The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1528-98) was published in Antwerp on 20 May 1570 by the printer Gilles Coppens de Diest. The first authentic atlas in the history of publishing, it was also a product of great elegance and quality withillustrations engraved by Franz Hogenberg and coloured in most ofthe copies.¹ The word atlas was first used, however, for the work of Mercator that appeared in 1595 with the famous frontispiece of the giant Atlas with the world on his shoulders.

In this period, with the novelty of the discovery of the Americas now assimilated but no slackening of the thirst for knowledge and the desire to explore the world for commercial ends, cartography established the horizons of Europe, both old and new. It was the era of “cartographic natives”.² The rulers of Italy and Europe as a whole, many of whom owed the consolidation of their position to the imperial policy of Charles V, were immediately responsive to these new developments. On the one hand, the Italian publishing market supplied them with extraordinary works such as Giovan Battista Ramusio’s Delle navigazioni et viaggi (Venice, 1550),³ a collection of mostly contemporary accounts of voyages and journeys by authors of different origins and culture. On the other, cartography was becoming established as a discipline and cartographers were in great demand to draw maps or adorn the galleries of the most important palaces with images of the world. Works like the astonishing Map of the World Room in the Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, created by Giovanni Antonio da Varese for the papal family in the 1570s, and the Gallery of Maps (1580-85) producedby Egnazio Danti for Pope Gregory XIII suffice to show that the function performed by representation of the continents and the world was anything but merely decorative, especially in the stately halls of the papal palaces, where the vastness of the terrestrial globe corresponded to the global horizons of Christianity.

By virtue of its adaptability to different formats, the atlas soon became a standard work in the libraries of centres of power and knowledge. Over forty editions were printed in Latin, Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Italian, gradually expanded with new maps (from the original 70 to 167 in 1612) and bibliographic references.⁴

Purchased by Francesco Federico Cerruti in 2004 at the Librairie Sourget in Paris, the copy dated 1601, owned by Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1606, is one of the first posthumous editions of the work and also one of the most complete. As is known, the elder son of Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Christina of Lorraine received a thorough scientific education under the supervision of his mother and the guidance of Galileo, who was his tutor from 1605 to 1608 and dedicated his Operazioni del compasso geometrico e militare (Padua, 1606) to him. The binding of the same period attests to the importance of the gift to the future sovereign. Tuscany was still one of the maritime powers in the Mediterranean and politics had to be combined with knowledge, as also demonstrated by the presence of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, in the posthumous third edition of 1609, on the shelves in the Great Gallery of Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy.⁵

Blythe Alice Raviola

¹ Van der Broecke et al. 1998; P. Pressenda, Abraham Orteli Antwerp Geographi Regii […], in Turin 2011-12, pp. 297-298, cat. 284.

² Farinelli 2003; Farinelli 2007.

³ Ramusio 1978-88.

⁴ Almagià 1935.

⁵ G. Olivero, “Matematica, cosmografia, astrologia: un insieme ordinato e coerente?”, in Varallo, Vivarelli 2019, pp. 261-273.