I was going to complain that the images in the pdfs are really bad quality, but then again, so they are in many art history books, and given the name it is pretty easy to just google higher resolution images of the map.
People love to talk about how quickly the information society has changed the world, but if you look at the renaissance it's just mindblowing how much happened there in such a short time span as well.
Amazing for U of Chicago to make this available. The pdfs represent over $1,600 of physical books which are still available for purchase. Vol 6 is available as an ebook as well.
These books were deeply influential to me while I was a student. They provide such a clear demonstration of how our image of the world is malleable. It's fantastic that they're now even more accessible.
Looking at this I immediately thought of Jorge Luis Borges.
Slightly relevant. A one paragraph short story of his.
On Exactitude in Science - Jorge Luis Borges
"... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
-purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658"
The chapter about map projections in the renaissance is pretty awesome btw: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/HOC_V3_Pt1/HOC_VOLUM... and for example this 1515 beauty by German artist Albrecht Dürer and the Austrian scientist Johannes Stabius: http://www.buzemann.de/luther/Stabius.jpg
People love to talk about how quickly the information society has changed the world, but if you look at the renaissance it's just mindblowing how much happened there in such a short time span as well.