Reconstructed setting· The columns of time

The world made round

1450 → 1800

This backdrop shows the world's coasts joined to one another and text made reproducible: an ocean-going ship under sail and a printing press with its volumes stacked beside it.

Backdrop representing the period in which the world's coasts are connected to one another and text becomes mechanically reproducible: an ocean-going ship under sail and a printing press with its volumes stacked beside it.

What the evidence shows

The first circumnavigation is completed in 1522, after which any shore is reachable from the east as from the west. Movable-type printing spreads in Europe from about 1450. The composition brings the two together because neither element alone accounts for the period: ocean navigation constitutes the world as a single space of circulation, printing as a single space of discussion, and some seventy years separate them.

Bounds and conventions

The composition adopts the viewpoint of the ship, which is only one of two possible viewpoints. The same voyages that connected the coasts carried the epidemics that caused the death of most of the population of the Americas; a backdrop established from the shore would constitute a different representation.