Dagmar KUSENDOVÁ

Cartographic works of Ján Matej Korabinský

Kusendová, D.: Cartographic works of Ján Matej Korabinský. Kartografické listy, 2013, 21 (2).

Abstract: Ján Matej Korabinský (1740-1811) made a significant contribution to Slovak and European cartography, especially notable – to the production of atlases. Our goal was to bring closer this Slovak personality, especially his cartographic work. In the foreword, an overview of works, which approximate Korabinský's masterwork alongside with his brief biography, is given. This is followed by a more detailed approach of the background and content of his most important cartographic works and geographic sources (lexicons) based on which he developed his maps. His works were distinctively thematically oriented on demographic, ethnographic, or economic and social geographically focused themes. Most information is referred to his most important cartographic work – A Handheld (handy) Atlas of Hungarian Kingdom dated 1804 (Korabinszky, 1804), which represents a unique masterpiece of his cartographic work, as well as his deep geographic knowledge of that day Hungary and Slovakia. In the following analysis of the form and content of the atlas we particularly relate to the works of Martinka (1961) and Pravda (2003). For this purpose, we digitised and analysed in more details the maps of the atlas covering the territory of Slovakia. Namely the construction of maps, used map symbols, carto-graphic expression methods and maps syntax (maps layers, their stratigraphic components and composition) were analysed.

Keywords: Ján Matej Korabinský/Johann Matthias Korabinsky, a handy atlas of Hungarian Kingdom from 1804, cartographic heritage of Slovakia, thematic map