Several of the most compelling and entertaining works richly interweave fantasy and reality (or ditch the latter altogether). One of the great early modern, illustrated history books, the Nuremberg Chronicle, spans the world from God’s creation up to 1493, melding biblical text with scientific theory. It contains more than 300 hand-colored woodcuts, including “The World,” based on the works of two first-century savants: Ptolemy, who compiled the first map of the world (considered the most accurate until the Age of Exploration), and Pliny the Elder, who penned the influential, multi-volume Natural History. Pliny wrote of curious creatures in exotic lands, such as the Sciapodes, who, according to Tuttle, “had just one foot, but it was very large and they could hop with amazing speed. The shy Panotti of Scythia had enormous ears that they could use to fly from curious travelers.”

Then there’s “The Land of Cockaigne” (Niccolò Nelli, 1564), which has few rivals for sheer gastronomic excess: a giant cauldron continually bubbles over with macaroni and ravioli, seas flow with wine and roast fowl fall from the sky into the mouths of waiting diners. In this land of sybarites, anyone caught working is jailed in a prison with sausage-link bars girded by a moat of wine.

Tuttle’s broad definition of travel—which embraces the severely Catholic and the wantonly comedic—at times makes the exhibition feel diffuse. Ultimately, however, it succeeds in demonstrating, with an intelligent and tantalizing selection of works (drawn mostly from the museum’s vast holdings), the myriad ways in which information about distant places percolated into the early modern, Western consciousness.

Nord Wennerstrom is a freelance writer and art critic based in Washington, D.C.