![]() ![]() The NorthSimilarly, the guesswork and legend that informed the 16th century mapping of the north has been replaced with concrete results of exploration. The oft-imagined southern continent is replaced by Abel Tasman's discoveries of Australia and New Zealand's western coastlines in 16, and a current depiction of the East Indies consistent with Joan Blaeu's access to the secret maps of the East India Company. Visscher's south polar projection is starkly empty, apart from a portion of Patagonia and a full-coastlined Tierra del Fuego. The SouthThis is among the earliest world maps to dispense with the Terra Australis Incognita that dominated the south pole of earlier world maps, and which mariners consistently failed to discover. Visscher's map does include two subordinate polar projections based on those that appear on the wall map, however, which Blaeu did not reproduce on his atlas map. Franco Draco, which do not appear on the 1648 wall map. Thus, it is likely that Visscher's immediate source was Joan Blaeu's double hemisphere atlas map, and not the earlier wall map: this is supported by the presence on the Visscher map of the Californian place names of Nova Albion and Pt. Visscher's title appears to allude to that of Joan Blaeu's atlas map Nova et Accuratissima Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula, which almost certainly predated Visscher's, although Shirley dates the Blaeu at 1662, Van der Krogt places it in the first volume of Blaeu's Toonneel des Aerdrycks, which was printed ahead of the others in the atlas, as early as 1649. Sources and DatingVisscher's cartography represented the state of the art of Dutch mapmaking, as expressed in Joan Blaeu's 1648 double hemisphere wall map, Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula. As such, according to Rodney Shirley, it is the 'master fore-runner' of the highly decorative style of Dutch world map that followed in the second half of the 17th century. ![]() It epitomizes, both aesthetically and geographically, the Dutch World map of the second part of the 17th century. This is Nicolas Visscher's classic 1658 double hemisphere map of the world, in beautiful original color. Minnesota - North Dakota - South Dakota.Massachusetts - Connecticut - Rhode Island.The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472-1700. ![]() The result is a singular image of the entire cosmos: of the heavens and the earth and, in the armillary sphere, the geometry that binds them together in a single creation. In the lower margin, Blaeu included allegories of the seasons, which is to say the temporal dimension of existence and of the Earth's annual orbit around the Sun. Also, the hemispheres are flanked by images (far left) of the Astronomer, holding an armillary sphere, and the Geographer (far right), taking measurements off the globe. At the center is Apollo, the Sun god, closely attended by Mercury (just to the right) and Venus (to the left) then Earth itself (the map!), with the Moon as a cherub clambering up between the two hemispheres to the far left is crowned Jupiter, king of the gods to the far right are the warrior god Mars and Saturn, god of time. In the upper margin, Blaeu depicted allegorical representations of the planets, each shown as a classical god and each orbiting the heavens on a rainbow ring within the etheric clouds. That decoration was, on this map, new and carried significant meaning. The projection ~ showing the world in two hemispheres ~ was also quite conventional it was favored in the seventeenth century not only because it gave a sense of the earth's sphericity but also because it allowed a great deal of room in the margins for decorative elements. ![]() Blaeu derived the geographical content from earlier maps, probably one of the world maps by Nicolaas Visscher (Shirley 2001, no. Joan Blaeu included this wonderfully ornate world map ~ Nova et accuratissima totius terrarum orbis tabula ("New and most accurate map of the whole world") ~ in the first volume of his eleven-volume Atlas Maior, published in Amsterdam in 1662. ![]()
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