Duisburg, on the banks of the Rhine, August 1569. Gerardus Mercator, age 57, completes a work that will keep his name in every atlas for five centuries: a world map in eighteen sheets, drawn according to a new projection that lets sailors trace their route in a straight line. The chart measures two meters by one twenty. It is titled Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio. It invents the modern world map.
A year later, in Antwerp, Abraham Ortelius publishes the first bound atlas in history, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Fifty-three copperplate maps, an index, descriptions of territories. The book costs a small fortune (the equivalent of a month's salary for a ship's captain), yet sells in the thousands over the following twenty years. Europe has just invented the encyclopedic format of geographic knowledge. Four centuries later, the heirs of that tradition still wander our interiors, in the form of posters and reproductions.
Mercator, Ortelius and the Antwerp school
Mercator and Ortelius knew each other. They corresponded throughout their lives. Antwerp, in the second half of the sixteenth century, is the European capital of cartography. The city concentrates engravers, publishers, sailors returning from the Americas, Portuguese and Spanish merchants who bring back manuscript charts from their trading posts. The workshops of Christophe Plantin, where Ortelius works, publish maps whose technical quality will remain unmatched for a century.
The work is meticulous. A map for the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum requires six to nine months of copper engraving. The engraver works in reverse, mirrored, with burin and chisel. The thin lines of rivers, the shading of mountains, the cartouche compositions, the lettering, all pass through his hand. The copper plate, once finished, can print up to 3,000 impressions before wearing out. Successive editions often add new place names or correct borders.
The Dutch golden age (1600-1700)
At the start of the seventeenth century, the center of cartography shifts from Antwerp to Amsterdam. The Dutch East India Company (the VOC, founded in 1602) becomes the first commissioner of maritime charts in the world. Willem Blaeu, his son Joan Blaeu, Jan Janssonius publish monumental atlases. Joan Blaeu's Atlas Maior, issued between 1662 and 1672, runs to twelve volumes. Each map is hand-colored in a specialized workshop. Luxury is extreme, the price too.
During that period the visual conventions of Western cartography settle. Oceans are tinted pale blue or left white with hatched currents. Lands receive light colors, yellow and pale pink. Borders are marked in bright colors. The cartouches, those large ornamentations in the corners, host allegories of the continents, indigenous figures, exotic animals. All that visual grammar has become so familiar that we identify it immediately as antique chart.
The shift to decoration
From the nineteenth century, antique maps begin to leave libraries for living rooms. European aristocratic collectors frame plates pulled from broken atlases. At the turn of the twentieth century, publishers offer reproductions of Renaissance charts for the urban middle classes. The map becomes an object of cultural prestige: owning a representation of the world says something about curiosity, openness, education.
"A map is not the territory," Alfred Korzybski wrote in 1933. "But a beautiful map gives the territory a dignity that aerial photography takes away."
Living with a map on the wall
The antique map has a rare property in decoration: it is legible at every distance. At two meters, one sees the overall composition and the sepia palette. At thirty centimeters, one reads place names, follows shipping routes, discovers the names of cities that no longer exist. That double scale of reading means a chart on a wall can stay with you for years without dating. One returns to it. One always finds a new detail.
For the wall, two formats work especially well. The 50 by 70 centimeters for a regional map (an Italian city, a French province, a Mediterranean island): the composition settles in without dominating. The 70 by 100 centimeters for a world map or a large continental chart: a format that supports the scale of the original work. Frame: natural oak to echo the woods of cabinets of curiosities, or matte black to discipline the whole. Gilt, despite the temptation, weighs things down; keep it for an interior that is already very baroque.
Three selection paths
- A Renaissance world map in the spirit of Mercator or Ortelius: sepia palette, fine engraving, ornate cartouches. For an office or a classic living room.
- An eighteenth-century regional map of Italy or France: pastel tones, borders in bright colors, cities in ornate typography. For a kitchen or a dining room.
- An antique celestial chart in the same family (constellations, armillary sphere, plates by Hevelius): very fine above a bed or in a child's bedroom.
At Montmartre Poster, the vintage travel collection brings together reproductions of antique charts, in the line of the great European cartographic tradition, printed on 275 gsm art paper. The idea is simple: make habitable the images that first served to understand the world, and that still, four centuries later, make us want to travel through it.
