As first impressions go, seeing Rome’s Colosseum, resonant with the past presence of tens of thousands of ancient visitors, gladiators and wild beasts, is truly breathtaking. It retains an unimpeachable majesty that defies its ruinous state. The reality surpasses every reproduction you’ve ever seen. Getting there, however, can be a trial, particularly if you’re using Erhard Etzlaub’s “Road Map of Central Europe,” and its suggested path from Nuremberg to Rome. It’s not what you’d get from AAA; in fact, travelers be warned, it’s one of the most unintelligible road maps I’ve ever seen. However, for religious pilgrims planning to celebrate the Jubilee of 1500 in Rome, this first-ever printed road map of Europe (c. 1492) was probably the best available option. As a work of art, the map’s congested muddle of city and town names rendered in Gothic script isn’t terribly compelling. However, as one of 61 works in the National Gallery of Art’s “Fabulous Journeys and Faraway Places: Travels on Paper, 1450–1700,” it contributes to an intriguing, multi-faceted look at travel centuries ago to places both actual and apocryphal, in an exhibition that underscores how the power of image reinforced the primacy of Christianity and the moral imperative of the Old World.

Long before Fodor’s, glossy travel magazines and the Internet, information about distant places could be found only in a few ancient travelogues. Not until the 15th century when European artists developed the ability to mass-produce works of art on paper—engravings, etchings, prints and woodcuts—did images of distant lands and people circulate widely. Works on paper during this period, according to exhibition curator Virginia Grace Tuttle, were generally produced on spec—unlike paintings, which were usually commissioned. They were published by the artists who created them or by independent publishers and were sold at regional fairs, in shops and by itinerant merchants to tradesmen, the moneyed classes, humanists and intellectuals. Popular taste dictated subject matter, favoring religious themes, moralizing tales, foreign cultures and, thanks to the Renaissance, just about anything with a classical theme.

Images of Rome, an important pilgrimage site, were especially popular. “The Baths of Diocletian” and “The Septizonium and the Colosseum” were rendered in exquisite detail by Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp, who along with Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi in Rome (represented by a “Map of Ancient Rome” after Étienne Dupérac), dominated the business of publishing travel images in the 16th century. An exquisite engraving (c. 1508) by Lucas van Leyden eloquently depicts two weary religious pilgrims resting on their journey. Each wears a few souvenir badges representing the shrines and destinations visited.

Europeans were also fascinated by the Turks, though fearful of the spread of Islam. This dichotomy is captured by one of the exhibition’s gems, Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s rare and remarkable 16-foot-long narrative of a trip to Constantinople, The Ways and Fashions of the Turks (published in 1553). Although it was extremely popular in its day (Rembrandt owned a copy), today fewer than a dozen survive. It does not represent an actual itinerary, but combines eyewitness accounts of contemporary events, accurate depictions of costumes and styles of eating and greeting, as well as inaccurate and pejorative portrayals of the religion of Islam.

Similarly, depictions of the New World frequently dovetailed anthropological discoveries with images that reinforced the moral superiority of the Old World. For example, Theodor Galle’s 1580–90 engraving (after Jan van der Straet) “The Discovery of America, from ‘New Discoveries’” features Amerigo  Vespucci meeting a nude female figure personifying America. She rests in a hammock while cannibals roast a victim in the background. Not all was so risqué and violent, however. “Dance of the Virginians,” in A Marvelous but True Report on the Natives of Virginia (1590), has a courtly air, based as it is on Thomas Hariot’s somewhat condescending 1585 account of a feast he observed where the Indians “dance, sing, and use the strangest gestures they can possibly devise.”

More demonstratively moralizing were biblical images accented with foreign exotica, such as Martin Schongauer’s “The Flight into Egypt” (1470–75), with the Holy Family surrounded by richly articulated and strange foliage. Classical paganism, too, was co-opted for tales of a righteous path, as in Jacob Matham’s 1592 lushly wrought version of “The Table of Cebes,” derived from a frequently reprinted story about a journey to the “Domicilium Salutis”—the Home of Virtue. An aged male figure, Genius, directs a serpentine line of children through the gates of life, where they meet female personifications of desires, pleasures and opinions who steer them away from virtue. The children progressively age, and many fall victim to temptation, with only a few reaching their final reward.