Night Maps

Celestial Map by Yunyou Sanren 雲遊散人 (Shang Huang 黃裳), 1822 (Wall map, woodcut, coloured, first edition). Credit: ©The Sunderland Collection.

Curated by Warburg Professor, John Tresch, Night Maps features a number of works from The Sunderland Collection, a cultural heritage collection containing world maps from the 13th–19th centuries. Tracing the entangled histories of cosmic imagination and earthly power, from medieval courts and cathedrals to moon landings and the 21st-century space race, the exhibition reveals how depictions of the heavens have been made to serve rival systems on earth – and how these mythical flights continue to shape the worlds we share.