The standard in cartography, set by Claudius Ptolemy in the second century CE, placing the North on a map in a superior, "up" position, extends during the Renaissance into placing Europe or the Holy Land at the centre of maps. Flattening a three-dimensional globe onto two dimensions of a map, Renaissance cartographic modeling had also conferred disproportionately larger allocation in a map to land mass close to circumpolar regions of the Northern Hemisphere, while the unknown Australia and Antarctica were nowhere to enjoy the same kind of acquiescing distortion.