Click to enlargeIndiae Orientalis
Abraham Ortelius's Indiae Orientalis Insularumque Adiacientium Typus, from the 1570 first edition of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum — the first modern atlas. One of the earliest printed maps devoted to the East Indies, it places India at the western edge of a sweep running through Southeast Asia to a speculative southern continent, and fixed the European image of the spice-trade world for a generation.
Authorship and object
Ortelius (1527–1598), an Antwerp dealer in books, coins and antiquities, assembled the Theatrum by reducing the best available maps to a single uniform format — the innovation that makes it the first true atlas. First issued on 20 May 1570; the strapwork title cartouche, frolicking mermaids and sea-monsters were engraved in the workshop of Frans Hogenberg (Van den Broecke 166).
Lineage
The geography derives largely from Mercator's world map of 1569, improving on the Italian school of Gastaldi, Forlani and Ramusio with fresher Portuguese and Spanish reports. With Ortelius's companion map of Asia, it is among the first printed maps to name Formosa (Taiwan).
Content
The sheet runs from "India Orientalis" in the west across China, Japan and the archipelago to the north-west coast of America. The Moluccas, Sumatra and Java are drawn oversized and distorted — their scale a measure of commercial importance rather than survey — and the lower margin carries the enigmatic Beach, pars continentis australis, a guessed-at southern continent. The Indian peninsula appears as the route's western gateway, broad and schematic.
The gaze
This is India seen from the counting-house of the spice trade — not an end in itself but the threshold to the islands that mattered. What is rendered in detail is what is commercially valuable; the rest, interiors and southern ocean alike, is filled with conjecture and ornament.