Maps on the Wall, Knowledge in the World: ArcGIS Georeferencing, Slide Scanning, and Environmental Change Detection Applied to Vermeer's Cartographic Interiors and the Dutch Atlantic Corpus, 1600–1714

ABSTRACT This article applies ArcGIS georeferencing methodology and slide scanning techniques to the maps depicted in nine paintings by Johannes Vermeer as a novel evidentiary approach to measuring the state and limits of Dutch geographic knowledge in the 1660s. By identifying the source cartography for each painted map, recovering cartographic content through slide scanning of photographic reproductions, and georeferencing both the painted maps and their source cartography against contemporary spatial data, this study produces a layered analysis of what a cultivated Dutch household in the Golden Age could spatially know, and where that knowledge ended. The results are read against a broader corpus of Dutch Atlantic cartography spanning 1600 to 1714, including the Blaeu, Hondius, Visscher, and Moll maps central to the Dutch cartographic intelligence system of the Tierra Firme theater, to produce a comparative distortion profile revealing differential accuracy between domestic and colonial cartographic representation. The article argues that the maps on Vermeer’s walls are not decorations but snapshots of domesticated geographic knowledge, and that georeferencing them reveals environmental, geographic, and cultural changes encoded in the gap between what those maps claimed to know and what the landscape actually was. The methodology builds on ArcGIS tools developed at the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis and extends the analytical framework established in prior work on knowledge asymmetry and Dutch colonial cartography.