One of the most beautiful and important maps of America of the 16th century. America: Americae sive Novi Orbis, Nova Descriptio The legendary names Lucach, Beach (Land of Gold) and Maletur (Kingdom of the Malays) in the great southern continent Terrae Australis go back to Marco Polo. The Southeast Asian islands are already well depicted for the time. Japan is still incorrectly shown as a large round island, Korea is not present. It was named after the Irish monk Saint Brendan, who supposedly undertook a legendary sea voyage in the 6th century and discovered this island. Bo., was also considered a fact among scholars at the time this map was created. The island of Saint Brendan in the northeast of South America, marked as Y. It was said the island has been settled by a Christian community fleeing the Moors in the 8th century, leaving the Iberian peninsula by ship. Legendary is the phantom island Sept Citiz in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, better known as Antilia. Several mythical islands are marked in the Atlantic, mostly based on questionable reports by little-known seafarers: Brasil, Frisland, Verde, S. It was not until Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the world in 1577-80 that he realised that the Strait of Magellan was not a channel between two continents and that south of Cape Horn there was only the open sea. It was believed that all seas were surrounded by land, like the Mediterranean. The hypothetical southern continent was already supposed in ancient times. The southern tip of South America is separated from Tierra del Fuego by the Strait of Magellan, discovered in 1520, which is still part of the huge fictitious southern continent Terra Australis Nondum Cognita. Quivira in the far northwest refers to the fabled gold country of Quivira, which Coronado sought as far west as Kansas in North America in 1541. The discoveries of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado from 1540-42 in the western USA, such as the mouth of the Colorado River, are depicted. The Chesapeake Bay is still undiscovered, the Mississippi River is not yet drawn despite its discovery in 1540, and the Great Lakes are also missing. The Atlantic coast extends too far east, the discoveries of Giovanni de Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier, such as the St Lawrence River are already depicted. The cartography of North America is largely speculative apart from the colonial centres in the Caribbean and central Mexico. South America retains the unusual bulged southwest coast, which is no longer present in the later edition of 1589. ![]() Ortelius also used the 1561 world map of Giacomo Gastaldi and Diego Gutierrez' portolan chart of the Atlantic. Geographically, the map is mainly based on Mercator's large map of the world, which was published a year earlier in 1569 and is only preserved in three copies. From the 1584 Latin edition of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. This is the first edition, printed from the first of 3 plates which Ortelius used for his atlases. ![]() At the bottom a quote by Cicero, in translation, For what human affairs can seem important to a man who keeps all eternity before his eyes and knows the vastness of the universe? Decorated with a galleon and two sea monsters. The beautiful world map in an oval projection is surrounded by clouds, above the title in a scroll-work cartouche. Through its launching, pre-eminence in map publishing was transferred from Italy to the Netherlands leading to over hundred years of Dutch supremancy in all facets of cartographical production. Unlike earlier compositions such as the Italian composite or 'Lafreri' atlases, each of Ortelius' maps was engraved specifically for his atlas according to uniform format. This substantial undertaking assembled fifty-three of the best available maps of the world by the most renowned and up-to-date geographers. Shirley describes the Ortelius-Atlas in The Mapping of the World:įor the first time, in 1570, all the elements of the modern atlas were brought to publication in Abraham Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. "As the first world map occurring in the first regular atlas, this map is of fundamental importance in the history of cartography." (M. Early old colour examples, each map printed from the first plate. Ortelius' World and Continents from the First Modern Atlas.Ī fine set consisting of a world map and four of the continents from the first modern atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by Abraham Ortelius.
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