![]() ![]() His first effort was an eight-sheet world map produced in 1564. It was during this trip that Mercator is supposed to have persuaded his friend to not just engrave and colour other people’s maps but to become a cartographer in his own right.įollowing the example of his mentor, Ortelius started out producing single maps sold as prints. In 1559-1560 he accompanied Mercator on his cartographical expedition through Trier, Lorraine and Poitiers. ![]() He met and became friends with Gerard Mercator at the Frankfurt book Fair in 1554. Through his various activities as a trader Ortelius came to travel extensively throughout Europe, visiting all the regions of Germany, Italy, France, England and Ireland. He set a shop trading in books, prints and maps with his sister and became an engraver for the highly influential Plantin publishing house. Ortelius studied mathematics, Latin and Greek as a youth and apprenticed as an engraver of maps and entered the Antwerp guild of map illuminators in 1547. The son of a merchant who died whilst he was still young, in about 1535. Late in life, he also aided Welser in his edition of the Peutinger Table (1598).He was born Abraham Ortel (as we most Renaissance scholars there are numerous variant spellings of the family name) in Antwerp on 14 April 1527, to where his grandfather William had moved the family from Augsburg in Southern Germany in 1460, supposedly because of religious persecution. ![]() In 1584 he issued his Nomenclator Ptolemaicus, a Parergon (a series of maps illustrating ancient history, sacred and secular). ![]() In 1578 he laid the basis of a critical treatment of ancient geography with his Synonymia geographica (issued by the Plantin press at Antwerp and republished as Thesaurus geographicus in 1596). In 1575 he was appointed geographer to the king of Spain, Philip II, on the recommendation of Arias Montanus, who vouched for his orthodoxy (his family, as early as 1535, had fallen under suspicion of Protestantism). In 1573, Ortelius published seventeen supplementary maps under the title of Additamentum Theatri Orbis Terrarum. Most of the maps in Ortelius' Theatrum were drawn from the works of a number of other mapmakers from around the world a list of 87 authors is given by Ortelius himself Later editions would also be issued in Spanish and English by Ortelius’ successors, Vrients and Plantin, the former adding a number of maps to the atlas, the final edition of which was issued in 1612. By the time of his death in 1598, a total of 25 editions were published including editions in Latin, Italian, German, French, and Dutch. On May 20, 1570, Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum first appeared in an edition of 70 maps. Ortelius also published a map of Egypt in 1565, a plan of Brittenburg Castle on the coast of the Netherlands, and a map of Asia, prior to 1570. The only extant copy of this great map is in the library of the University of Basel. In 1564 he completed his “ mappemonde", an eight-sheet map of the world. From that point forward, he devoted himself to the compilation of his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), which would become the first modern atlas. In 1560, while traveling with Gerard Mercator to Trier, Lorraine, and Poitiers, he seems to have been attracted, largely by Mercator’s influence, towards a career as a scientific geographer. His early career was as a business man, and most of his journeys before 1560, were for commercial purposes. In 1547 he entered the Antwerp guild of St Luke as afsetter van Karten. Ortelius started his career as a map colorist. African Islands, including Madagascar (65)Ībraham Ortelius is perhaps the best known and most frequently collected of all sixteenth-century mapmakers. ![]()
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