When printing came around, pictorial maps evolved into some of the earliest forms of advertising as cities competed amongst themselves to attract larger shares of the known world’s commerce. As emerging trade centers such as Venice began to prosper, local rulers commissioned artists to develop pictorial overviews of their towns to help them organize trade fairs and direct the increasing flow of visiting merchants. The more precise art of illustrating detailed bird’s-eye-view urban landscapes flourished during the European Renaissance. A classic example of this is the T and O map, which represented the three known continents in the form of a cross, with Jerusalem at its center. In Medieval cartography, pictorial icons as well as religious and historical ideas usually overshadowed accurate geographic proportions. The history of pictorial maps overlaps much with the history of cartography in general, and ancient artifacts suggest that pictorial mapping has been around since recorded history began.
Some require thousands of hours to produce. With an emphasis on objects and style, these maps cover an artistic spectrum from childlike caricature to spectacular landscape graphic, with the better ones being attractive, informative and highly accurate. While regular maps focus on the accurate rendition of distances, pictorial maps enhance landmarks and often incorporate a complex interplay of different scales into one image in order to give the viewer a more familiar sense of recognition. They are not generally drawn to scale in order to show street patterns, individual buildings, and major landscape features in perspective. Pictorial maps usually show an area as if viewed from above at an oblique angle. Drawn by specialized artists and illustrators, pictorial maps are a rich, centuries-old tradition and a diverse art form that ranges from cartoon maps on restaurant placemats to treasured art prints in museums. They can feature all sorts of varied topics like historical events, legendary figures or local agricultural products and cover anything from an entire continent to a college campus.
The cartography can be a sophisticated 3-D perspective landscape or a simple map graphic enlivened with illustrations of buildings, people and animals. It is a type of map in contrast to road map, atlas, or topographic map. Pictorial maps (also known as illustrated maps, panoramic maps, perspective maps, bird’s-eye view maps, and geopictorial maps) depict a given territory with a more artistic rather than technical style. Pictorial map of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania from 1897 by Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler & James B.
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