CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/31/2015

Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia

"The world as we know it did not exist before the sixteenth century. It existed only in parts," Timothy Brooks writes in Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia, the catalogue to MFA Boston's current exhibition. "Not until the sixteenth century did cartographers in Europe begin to gain access to knowledge on the scale needed to model the world as we now see it. The agents of this transformation were navigators, who were able to travel far enough east and west to stretch the world into new shapes. These voyages to the Americas and Asia ushered in the first age of globalization, when the world’s major landmasses and civilizations learned of each other for the first time and became linked in a worldwide web of exchange. It was a shockingly new vision of the world. On medieval maps Europe was more or less alone in the world. It was taking to the oceans that brought the Americas and Asia onto the map." Detail of Abraham Gessner's double cup, globe and armillary sphere, 1580-90, is reproduced from Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia.