Click to enlargeIndia Orientalis
The India Orientalis plate from the Mercator–Hondius Atlas of 1623 — the fifth Latin edition, and the first to carry Henricus Hondius's name on the title page. It represents the standard Dutch depiction of the East Indies at the height of the Mercator atlas tradition, as Amsterdam overtook Antwerp as Europe's map capital.
Authorship and object
The map belongs to the lineage begun by Gerard Mercator (1512–1594), whose atlas plates passed after his death to Jodocus Hondius and then to Hondius's son Henricus, who issued this 1623 edition (Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes). The collection's example is noted for unusually fine contemporary colour (Van der Krogt 1:105).
Lineage and content
The sheet continues the Mercator–Hondius house style — clean engraving, decorative cartouches, the East Indies running from the Indian coast through the archipelago. It descends from the late-sixteenth-century Flemish models rather than from new survey, consolidating the inherited image of the region for the booming seventeenth-century Dutch atlas market.
The gaze
By 1623 the Dutch East India Company was the dominant European power in Asian waters, and the map reflects a settled, commercial confidence: India and the Indies as a known, charted, tradeable world. The frontier of discovery has closed into the steady repetition of an accepted picture — geography as established fact and saleable product.