OPICINUS

While some earlier scholars would have labelled these maps as the epitome of medieval European cartography, due to the very ecclesiastical form and content, they were, indeed, an exception in this period's mapmaking. Opicinus de Canistris (1296 ~ c1350), a Pavian who worked at the papal court in Avignon, drew a series of imaginative maps, while acknowledging in a text written between 1334 and 1338 his use of nautical charts. Canistris's maps are fanciful anthropomorphic perspectives on geography, cartography and religion, a style that was to become a popular form of social and political commentary in the 17th - 19th centuries.  In these examples of Canistris's maps the physical geography is adapted somewhat to animal and human forms - the image of a king conforms to the shape/content of Europe, with the image of his queen forming North Africa. There is no further attempt to personify any other landmasses; however, the Bay of Biscay adjacent to France takes on the form of a lion with his mouth agape; and the Eastern Mediterranean is shown as an old bearded man holding a dove, a book and a scepter. There is no real attempt to depict the landmasses with any degree of current geographical knowledge, the British Isles, Ireland, and Scandinavia are drawn crudely even by the standards of the day. However, the purpose of these maps were obviously not geographical or navigational, but purely a fascinating, eye-catching medium for conveying a set of ideas.

Otto Georg von Simson:

The way in which the mediaeval imagination wrought the symbols of its visions appears, more clearly perhaps than in the conventional imagery of Christian iconography, in the strange designs by which an Avignon cleric, Opicinus de Canistris, sought to represent the Christian cosmos. While he represents the universal Church as edificium templi Dei, he blends the female allegory of Ecclesia into a geometrical pattern that looks much like the ground plan of a church and helps one understand how the mediaeval mind envisaged the symbolic relation between the temple and the shape of man. Opicinus was an eccentric; his drawings can hardly claim to be works of art. They are nevertheless characteristic of the mode by which the Middle Ages created its symbols.