The Rosettes Page - March 2024

[Mark Knowles]

Thinking about the Rosettes foldout and trying to understand how other people approach it. At a high level it does not look like a map. 9 very large circles arranged 3x3 with the outer circles connected on the face of it are nothing like a map. I think the key is the low level i.e. the details which make it look like a map. And I think many people look at the page at a high level overview and pay little or no significant attention to the low level details.
Why did the author choose to represent their map with 9 circles? I think this is partly a stylist consideration rather than one of necessity. At that time in Northern Italy people were quite creative in how they produced maps as Professor Paul Harvey says in his book "Medieval Maps" and to me in person, so to have a distinctive design was not unusual. I think the author wanted to some extent to produce their own unique design. I personally doubt we will find another map like it, from that time, as I don't think the author copied the map from another document. I think part of the design was that the corner large circles provided a zoom in on a specific location at a different scale from the connecting causeway. So the circle could represent a magnifying glass focusing on specific details the author found important. So we have a zoom in on Milan and a zoom in on the Abbey of Saints Nazzaro and Celso and a zoom in on the Council of Basel. The centre side circles also act to zoom in on certain features the author has chosen to highlight.