World--[Blaeu, Joannes, Sr.?]

Shirley, Mapping of the World 459

The condition of this item is as described in the catalogue description
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A map of mystery. Earlier commentators have discerned the erased imprint of Johannes Blaeu in the title cartouche, behind the imprint of Gerard Valk, leading to the supposition that the map was originally engraved in about 1672, perhaps for inclusion in the Spanish text edition of that year, which was left incomplete because of the great fire which devastated the Blaeu printing works. This understandably curtailed Blaeu's atlas publishing, and the plate was acquired by Valk, who reprinted it, apparently geographically unchanged, towards the end of the century.

For the period, the double polar projection is unusual, harking back to the maps by Fine (lot 22) and de Jode (lot 28), but the map is impressively executed, with fine allegorical scenes in the two lower cusps around the hemispheres, at right Adam in the Garden of Eden and, at left, Adam and Eve after being ejected from Paradise, in an altogether less welcoming environment.

The projection highlights North America and Australia; the former displays developing, but relatively unsophisticated knowledge of the Great Lakes, and California as an island, with a flat northern coastline, unusual in world maps of this period. Australia has the developed western coastline, but with the east coast left blank.

As one of the last cartographic productions of the great Blaeu publishing house, this one of the most interesting world maps of its period, and compares with their first atlas world map – on Mercator's projection, and the replacement, the more standard double hemisphere model that appeared in the Atlas Maior (see lot 64).