Topography has never truly been confined to the realm of cartography, or even science more generally. Landscape artworks have a way of showing us their truest elements – the most rarified parts becoming clearer than the rest. But landscapes are rarely about physical features.
This is one of the great schisms between Italian Renaissance painting and Northern European painting. N. European painting was very much about the physical features, colors and light, much to the consternation of the Italian painters. Whereas the Italians were always using their landscapes as a back drop for religious or historical story, the N. Europeans were smitten by the features of the land and even if a religious painting, the land scape features would dominate. Some historians claim that this different way of thinking about our surroundings, by taking God out of nature, led to the Protestant reformation.
When 13th Century painter Pietro Lorenzetti created The Road To Calvary, he included scant evidence of what we would consider physical land in the background, because the landscape was a relationship between Christ and the ever looming Jerusalem behind him. Those were the rarified elements.
A feature of topographical maps is a top-down, birds-eye view, but when it comes to stories, iconographies, or symbols, the top-down perspective isn’t as important. Pietro Lorenzetti’s inferred relationship between a towering Jerusalem and a humble assemblage of worshippers walking away from its gates is far more helpful in showing us the important markers of that particular scene than a birds-eye view. There is a bit of land off to the side and below their feet, but the defining dimensions of this piece are the people leaving Jerusalem (varied in purpose though they may be), and the towering authority of Jerusalem itself.
A cognitive map is typically thought of as a mental representation of the spatial world, but it can operate as a map of ideas as well. The distance between two concepts is a sort of spatial recognition in and of itself. A topology of meaning arises directly from this. In this way, cognitive maps come to bare on all sorts of peculiarities in our daily lives (such as the experience of déjà vu or psychologist Jung’s principle of synchronicity – both of which seem to suggest acausal linkage between meaningful events and the observer, unconnected in physical space).
The point is, meaning has a spatial component, and its topology can be represented through something approaching topography. All one has to do is map out their internal territory to see this is true. It's not scientific in the sense that results will be repeatable for every individual, but it is a sort of science based on dimensional relationships between meaningful archetypes on an individual basis.
