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00:00The British Library in London is home to a staggering four and a half million maps.
00:14Mysterious and beautiful, these rarely seen treasures are much more than just physical depictions of the world.
00:21A map is definitely by far the best synthesis of topography, so the geography of a place, together with its history and of course art as well.
00:34So you've got all great themes all combining in one to produce something of huge beauty.
00:41Our love affair with maps is as old as civilisation itself.
00:46Each map tells its own story and hides its own secrets.
00:56Maps delight, they unsettle, they reveal deep truths.
01:02Not just about where we come from, but about who we are.
01:09A map is a thing of beauty, it's a place where perhaps you express the cosmos,
01:13you try and bring together the whole view of the world so you can understand it.
01:20The medieval masterpiece, known as the Hereford Mapamundi, is the world's oldest surviving wall map.
01:28It still resides where it was made over 700 years ago.
01:32A unique insight into a vanished world.
01:35It's probably the best way in to the medieval mind, because in it are drawn together so many aspects of medieval thinking.
01:51I think the point of the map was to make you say, wow, that's extraordinary.
01:56The Hereford Mapamundi has inspired wonder and caused confusion for centuries.
02:07It seems to defy logic.
02:10It's a map and a medieval encyclopedia that charts both the known world of the physical and the unknown world of belief.
02:18The mapamundi has spent almost all of its life in one of Britain's oldest ecclesiastical buildings, Hereford Cathedral.
02:32There were many mapamundi in medieval times, but the Hereford map is the largest to have survived intact.
02:50When it was made in 1300, Europe stood on the verge of the Renaissance.
03:05The poet Dante was about to embark on his epic work, The Divine Comedy.
03:12While the Venetian explorer Marco Polo was on his pioneering travels in Asia.
03:20Painted on a single sheet of calfskin, the mapamundi, the name means cloth of the world, is five feet high and four feet across.
03:32It's a map of a teeming world, rendered in dizzying detail.
03:38One of the greatest surviving artworks of the Middle Ages, it rarely leaves its glass case.
03:43The ravages of time and past neglect have taken their toll, leaving parts of it dark and damaged.
03:54But it still exerts an extraordinary power over those who come into contact with it.
03:59I remember seeing it when I was eight years old.
04:06And to me it was really intriguing and fascinating, like seeing a kind of medical specimen squeezed into a jar.
04:18You know, something that captured my imagination as a child.
04:21Dominic Harbour came to Hereford as a student to help prepare a new exhibition for the map.
04:30Twenty years later, he's still here as the cathedral's commercial director.
04:36And has seen thousands of visitors encounter the map for the first time.
04:40I think actually, it completely disarms anybody who stands in front of it.
04:47It's really a total cacophony of too much going on at the same time.
04:53Which, if you think of the culture that produced it, it's a pretty good description really.
04:59It's kind of unfathomable and I think you have to sort of immerse yourself into it.
05:04The map was the work of a highly skilled team of scribes and artists.
05:28Its original creator left behind his mark.
05:32Pray for Richard of Lafford, who had it made, reads a caption in Norman French.
05:43At the heart of the map is Jerusalem.
05:48And at its center, a tantalizing clue to what was probably the first act of the map makers.
05:54A tiny pinprick made 700 years ago where a compass was used to trace the circular tower.
06:02From that tiny, ragged hole at its center spreads a map of amazing complexity.
06:11A thousand written legends.
06:14500 drawings of the cities and towns of the known world.
06:17And the monstrous races of the unknown world.
06:18Among them, the acetones eating the corpses of their parents.
06:33And the skyopods using one huge foot as a sunshade.
06:37Small wonder, you might think, that the Victorian scholar, Sir Charles Raymond Beasley, called it a monstrosity.
06:47The Hereford Mapamundi, like other works of its genre, are very confusing.
06:57There are no country boundaries.
07:00Everything seems out of place.
07:02However, it requires learning about the medieval worldview and trying to come to terms with the internal structure of the map.
07:15The medieval world map has its own internal principles of organization.
07:21You just have to learn it.
07:22And where better to start to unravel the mysteries of this map than at the heart of cartographic learning, London's British Library.
07:34Its four million maps are under the care of a curator, who is both a world expert on cartography and a trustee of the Mapamundi.
07:44Peter Barber.
07:45Like other scholars of the map, he's had a lifelong fascination with the Mapamundi.
07:55And knows how tricky it can be to decipher.
07:58The first-hand viewer, I think, would be completely lost by the map.
08:03You've got none of the familiar cities, you've got none of the familiar landmarks.
08:07All you have is this sort of collection of weird-looking animals.
08:11And lots and lots and lots of text which, being in Latin, you can't read.
08:15I mean, this is totally incomprehensible to most people.
08:21At first glance, it's the geography of the Hereford map that is immediately confusing.
08:27We're used to maps that face north, but the Mapamundi follows an older convention and faces east.
08:34The Mapamundi's geography is obviously distorted because it's got east at the top.
08:42But if you turn it round, all of a sudden it does become slightly more familiar.
08:51You can recognise immediately Sicily, which is a triangle, that's actually quite accurate.
08:56You see Italy, you see Greece, you see most notably the Mediterranean.
09:02You have Britain at the top left-hand corner.
09:06You have the west coast of Europe.
09:08And then most important of all, down here you have Africa, or at least North Africa.
09:13And to the right you have Asia.
09:16And actually, it's certainly recognisable, even if distorted.
09:20It's also full of mysteries.
09:24I mean, you can't begin to unravel everything, and nobody has yet.
09:28So you can come back to it again and again and again with new questions and see new things.
09:34And it is endlessly absorbing.
09:37Delving deeper into the map, beyond its physical geography, another layer of meaning appears.
09:51The Mapamundi is also a complete history of the world.
09:59Among the cities and towns, the rivers and seas, the map also depicts events from the past.
10:06Events separated sometimes by thousands of years.
10:20We see Noah's Ark, and the crucifixion of Christ.
10:24But we are also shown Caesar sending out surveyors to map the world before Christ was even born.
10:36Across its extraordinary surface, geography, time, and history mingle.
10:42The present collides with the distant past.
10:47But the Mapamundi's real beauty is that it is much more than just a map.
10:52The Hereford map was not used the way we use a map for getting from point A to point Z.
11:01It was not a route-finding map.
11:04It was an imago mundi, a picture of the world, a kind of display of all creation laid out, extended, before the viewers.
11:16It was a marvel, a mirabilia mundi.
11:20What the map is for is to plot, if you like, human history.
11:26And that's why it's orientated with East at the top.
11:30Because human history starts, this is Christian human history.
11:35And the human history starts in the East, in the Garden of Eden, with the creation of Adam and Eve.
11:42And the geography, really, I think you want to think of as a background.
11:46So it's history. History from the beginning of time to the expected, anticipated end of time.
11:53And where did the map makers source the knowledge?
11:59The history, the geography, that is pictured on the map?
12:03From writers of the distant past.
12:06Some, like the scholar Orosius, pupil of the great St Augustine, were writing hundreds of years before the map was made.
12:14Others, like the Roman Pliny, had been dead for well over a thousand years.
12:19I think that's a river of gall, isn't it?
12:24Peter Barber and Mapamundi scholar Paul Harvey have spent their professional lives deciphering the complex secrets of the map's many sources.
12:34River after river.
12:36And also how rapid...
12:38Well, I like to think of the map, the Hereford map, as a sort of patchwork quilt.
12:41There's lots of little bits, and if you know something about the sources, then you can identify, you know, this little patch came from here.
12:51You couldn't create something like the Hereford map without relying on a great many different sources.
12:58And we think the Hereford map certainly drew on 7, 8, 10 sources fairly directly, but possibly rather more.
13:11And this would have been the sort of illustrative source that a map maker might have used.
13:17One can discern a vast number of sources, but it is actually very, very difficult since all of the sources tended to repeat what the other sources had said.
13:23So, for instance, there on the Hereford world map, you get a specific reference to Erosius.
13:31Erosius included a lot of information that came from Pliny.
13:36Pliny's enormous text on natural history, which is really a history of the world and everything in the world.
13:46And the miniature just expresses it beautifully, because on the left you can see Pliny writing his text, and outside, almost through the window, you can see all of the animals of the world, all of the natural features of the world.
14:01That image really does sort of express the encyclopedic vision of the classical writers, which is carried through to medieval Mapamundi.
14:10The map's next layer of content, and by far its most bewildering, owes much to Pliny.
14:22His encyclopedia lists all the animals and peoples of the world.
14:27So, too, does the map.
14:29At first, we see creatures we would recognise.
14:36Here's a giant lizard basking in the sun.
14:39There's an elephant.
14:41But the further we move out from Jerusalem at the centre, the wilder the world gets.
14:51Well, Mapamundi, of course, is one of the finest examples of a medieval bestiary.
14:56What I find interesting about the beasties on the map is where they are, what you've got and where you've got them.
15:07You've got the worst ones, the scariest ones, the really bizarre ones, you know, the big feet over their heads as umbrellas,
15:13and the ones cannibalising their own parents, all these kind of things.
15:18They're all in, well, they're in Africa, they're in Asia, they're in the far north of Russia and the Arctic and the Baltic.
15:26And that very much reflects, I think, the prejudice of the time against these sort of unknown parts of the world.
15:33Here's the greased in Scandinavia, who make handy blankets from the skins of their enemies.
15:42Next to them live the cynocephaly, recognised to be human, but with the heads of dogs.
15:49Then there's the hermaphrodites, with male and female genitals, and the headless blemmies, with eyes in their chests.
15:56These monstrous races from the classical past are partly on the map to entertain, and partly to preserve classical knowledge.
16:09But their presence also serves a larger purpose that goes to the heart of the map's deeper religious meaning.
16:15These are the fabulous races, the so-called monstrous races, from classical antiquity.
16:28And Augustine talked about these fabulous peoples as testifying to the power of God.
16:36That if God could create these fabulous peoples, then he could make bodies suffer eternally in the torments of hell.
16:51For him, this was proof of the resurrection with eternal damnation.
16:59So this was, again, using a mirabilia, a marvel, to prove a theological point.
17:18So theology is the mapamundi's final layer of meaning.
17:22And the map's very complexity serves, it turns out, a very specific purpose.
17:30Well, I think the fact that the map is a picture of extraordinary confusion is actually extremely important for understanding it.
17:39The tremendous visual disarray of the map is a sign of man's fallen vision of the world.
17:46In a way, it directs attention away from the world, away from trying to understand the world,
17:51towards trying to achieve an understanding of and a vision of things outside the world, of heavenly things.
17:59The French philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor, writing when the map was made, wrote,
18:07The whole world is like a book, written by the finger of God.
18:11And there he is, God in the form of Christ in majesty, above the circle of the world.
18:20To his left, the blessed enter heaven.
18:24To his right, the damned are ushered into the jaws of hell.
18:28This is Judgment Day, the end of time.
18:33The moment that explains the map, and gives it its deeper meaning.
18:37You see a marvellous recreation of the classical and Christian world, and of a world that was really dominated by faith.
18:48And a world too, which in a way, put the world in its possibly proper place.
18:53There are also scenes in the corners, and the scenes in the corners actually put everything into context.
19:05Because at the top, you have the last judgment.
19:09And I think even more movingly, at the bottom right, you have a scene of a huntsman of a human being, looking back wistfully at the world, but being told to proceed.
19:21And around the world, you have the disc containing the world is fastened to eternity by thongs, which read M-O-R-S, or the Latin for death.
19:35And it is a very, very sober image, or idea, which makes, all of a sudden, the whole of this enormous world in the middle seem somewhat less important.
19:51Here is the world, says the map. Enjoy it. But remember that you will soon leave it.
19:57The huntsman, about to depart the world, takes one last look back.
20:02But on the ground, his squire calls out,
20:06Pass avant. Pass on. Without regret. To the next world.
20:12It is a memento mori, that we may live in this world, the world is full of good things, it's full of difficulties, political relations between France and England and so on.
20:27It's full of history. But it's also temporal, it comes to an end, as far as our lives come to an end.
20:36So the map, whilst teeming with life, is actually about death, and about how, for the medieval mind, belief in the next world was the only certainty.
20:51700 years on from its creation, that idea of belief and certainty continues to fascinate and inspire artists like Turner Prize winner, Grayson Perry.
21:10I was asked to give a lecture in Hereford, but I got there a bit early, and I thought, oh, I'll go and see the map of Monday.
21:20And I hadn't really, you know, I hadn't sort of thought about it before, but I was just blown away by it, because I got there and I had it all to myself.
21:27And there was me and the guide, and she took me through it, and I was just entranced by this thing.
21:34Grayson's Map of Nowhere, made in 2008, borrows much from the Hereford map.
21:41Its circular scheme, its wild mixture of image and text.
21:46His picture is a very personal take on the idea of mapping belief.
21:51Like all my works, I've sort of, didn't start with a sort of super clear plan.
21:57That would be boring to do that.
21:59So I just work my way across.
22:01I start in the top left-hand corner, and then three months later, I get to the bottom right-hand corner.
22:06And in between, something has happened, and that's how it works for me, you know.
22:10And so the idea of, I suppose to a certain extent, I'm parodying the, you know, the intellectual constructs of religion.
22:17In that, you know, at the bottom scene is all these people that I sort of imagine them on a kind of Ruritanian pilgrimage.
22:28And they're all making their way up this mountain to this sort of holy shrine site at the top,
22:35which is illuminated by a shaft of heavenly light.
22:38But if you follow the shaft up, it's coming out of my bum hole.
22:43So it's sort of, that's what I was saying about that.
22:50This map is like the Mapamundi in that it is a kind of world view, but it's very much a personal, individualistic world view.
22:57You know, I don't presume to be the voice of anybody else but myself.
23:02But obviously, you know, I have shared values with a lot of other people.
23:07Being a sort of fully paid up member of the chattering classes.
23:17Grayson's picture and the Mapamundi have much in common.
23:22Both are visual encyclopedias of a complex world.
23:25Both have at their heart questions of faith and belief.
23:31But there's one crucial difference.
23:35Age.
23:37Time and past neglect have taken their toll on the Hereford map.
23:41The crucial scene of Christ in majesty is dark and damaged.
23:46The rivers and seas, once vividly colored, have faded to a murky brown.
23:51But now, using the latest scholarly research, the map is being restored to something like its former glory.
24:07The Folio Society is preparing the first authentic reproduction of the Mapamundi.
24:13Digitally cleaning up the faded original and restoring its color.
24:17The rivers are returning to a vivid blue.
24:25The long faded green of the sea is being restored.
24:29Christ shines out once more.
24:34Even the ivy around the map, invisible for perhaps hundreds of years, grows again.
24:40At the British Library, Mapamundi scholars are gathering to see the finished results for the first time.
25:01The Hereford map has never been digitally photographed in its entirety before.
25:05Will the wonders of 21st century technology restore the glories of 700 years ago?
25:14It's strange seeing the original background color with these fresh colors.
25:19It's very much brighter than the original, and it's visually much more interesting.
25:31I'm really, really pleased with it. I've been involved in giving advice on various aspects of it.
25:36But when you look at it as it is in its final state, you can see the birds and the animals quite, quite clearly.
25:49So I think this is going to be a tremendous aid to people who are studying it, not only in detail, but also from the wider perspective as an ensemble of information.
26:00Yes.
26:01It's very striking the contrast now between the rivers and the sea as well.
26:07I love it. I absolutely love it.
26:10I have to keep on telling myself I'm not looking at the original. This is not what it was.
26:15But as a vision of the original, it's absolutely superb, I think.
26:19It gets across what an extraordinary spectacle the original must have been.
26:30It really helps us envision what this would have been like to come across in the cathedral as you walked up the aisle and came across this absolutely astonishing object.
26:43This authentic reproduction of the map opens up new opportunities for the future appreciation of the mapamundi.
26:54It brings the past right into the present, marking the latest chapter in its extraordinary ability to fascinate us and draw us in.
27:03The Hereford map is crucially important because it is the only surviving example of a large, almost monumental medieval mapamundi.
27:29When I look at the medieval past, it makes me think about what is going to be left of our civilization a thousand years from now.
27:43What will be around a thousand years from now? Maybe just pieces of art.
27:48Hereford's mapamundi is many things. An encyclopedia of all the world's knowledge. A memento mori. A remarkable piece of medieval art.
28:03It remains a unique testament to a vanished world and a vivid illustration of the depth, complexity and artistic genius of maps themselves.
28:20To explore the new world of digital mapping and to find out more about the British Library map exhibition, go to bbc.co.uk slash beauty of maps.
28:31And the beauty of maps continues tomorrow at 10.50. Also tomorrow, the coolest names in music come together for later with Jules Holland at 10.00.
28:46Back to tonight though, and there's music coming up next here on BBC HD with a tribute to Nick Drake.
28:52Thanks for joining us, 이거's Ravens Sheet.
28:55There's music coming up with Jo saying meantime many years in the world.
28:57Akkeutemanyuns Rebound
29:02Your finaljet Dylan does Candy and do us to miss another 안 in the end.
29:05He got the support board for the last 200 years in the world to leave here, and the last 100 years in the world gets distorted
29:09And what he said is, Mike, he has a watchful help from now on over the past.
29:14Before question, can anyone even take what they expect?