Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula...
MAP OF THE WORLD FROM THE PREMIER DUTCH MARITIME ATLAS
Double-page engraved map with original hand-color (24 9/16” x 21 3/8”). First edition, first state.
In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, a copperplate could outlive its maker. Frederick de Wit (c. 1629-1706) was one of the most accomplished engravers, publishers, and mapmakers of the age. He established a highly successful publishing house whose maps were distinguished by their fine engraving, sophisticated geographical content, and exceptionally elaborate decoration. His world map is a sheet of four circular projections: the eastern and western hemispheres at center, with polar views above and below. Continents are outlined in contemporary hand color and densely engraved with rivers, islands, coastlines, and place names. Around them cluster allegorical and mythological figures, ships, exotic animals, coastal scenes, and maritime emblems, which recast a geographical framework as a celebration of Dutch seafaring. At the southern edge, the Pacific and the austral regions retain the uncertainties of seventeenth-century cartography, the hypothetical southern continent only partly surrendered to knowledge.
Such a sheet was made to be consulted and admired in equal measure. Amsterdam's great publishing houses deliberately joined cartographic accuracy to visual spectacle, appealing to navigators and collectors alike.
Its path to Jacobus Robijn ran through the trade rather than through any partnership. Robijn (1649-c. 1710) was an Amsterdam bookseller, map seller, publisher, and map illuminator who entered the city's highly competitive map trade during the final decades of the seventeenth century. His importance lies in large part in his acquisition and reuse of existing copperplates. Following the deaths of several earlier publishers and mapmakers, he obtained plates and cartographic material from their estates and incorporated them into his own publications, extending the commercial life of some of the most important Dutch charts of the period.
In 1681 he gathered this inheritance into L'Atlas de la Mer, ou Monde Aquatique, a richly illustrated sea atlas assembled from the work of several leading Dutch hydrographers and map publishers of the preceding generation. De Wit's world map appears there not as evidence of collaboration but as evidence of circulation. Copperplates passed from shop to shop, to be reissued, updated, and absorbed into new atlases. Robijn's atlas shows that process with unusual clarity, and it links the great chartmakers of the mid-seventeenth century to the later generation of Dutch publishers.
This sheet therefore tells two stories at once. It is a finely engraved, contemporary-colored example of Dutch cartography at the height of its artistic and commercial development, and it is a record of the publishing practices that kept the work of earlier mapmakers in circulation long after their deaths.
Item #65ERM0014
Price: $24,000