans and sea charts, and the fire for maps related to warfare and fortifications plans.

This Symposium is planned as a three-day event, opening with an reception on the evening of 11 October 2021 at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR). It will comprise speaker presentations at the KBR and visits to collections/institutions holding remarkable map collections: the State Archives of Belgium, the Art & History Museum, the Royal Military Museum. An official dinner will close the conference on 14 October 2021.

The Symposium will be open to cartographers, geographers, historians, map collectors, land surveyors, curators and everyone with an interest in maps.

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Programme

This programme is still under development and is therefore likely to change during the next months.

Monday 11 October 2021

• 17.00 | Registration
• 18.00-19.00 | Reception
• 19.00 | End of the day’s programme

Tuesday 12 October 2021 – Day 1

• 09.00 | Registration
• 09.30 | Opening
• 10.00 | Where are you? Introduction to Belgium by Prof. Wouter Bracke (KBR and ULB)

10.30 | Coffee

• 11.00 | Darkness there and nothing more? Medieval cartography and the Liber Floridus by Dr. Karen De Coene
• 11.30 | Intersections of military architecture and cartography in the Low Countries (1540-1625), from Jacob van Deventer to Pierre Le Poivre by Prof. Pieter Martens (VUB)

12.00-13.30 | Lunch at your leisure (we will provide a list of places to eat in the neighbourhood)

• 13.30 | Guided visit to the Dukes of Burgundy museum
• 15.30 | Guided visit around the KBR Map Room
• 17.00 | End of the day’s programme

Wednesday 13 October 2021 – Day 2

• 09.30 | Ortelius: the man and his world by Curator Joost Depuydt (Museum Plantin Moretus)
• 10.00 | Gerard Mercator as a maker of scientific instruments: aspects of materialized knowledge by Prof. Koenraad van Cleempoel (Universiteit Hasselt)

10.30 | Coffee

• 11.00 | Northern Europe in sixteenth-century nautical cartography: a comprehensive review by Luis Robles (ULB)
• 11.30 | Between Heaven and Earth. Michiel Florent van Langren and his Map of the Moon. by Prof. Geert Vanpaemel (KU Leuven)
• 12.00-13.30 | Lunch at your leisure (see list of places to eat in the neighbourhood)
• 14.00 | Visit to the scientific instruments section of the Art & History Museum
• 15.30 | Visit to the Map Room of the Royal Army Museum [to be confirmed]
• 16.30 | End of the day’s programme

Thursday 14 October 2021 – Day 3

• 09.30 | The Ostend East India Company 1722-1742 by Dr. Jan Parmentier (Museum aan de Stroom)
• 09.55 | From a 1761 Venus transit to the Second Military Survey – the century of the Habsburg Empire in cartography by Prof. Gábor Timár (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary)
• 10.20 | The role of geography and cartography in Leopold II’s imperialist ventures around the time of the Berlin Conference (1884-1885) by Dr. Jan Vandersmissen (UGent)

10.45 | Coffee

• 11.10 | The ‘Mappothèque’ of Philippe Vandermaelen by Marguerite Silvestre (to be confirmed)
• 11.35 | The Mapping of the Antarctic Peninsula by European Nations around 1900 (Belgium, France, Sweden and Russia) by Robert Clancy

12.00-13.30 | Lunch at your leisure (see list of places to eat in the neighbourhood)

• 14.30 | Visit to the Map Room of the State Archives of Belgium
• 16.30 | End of the programme
• 18.30 | Reception at the Cercle Gaulois

19.00 | Official dinner at the Cercle Gaulois

21.30 | Speeches

Friday 15 to Sunday 17 October 2021

Optional excursion organised by our travel agent