![]() ![]() Ortelius also wrote a critique of ancient geography in 1578, Synonymia geographica, which is considered to be the first work to refer to continental drift. He then travelled through Europe, and eventually produced a book of city views to accompany his great work. The Theatrum was incredibly popular, and Ortelius was made royal geographer to Phillip II. His contemporary Gerard Mercator, the best cartographer of his day, publicly praised the atlas and helped to revise the world map. His friendship album, kept between 15, has dedications from all over Europe and every kind of profession. He was aided by his vast network of contacts throughout Europe, built through his successful career and his ability to speak five languages. This in itself was not groundbreaking, but he then compiled a comprehensive list of his sources and included it at the beginning of each edition, an unprecedented acknowledgement which established his scholarship and made other cartographers keen to contribute. Ortelius sourced what he considered to be the best available map of each area, and had them expertly reproduced. The Theatrum was a work of great scholarship. It also contained the first accurate European map of Japan. It was also the first to make the maps uniform in style and scale and, unusually, the individual maps were not issued for sale beforehand, as Ortelius thought of them as a coherent whole. Although collections of maps had been bound together in the past, this was made according to principles laid down by its editor rather than a customer. ![]() He then began his magnum opus, Theatrum orbis terrarum, the first atlas in the modern sense of the world. He moved into the publishing side of the business in 1561, after he assembled a collection of maps of Europe for his patron Gillis Hooftman, and three years later he produced his own eight sheet world map, Typus orbis terrarum. He dealt in maps and books to supplement his income, and met Gerard Mercator at the Frankfurt book fair in 1554. He lived with his sister Anna, who was also a map colourist one of his clients specifically requested an atlas coloured by her. He began his career as a map colourist, enrolling in the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp in 1547, and appearing in the books of the Plantin publishing house in 1558 as a “peintre des cartes”. Valuable journal of record as well as scholarship.Abraham Ortelius was a cartographer and publisher, and the first person to publish an atlas as we now know it. Has contained a full complement of scholarly aids in the form of book reviews,īibliography, and chronicles, all of which have made Imago Mundi a Illustrated (recent volumes have included color plates). All articles represent original research, are refereed, and are well A multi-disciplinary approach was adopted Mundi publishes exclusively in English with foreign language abstracts ![]() ThereafterĮnglish was used with, very occasionally, French. From 1975 to 2003 publication was regular. It was founded in Berlin in 1935 by the Russian émigré Leoīagrow as an annual publication, although only five volumes appeared betweenġ9. Imago Mundi is the only English-language scholarly periodical devotedĮxclusively to the history of pre-modern maps, mapping, and map-related ideasįrom anywhere in the world. It is concluded that Ortelius was not a geographer in the same way Ptolemy was, and that Ortelius was using geography as a philosopher and his world map as an illustration of his moral and religious thinking. ![]() The map is contradictory, however for Ortelius's accurate and up-to-date presentation of the physical world is qualified by a verbal statement that the world is 'nothing', a mere pinpoint in the immensity of the universe. As in emblems, the words on Ortelius's map are not there to explain or to comment on what is seen but to give the image meaning the purpose of the map is to invite contemplation of God's world. Attention is drawn to the content of the texts on the map, to Ortelius's notion of geography as the eye of history, and to the importance in the Renaissance of the emblem as a conceit, or device, in the system of acquisition and transmission of knowledge. In this paper, the map of the world, which (as in Ptolemy's Geography) opens Ortelius's Theatrum, is analysed to show how Ortelius's concept of space was very different from Ptolemy's. Although the close association of word and image in medieval cartography is widely acknowledged, the significance of the relationship after the rediscovery of Ptolemy's Geography and throughout the Renaissance has been overlooked, despite Abraham Ortelius's choice of the term 'Reader' for users of the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |