Effets d’échelle, quadrillage de l’espace et construction de la carte. La cartographie de Marino Sanudo et de Paulin de Venise (Venise, premier tiers du XIVe siècle)
Résumé
The article analyses the cartographic file that was collected by the Venitian patrician
Marino Sanudo and by the Franciscan Paolino Veneto. It shows the complementarity of the maps with
different scales (mappa mundi, marine charts, maps of the Holy Land and city maps) which are found in
the Liber secretorum fidelium crucis by Marino Sanudo, a treatise about the reconquest of the Holy Land
and the historic treatise by Paolino Veneto. Together with the Genoese cartographer, working in Venice,
Petrus Vesconte, the two authors used the same maps which fitted their projects (the reconquest
of the Holy Land strategy for Marino Sanudo and the understanding of history for Paolino Veneto).
Both share the same awareness of the conventional nature of maps and of the perception of the notion
of scale, constantly implemented through the association of the mappa mundi, the regional map
and the local maps (grid map of the Holy Land, plans of towns). Figures written on the sides of the
hand-written page draw an imaginary grid similar to the one of the Holy Land on the maps of Italy
by Paolino Veneto. This notion of scale is not a matter of a mathematical conception of space but rather
an intellectual do-it-yourself based on the manipulation of the grid which serves at the same time to
localize the cartographic data, to reproduce the map and to measure the distances. Hypotheses on the
making of the maps of Italy have been proposed. If the outline of Italy is made from the drawing of a
marine chart, the inside of the peninsula is drawn thanks to the use of itinenaries, the insertion of local
maps such as the plan of the lower course of the Po drawn in two manuscripts by Paulino as well as the collection of oral data.
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