Such was the influence of the Ortelius atlas that it came to provide both content and methodology for the work of the great Flemish engravers and printers of the 17th century. So it was that in 1630 the cartographers and printers Willem and Joan Blaeu, father and son, began to compile what is known as the Atlas Maior, the copy of which in the Cerruti Collection bears witness to a taste both for fine bindings and for magnificence.

The specimen in question, produced in the family workshop in Amsterdam in two successive stages, bears the original Dutch title, whereas the Blaeu atlas is known as the Atlas Maior despite the Ortelian title Theatrum Orbis Terrarum sive Atlas Novus in quo tabulae et descriptiones omnium regionum that appears in the frontispiece.¹ The complete work consists of eleven volumes and 600 maps showing the world in ever greater geographic and political detail, as foreshadowed by the highly symbolic frontispiece of 1645, which shows personifications of the four continents together with four learned figures, including a woman, intent on examining two maps of the world. This unprecedented publishing venture, which involved the collation of different maps and atlases as well as cartographic campaigns undertaken by the authors themselves, was very costly but highly successful and won them fame throughout Europe as well as indisputable primacy in the sphere of 17th-century geographical publications.²

[Blythe Alice Raviola]

¹ See Van der Krogt 2005, a reproduction of the 1665 edition with an introduction.

² Quaini 2006.