Built off of medieval maps and a follow up to my Mappa Mundi, this responds to the Catalan Atlas from 1375: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_Atlas

I wanted to create a sense of modern Pittsburgh as medieval, so I included some modern buildings that looked medieval, some modern buildings adjusted to be made medieval (downtown), some medieval buildings providing direct symbolic reference to modern Pittsburgh, and some just purely medieval objects.

Want to play Where’s Waldo on my six zillion hour painting? Here’s a good list:

1. The Ogua: 2 headed Monongahela River Monster
2. 3 Pittsburgh community farms
3. The Palace of the Grandmaster of the Knights of Rhodes (the hospitallers- a stand in for Allegheny General Hospital)
4. The Pittsburgh Zoo
5. The Wife of Bath
6. John Blanke, Royal Trumpeter
7. A Kraken, Gryphon, and Manticore for my three wonderful children
8. The Army Reserve
9. Mansa Musa, King of Mali
10. The Second Temple of Jerusalem

While it’s fun to figure out what everything is, I also was trying to create something that would have an overall impact. I wanted to realize a blunt version of what I’m going for with this show. I’m interested in the inevitability of certain facets of the human experience, the longevity of history, and modern category slippage. So much medieval stuff- it’s just still here embedded in our lives unnoticed. The epic tones of medieval myth making still reverberate.

I hope this is a good place for people to imagine themselves and get a little lost- a “what if?” mind palace. I loved crate digging for the weird manuscript marginalia that ended up contributing to this painting. I hope it’s just as fun to find all the strange details in this map.

Let me know if you have any thoughts/questions (nsv5001@gmail.com; nathanvp_art (instagram))