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For historians of cartography, maps are everywhere. Libraries preserve them. Museums exhibit them. Scholars catalogue, compare and analyse them. Atlases and printed sheets have been studied with extraordinary precision. The history of cartography has naturally focused on visible products: maps themselves.

Yet during my own research a surprisingly simple question gradually emerged:

Where are the tools that made those maps possible?

Not printed sheets, impressions or reproductions, but the engraved printing matrices from which maps were physically produced.

This question did not begin in an archive or library. It began much earlier – and in a rather unexpected place: São Paulo.In 1990, while professionally based in Brazil, I encountered an engraved cartographic object whose nature and historical implications would only become clear much later. At the time it was not acquired as a research object, It was simply an intriguing historical artefact whose significance remained only partially understood. For more than three decades the object remained carefully preserved, quietly present – but academically silent.

Only much later did another question emerge. What initially appeared as an isolated object gradually became less important as an object itself than as a starting point for a broader historical question: if one seventeenth-century cartographic matrix survived, where were the others?

Before proceeding further, one terminological point perhaps deserves clarification. Historically such objects are often described simply as copperplates. Throughout this text, however, I increasingly prefer the term printing matrices.

The distinction is not merely linguistic :

«  Copperplate » describes material

«  Matrix » describes function.

But perhaps it suggests something more as well. A matrix is not simply a surface of copper. It is a generative object : a place where ideas, gestures and geographical intentions become physically inscribed into a malleable material before being transmitted outward into the world. These engraved objects were not simply pieces of worked copper. They were operational instruments through which geographical knowledge was physically produced, transmitted and multiplied.

The distinction also reflects a broader historical question. The engraved cartographic matrix did not emerge by chance. It emerged because the early modern world increasingly required reliable and reproducible geographical knowledge. Its primary function was therefore operational before becoming patrimonial.

Initially this appeared a relatively straightforward documentary enquiry. Surely major collections would preserve examples. After all, matrices constituted the operational foundation of early modern cartographic production. Workshops such as those of Hondius, Blaeu and Janssonius depended upon them. Without matrices there were no impressions, atlases or large-scale geographical dissemination.

Matrices were not peripheral objects. They formed part of the infrastructure of geographical knowledge itself.

The first phase of research therefore consisted simply of asking institutions whether such objects survived. Do such matrices survive? If so: Where? How many? and Under what conditions?

One institution led to another. Questions generated suggestions. Suggestions generated networks. Gradually the enquiry evolved into an an international census involving more than seven hundred enquiries addressed to libraries, archives, museums, universities and specialised institutions worldwide.

At first the expectation seemed straightforward: a dispersed corpus of surviving matrices would progressively emerge. Instead something unexpected happened, as responses repeatedly pointed in another direction. There were ‘no known examples’, ‘no identified holdings’, ‘no institutional memory’, or ‘o catalogued corpus.’ Sometimes institutions redirected enquiries elsewhere. Sometimes curators consulted colleagues. Sometimes several departments participated. Yet remarkably often the result remained similar. And so, the absence itself gradually became an object of investigation. Rather than resulting from a single historical cause, this absence appears to derive from several distinct processes whose identification may eventually lead to a genuine “taxonomy of absence”

As replies accumulated, it gradually became difficult to ignore an emerging pattern : sixteenth and seventeenth-century cartographic matrices had largely disappeared from institutional visibility within documented public collections.

Matrices do survive and a small number of institutional cases identified during the census provide important points of comparison. The Plantin-Moretus collections in Antwerp preserve a remarkable corpus of engraved material associated with one of Europe’s major printing environments. Likewise, the British Library preserves the well-documented Hollar matrix associated with Kingston-upon-Hull. Other London collections preserve later scientific and technical matrices.

These examples matter not because they contradict the broader pattern, but because they help define its limits. They suggest survival was possible – but highly selective and dependent upon specific historical conditions.

Additional discoveries complicated the picture further. Documentation generously shared by Kalmar läns museum in Sweden revealed engraved objects associated with navigational, astronomical and technical environments rather than conventional printed maps. Likewise, unusual celestial matrices identified in maritime collections introduced additional questions concerning orientation and printing logic.

This led me to conclude that perhaps cartographic matrices should not be studied entirely in isolation and that perhaps they belong to a wider family of scientific, nautical and technical engraved objects. The census therefore evolved into a broader reflection on the material taxonomy of engraved artefacts.

Another question progressively emerged: perhaps historians have looked at these objects differently.

For generations scholars naturally focused on maps themselves. Printed sheets became visible objects: collected, catalogued, exhibited and studied. Matrices occupied a different position. They remained primarily tools: expensive working objects intended to produce something else and not necessarily to survive.

And yet the matrix preserves dimensions of cartographic creation that the printed impression can never entirely retain, namely gesture. The engraved surface still contains traces of the burin, corrections, hesitations, adjustments and decisions physically inscribed into metal. In a sense it may also preserve something of the gesture that produced them, the rythm of the engraver’s hand, and perhaps even a faint trace of the creative impuse that once animated it. So, where the printed map presents a finished image, the matrix preserves traces of its making. In other words, the printed map preserves representation whereas the matrices preserve creation. Or perhaps more simply: the printed map preserves the image of the world and the matrix preserves the making of that image.

Historical events also contributed to this disappearance. Among the most famous examples stands the catastrophic fire that distroyed the Blaeu printing house in Amsterdam in 1672. In all, we may wonder if their disappearance may not have been exceptional, but was perhaps structural.

An unexpected aspect of this work has been the remarkable generosity encountered along the way. What began as isolated enquiries gradually became something closer to a collaborative effort. Curators consulted colleagues, librarians redirected questions, researchers opened networks and institutions occasionally moved beyond merely answering questions to actively extending the census itself.

Parallel discussions with several scholars, curators and institutions progressively broadened both the geographical and historiographical dimensions of the project, and what initially appeared to be an isolated question gradually benefited from encouragement, suggestions and exchanges coming from different disciplinary and institutional environments.

The project has progressively become less an individual enquiry than an international scholarly dialogue, enriched by contributions from many different disciplines and institutions.

The project now continues under a broader framework entitled The Cartography of Absence. It is conceived as a long-term independent programme, and combines international census work, material history and historiographical investigation. To the central question ‘where are the matrices’, we ask ourselves ‘How do technical objects disappear? How do tools become historically invisible? and How should historians study objects whose absence itself becomes meaningful?’

This is an invitation to libraries, curators, specialists and researchers in the CERL community who may have encountered engraved matrices, archival references, fragments, uncatalogued material or institutional traces to contribute to this research.

The search for engraved cartographic matrices is therefore not only a search for missing objects. It is also an invitation to rethink the material foundations of early modern cartography.

Acknowledgment : The author wishes to express his sincere gratitude to the many librarians, curators, researchers and institutions whose generosity, suggestions and encouragement progressively helped shape this research. Their openness and willingness to engage with an independent researcher on an unusual question often extended far beyond simple institutional responses.
Several scholarly exchanges and institutional dialogues played an important rôle in broadening geographical and historiographical dimensions of this work .

Michel CHEVALIER
Independent Researcher « The Cartography of Absence »

Member, Société de Géographie ( Paris)
Royal Geographical Society (application in progress)

Cannes – Lisbon, michel.r.chevalier@hotmail.fr

E-mail included intentionally to facilitate exchanges with interested readers and institutions.

News update (22 June 2026): The project will be presented at the XII Ibercarto Conference in Lisbon, where this communication will constitute the first public presentation of the overall research architecture developed through this international programme.