Essays on the cartographers, navigators and printers — Ramusio, Ortelius, Van Linschoten and their world — and the stories behind the objects we offer.
How Venice, Amsterdam, Madrid, Paris, London, Glogau and New York drew and redrew the Americas
From Ruscelli's first maps of Brazil, Cuba and Hispaniola to the Republic of Texas and the Gadsden Purchase: the maps of the Americas on our shelves, read in the order in which they were made.
The kingdom of France province by province, from Barent Langenes's Caert-Thresoor, Middelburg 1598
The first Dutch pocket atlas gave France a map for nearly every province. Fourteen of those maps, each with its Dutch description on the back, from Normandy and Brittany to Provence and the papal Comtat Venaissin.
How a sixteenth-century reader learned the cosmos, predicted the sky and put astronomy to work
Ten books from our shelves, printed between 1504 and 1680, follow one line of thought: from the medieval schoolbook of the spheres to the tables that predicted the planets, the paper instruments that replaced calculation, and the sundial and the merchant's sum. Read together they show how…
How one Amsterdam engraver shaped what Europe believed the New World looked like, and where the line between report and invention runs
In 1670 Johan de Witt signed away fifteen years of exclusive right to a single Amsterdam shop. What followed was America, Africa, China and Japan in folio, engraved by one house. Some of it was drawn from life. Some of it was a unicorn.
From Ende, painter of the Girona Beatus in 975, to Anna Beek, the widows of the Amsterdam map houses, Mary Ann Rocque, Emma Willard and Marie Tharp: a thousand years of women in cartography, and how to recognise their work
The history of cartography is usually told as a procession of men. Yet behind every printed map stood a workshop, and in those workshops women drew, engraved, coloured, printed, sold and, more often than the title pages admit, ran the business. A thousand years of women mapmakers, from a Spanish…
A short history of mapmaking and its makers, from Ptolemy and the medieval world maps to Ramusio, Ortelius, Ricci and the atlas houses of Amsterdam, told through works in our collection
Maps are among the oldest forms of human communication, and among the most fragile. From the T-O maps of the monasteries and the portolan charts of the Mediterranean to Ramusio and Gastaldi in Venice, Ortelius in Antwerp, Ricci in China and the great atlas houses of Amsterdam: how the picture of…
Five ships and some two hundred and forty men sailed in 1519. Three years later one ship returned, and the map of the world had to be redrawn
A Portuguese captain in Spanish service, a Basque mutineer who finished the job, a Venetian passenger who wrote it all down, and the printed accounts through which Europe learned what they had done.
Two ships, a search for the Northeast Passage, and the first European winter in the high Arctic
In 1596 the city of Amsterdam staked two ships on a dream: a northern sea road to Asia. What followed was discovery, disaster, and one of the great survival stories of the age.
A Venetian civil servant who never crossed an ocean, and gave Europe its first great library of voyages
Before Hakluyt, there was Ramusio. From the heart of Venice he gathered the testimony of Marco Polo, Magellan and Cortés into one monumental work, then a fire and his own death nearly undid it.
How a Dutch clerk in Goa copied Portugal's deepest secret and opened the sea road to the East
For a century Portugal guarded the routes to the Indies like crown jewels. One observant Dutchman copied them down, and the VOC was born.
How an Antwerp map-colourist invented the atlas, and quietly guessed at continental drift
He began as a dealer who coloured maps by hand at the Frankfurt fair. In 1570 he gathered the whole world into a single book and changed how Europe saw the earth.