Twelve paintings, from Bosch in the 1490s to Jasper Johns in 1961, give a map or a globe a real part to play. Holbein, Vermeer, El Greco and Dalí use one to say something about the people or the place they paint.
Some of these maps copy real sheets sold in Amsterdam, and Vermeer painted the same map of Holland twice. Others were bent to flatter a patron.
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How These Were Chosen
Before photographs and screens, a map or a globe was the quickest way to bring the whole world, or a single country, into a room. A globe on a table showed that its owner read, traveled or governed.
For a painter, a map was also a flat surface inside the painting, ready to take lines, color and lettering. Hung on a painted wall, it could place a scene in a real country, flatter the person who paid for the work or stake a claim to land and sea.
The rule for this list is simple: the map or globe has to hold part of the picture's meaning. An instrument that simply sits on a desk with the rest of the furniture did not make it. The entries are numbered from twelve down to one, ending with Holbein's The Ambassadors.
12. El Greco, View and Plan of Toledo (1610 to 1614)
In the foreground of View and Plan of Toledo, a young man holds up a large unfolded sheet. It is a plan of the very city that spreads across the hills behind him, drawn street by street.
El Greco, the painter born on Crete who had lived in Toledo since 1577, painted the canvas between 1610 and 1614, near the end of his life.
He most likely made it for his friend Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, a churchman of Toledo. Salazar ran the Hospital of Don Juan Tavera, a large charity hospital founded by a cardinal of that name just outside the city walls.
That hospital is the one building El Greco moved on the canvas. A text written on the plan explains that it had to be shown "in the form of a model," lifted from its real place so that its front could be seen.
So the whole building floats on a cloud, small and complete, like the scale model an architect brings to a client.
The young man with the plan answers another problem. From a hilltop, the eye catches roofs and towers but never the pattern of the streets. El Greco hands that missing information to him, and the canvas holds two versions of Toledo at once, the city as it looks and the city as it is laid out.
At a Glance
Artist: El Greco (1541 to 1614)
Painted: 1610 to 1614
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 132 × 228 cm (52 × 90 in)
Where to see it: Museo del Greco, Toledo
11. Jasper Johns, Map (1961)
Across a canvas more than ten feet wide stretches a map of the United States, every state in its place. Jasper Johns painted it in 1961, after years of flags and targets, images everyone already knew. Yet the country most Americans could draw from memory is hard to make out here, and the reason lies in the way Johns painted it.