The world map in the “Beatos”
The beatos are copies of the Commentaries on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana that respect its text and the theme and situation of the images, although each miniaturist interpreted it according to their imagination, its technical characteristics and its quality.
The world map, although it does not appear among the images that have been preserved from the Beatus Emilianense, we already find it in the one of Escalada and from there, in most of the Beatus.
This image, which does not exist in the Apocalypse of Saint John and we do not know if it was in the original version of the Beatus of Liébana Commentary, does not appear in the European Apocalypses either.
In the blessed it is a vision of the world as it was known around the year 1000, when it was thought that the earth was flat and that it was surrounded by a peripheral ocean, which is drawn in all of them.
Here we can compare this miniature in ten blesseds arranged chronologically, in which we can see how the geographical knowledge and cartographic quality of the miniaturists are increasing.
All the images have been obtained from the collection of studies of our friend Jean-Luc Monneret, who completes this image in some cases with his interpretation of the map. To enlarge click on the image.
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