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This striking double map, created by Abraham Ortelius, with one of the two based on Jean Surhon’s earlier work, provides an accurate delineation of the regions of Calais, Boulogne, and Vermandois, depicting the areas of northern France with remarkable detail. The map on the left covers the coastal regions near Calais and Boulogne, showing rivers, towns, forests, and fortifications, while the right map focuses on the inland regions of Vermandois, with the same meticulous attention to settlements and natural features.
The topographical detail is particularly notable, with intricate renderings of rivers and forests, accompanied by detailed settlements ranging from larger towns such as Calais and Boulogne to smaller villages. Ortelius’s decorative style includes ornate cartouches in both sections of the map, one of which acknowledges Jean Surhon’s contribution to the cartography of Vermandois. The map is part of Ortelius’s celebrated Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas, and represents the era's finest cartographic achievements.
This is a late configuration of the map, with the pairing of the Calais map almost always found with the earlier Veromanduorum map (Van Den Broecke 44b), with its cartouche in the lower left corner.
Scarce in this configuration.
States
1609/1612/1641S31 (325 copies printed) (last line, left aligned: dades de la Gallia Belgica.)
The Johann Koler-Georg Mack the Elder 1570A Ortelius Theatrum
The most important Ortelius atlas in private hands.
Abraham Ortelius is perhaps the best known and most frequently collected of all sixteenth-century mapmakers. Ortelius started his career as a map colorist. In 1547 he entered the Antwerp guild of St Luke as afsetter van Karten. His early career was as a business man, and most of his journeys before 1560, were for commercial purposes. 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. 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 1564 he completed his “mappemonde", an eight-sheet map of the world. The only extant copy of this great map is in the library of the University of Basel. 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.
On May 20, 1570, Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum first appeared in an edition of 70 maps. By the time of his death in 1598, a total of 25 editions were published including editions in Latin, Italian, German, French, and Dutch. 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. 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
In 1573, Ortelius published seventeen supplementary maps under the title of Additamentum Theatri Orbis Terrarum. 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 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 1584 he issued his Nomenclator Ptolemaicus, a Parergon (a series of maps illustrating ancient history, sacred and secular). Late in life, he also aided Welser in his edition of the Peutinger Table (1598).
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