BIGGER PICTURE at Brusk

The first exhibition at the newly opened Brusk¹ museum in Brugge is Bigger Picture.

During the middle ages Bruges became a major city and trading hub with other hubs such as London, Venice, and Baghdad.

Due to trade, travel, and faith, Bruges was exposed to other regions and cultures and ideas. By being open to these, Bruges prospered. It was a preview of globalization. Is the underlying message that you need to get out of your bubble?

The expo posits that your perspective depends on where you are, and by looking at various maps of the time, how different people can see the same thing but have different perspectives from each other.

The citizens of Bruges may have felt like they were at the centre of the world at that time, which was a normal euro-centric perspective. Christian maps of the time, like Mappa Mundi, had deep semiotics², Jerusalem was at the centre, and biblical monsters filling the spaces.

Muhammad al-Idrisi was a cartographer commissioned by King Roger II of Sicily to produce a map of the world. In 1154 he produced the Tabula Rogeriana³, which provided a different perspective from that which had gone before. Firstly, it was drawn South at the top and North at the bottom. This was because al-Idrisi was an Islamic cartographer and their position was that as the majority of Islamic civilizations lived north of the equator and looked south to the Arabian Peninsula, the relationship is Soth/North for top-to-bottom. Secondly, it was based on fact, not myths and superstition (q.v. Mappa Mundi): it took 15 years of interviewing merchants, pilgrims, and captains to collate the necessary information about major trade centers (North Sea, Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean); that the Earth was a sphere, and al-Idrisi and King Roger even calculated its circumference to a close approximation.

The Tabula Rogeriana was so accurate that it remained the most accurate map for about 300 years. Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama used it when they attempted their global navigation.

Exhibition Catalog

@book{frankopan_connected_2026,
	address = {Antwerpen},
	title = {Connected worlds of {Bruges}},
	isbn = {978-94-93416-60-4},
	language = {eng},
	publisher = {Brusk},
	editor = {Frankopan, Peter and Dumolyn, Jan},
	year = {2026},
}