The struggle against water and the changing coast lines of the Low Countries has strongly defined the art and character of its inhabitants. The silting of the Zwin estuary near Bruges at the end of the fifteenth century would ultimately lead to the city’s demise as a commercial and artistic hub, while in the north decisive efforts were being made to make changing shore lines and polders inhabitable and sea routes more accessible. As a result of this unceasing struggle against the North Sea, many of the cartographical commissions during the late 15th and 16th century were related to large-scale and ambitious hydraulic campaigns. While projects were traditionally dealt with by local building masters or land-surveyors, the visualisation of the area in the form of ground plans and maps, was often relayed to a local painter. Although the well-documented cartographic involvement of painters such as Lanceloot Blondeel (1496-1561), Pieter Pourbus (1523-1584), Jan Van Scorel (1495-1562) and Cornelis Anthonisz. (1505-1553) received some partial academic interest, this paper will make a contextual and comparative analyses of the phenomenon of the painter-cartographer in the Low Countries between 1480 and 1550. Contrary to a previous generation of painters, these artists’ involvement in cartographic mapping projects exceeded a mere chorographic visual input. As their familiarity with geometrical principles and trigonometry increased, so did their involvement shift from a purely aesthetic role towards an active input on the technical and scientific design process. The focus of this interdisciplinary research will be threefold: on the trajectories which allowed geometrical knowledge to disseminate through established social networks, on collaborations between workshop practices and finally on the early development of trigonometry in the intellectual environment around Gemma Frisius (1508-1555) and the university of Leuven. Erudite networks in which artists, scientists, humanists and land-surveyors were key-players, set the stage for professional mapmaking embodied by figures such Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) and Gerard Mercator (1512-1594).Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art (NKJ), vol. 73.