![]() At the suggestion of the Dutch merchant and map collector Hooftman, and of his friend Radermacher, Ortelius undertook the publication of a comprehensive atlas of the world. The growing demand for maps of distant countries, caused by the rapidly expanding colonization and the development of commerce, had already led to the production of large collections of maps of various size and provenance, for instance, Lafreri’s atlas published ca. In 1565 he published a map of Egypt (two sheets), in 1567 a map of Asia (two sheets), and in 1570 a map of Spain (six sheets). The first product of this new activity was an eight-sheet map of the world published in 1564. In the period 1559-1560 he traveled through Lorraine and Poitou in the company of Mercator, who encouraged him to become a cartographer and to draw his own maps. Ortelius traveled widely in his profession he went regularly to the Frankfurt Fair and visited Italy several times before 1558. Soon he was able to earn his living by buying, coloring, and selling maps produced by map makers in various countries. At the age of twenty he was admitted as an illuminator of maps into the guild of St. He was born to a Catholic family whose origins were in Augsburg. With the exception of his friend Mercator, Ortelius was the principal cartographer of the sixteenth century. Antwerp, 4 July 1598), cartography, geography. The hugest of them all was the Atlas Maior published by Joan and Wilem Blaeu between 16 in Amsterdam, which contained over 500 maps and was the largest and most costly book printed in the 17th century.( b. ![]() The Dutch with their overseas trading empire became the leading producers of maps and atlases during the 17th century and yes, there was something of a competition going among Dutch atlas-makers to see who could print the biggest, most spectacular maps. The portrait of Ortelius was included in editions after 1579 and “was engraved by Filips Galle following a painting by Pieter Paul Rubens now in the Plantin Moretus Museum, Antwerp” (Shirley, Courtiers and Cannibals, 9). ![]() The meaning of each of the figures is explicated in a long Latin poem by Adolf van Meetkerke which Ortelius includes at the beginning of the book. It came to the Lilly Library from the immense travel literature collection donated to the Lilly by Bernardo Mendel.Īccording to Rodney Shirley in ‘The Art of the Decorative Cartographic Titlepage,’ the title page of Ortelius’s atlas was influential in depicting each of the five known regions of the world in female form. The 48cm-tall 1612 edition of the atlas was probably hand-colored to order for Cesare d’Isle, Duke of Ferrara and Modena, whose coat of arms adorns the covers. Frans Hogenberg and Ortelius were the primary engravers of these beautiful maps, though the designs are based on the works of many previous cartographers whom Ortelius widely credits throughout. Watts, “The European Religious Worldview and its Influence on Mapping,” in The History of Cartographyįirst published in 1587 in collaboration with the cartographer Gerardus Mercator (who later became one of his competitors), Abraham Ortelius’s Typus Orbis Terrarum was the first world atlas-a collection of standard maps bound together-and the most successful early atlas, going to forty editions by 1641 (Woodward, The History of Cartography 1322). In Abraham Ortelius’s 1587 Typus Orbis Terrarum “a world map is surrounded by quotations from Cicero and Seneca meditating on the transient insignificance of human affairs when viewed from a cosmic perspective.” -Paula M. ![]()
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