schiaparelli and mars maps

annalee newitz recently contributed an awesome post to io9 comparing 19th century maps of Mars to current science, which she got from an even awesomer (if possible) post on BibliOdyssey. Annalee compares the historical maps to more recent satellite photos from the 1990's. Peacay of BibliOdyssey show a buncha Schiaparelli maps, and a Percival Lowell map, and talks about the (to me, now) well-known history of the canals and the Martians.

What impresses me about this Schiaparelli map (Schiaparelli was the eye-talian who called the structures above depicted "canali," which simply means "channels" in Italian but was misunderstood as "canals" in English, thereby setting off the intelligent-life-on-Mars craze) is how wacko-Max-Ernst-modernist-sci-fi-y they look. Is this the source of a particular aesthetic? Or as Peacay put it:

Schiaparelli's (in)famous 'canali' turned out to be a kind of optical illusion caused by interactions between light, dust clouds that form in the martian atmosphere, the orbital location and background interference from the planet's surface itself. If a sketch is made of something that wasn't really there but you believed it to be there at the time, can you call the result abstract art I wonder? I guess so.