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Germanus:
British Isles. Ulm, 1482 |
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Slowly at first, new maps were added to printed editions, for example, to Francesco Berlinghieri's 'Geographia' (1482) and the Ulm Ptolemy (of the same year). The fourth edition of the Rome Ptolemy, published in 1508, was the first to include a world map incorporating the new discoveries. A less successful alternative, used by Bernard Sylvanus in 1511, was to try and combine, on each regional map, the Ptolemaic corpus with more modern materials. |
Martin Waldseemuller, in an edition of Ptolemy's 'Geographia', published in 1513, added a second section of 20 modern maps, which was the first major attempt to break away from the Ptolemaic tradition. Among these maps was the first map in an atlas devoted to the New World. For the next thirty years, subsequent atlases repeated this formula of an ancient and modern set of maps bound together, while expanding the coverage. For the Basle edition of 1540, Sebastian Munster added a set of maps of the four continents, while in 1548 Giacomo Gastaldi included a map of South-East Asia, and the first regional maps of the Americas, including a map of the eastern seaboard of North America. |
Waldseemuller |
Munster |
Gastaldi |
Lafreri/IATO |
From about 1544, there was a great upsurge in the number of people publishing maps in Italy, based in the twin centres of Rome and Venice. These publishers, working independently, produced their maps in many different sizes, in anything up to nine sheets or more. Gradually it became the fashion to bind the maps together, into composite atlases (frequently called 'Lafreri atlases' after one of the leading publishers of the period, or less commonly IATO atlases - Italian, Assembled To Order). The ‘Lafreri-Atlas’ at Yale, for example, has a contemporary manuscript title, recording that the volume was assembled for Don Antonio Xuarez in 1569, and the latest date found on any of the maps is 1568. (Note 1) |
Whatever the truth of the story, on May 20th 1570, Ortelius published
his 'Theatrum Orbis Terrarum', containing 53 map-sheets covering the countries
of the World. The 'Theatrum' was "the world's first regularly produced
atlas", in that "it was the first undertaking of its kind to reduce the
best available maps to an uniform format (Note 4),
and was an immediate critical and commercial success.
"Atlas" It should be noted that the term 'Atlas', for a bound collection of maps, was not to come into use for another twenty-five years, until the posthumous publication of Gerard Mercator’s ‘Atlas, Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes De Fabrica Mundi ...’ (Duisburg, 1595). Two different mythical figures named 'Atlas' were invoked by mapmakers. The first was the son of the Titan Iapetus and Clymene (or Asia), brother of Prometheus. Homer refers to him as "one who knows the depths of the whole sea, and keeps the tall pillars who hold heaven and earth asunder". (Note 5) In works of art, this Atlas is represented as carrying the heavens or the terrestrial globe on his shoulders. The Farnese statue of Atlas in the Naples Museum is a famous example. This figure is frequently found in the elaborate engraved frontispieces or title-page of atlas, particularly by Dutch publishers of the second half of the seventeenth century. The first to associate the Titan Atlas with a group of maps, without calling his collection an 'Atlas', was Lafreri, on his previously mentioned title-page, ‘Tavole Moderne Di Geografia De La Maggior Parte Del Mondo Di Diversi Autori ...’ The second Atlas was a mythical King of Mauretania, in Libya. Atlas was a wise philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, who supposedly made the first celestial globe. It was this Atlas that Mercator was thinking of, when he first used the name 'Atlas' (and a depiction of the King appears on the title-page). |
Notes
1. R.V. Tooley, ‘Maps In Italian Atlases’, Imago Mundi, III (1939), p.12. 2. Quoted by Skelton, Bibliographical Note to the Facsimile of Ortelius' 'Theatrum', 1570, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Press, Amsterdam, p.V-VI). 3. Skelton, do., p.VI. 4. Cornelis Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, vol. III, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd, Amsterdam, (1969) p.29. 5. Odyssey, i, 52. |