Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western

Long before we had the ability to photograph the earth from space - to see our planet as it would be seen by the Greek god Apollo - images of the earth as a globe had captured popular imagination. This is an examination of the historical implications for the West of conceiving and representing the earth as a globe: a unified, spherical body. Cosgrove traces how ideas of globalism and globalization have shifted historically in relation to changing images of the earth, from antiquity to the Space Age. He connects the evolving image of a unified globe to politically powerful conceptions of human unity. Cosgrove constructs a genealogy of global images from classical Greece and Rome to the present, giving special attention to the early 16th century, when Europeans circumnavigated the earth, relocated it within their understanding of the cosmos, and revolutionized its representation in models and maps. Each chapter focuses on specific images of the globe or whole earth, reproduced in illustrations. Cosgrove's analysis traces a pattern of associations between global images and the formation of Western identities, paying tribute to the richly complex cosmographic tradition out of which today's geographical imagination has emerged.

Denis Cosgrove is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His previous books include The Iconography of Landscape, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and Its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth-Century Italy, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, and Mappings.