Epilogue

Abstract

Ships virtually disappeared from maps in the eighteenth century. Some still appeared but rarely. At least those few were, as in previous years, always of the latest designs.¹ The reasons for the abandonment of ships as decoration are even harder to discern than those for the appearance of vessels in the Renaissance. There is certainly no single explanation for ships vanishing just as with their relatively sudden proliferation. Technically cartographers could produce more refined maps over time as they shifted from engraving to etching. The lines were finer, the writing more legible and the drawings more varied. Though etching did not produce the elegance of engraving it did produce about twice as many maps per plate which made the move in a business sense more reasonable.² The drive toward standardization which began with the introduction of printing to map production was a tyranny by the eighteenth century. The disappearance of manuscript portolans, the last of the entire Mediterranean marking the end of an era in 1688,3 eradicated the artistic flexibility and impetus to variation which had been under siege from around 1500. By the eighteenth century cartographers were better at depicting ships than they were in the fifteenth and the drive toward precise drawing of technologies was stronger than ever, as Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers of 1751–65 demonstrated.