Africa (ID 52B Courtiers and Cannibals)

The Blaeu atlas project was one of the major publishing enterprises of seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

It began with Willem Jansz.

Blaeu, whose firm produced globes, astronomical instruments, wall maps, sea charts, and pilot books.

In 1629, after the death of Jodocus Hondius Jr. (View Record (#460)), Blaeu acquired thirty-seven copperplates from the Hondius family, strengthening the firm’s position in the competitive atlas market.

His son Joan Blaeu later expanded the project, culminating in the Atlas Maior.

This title page forms part of the coordinated visual programme of the Atlas Maior.The collection also holds several other Blaeu title pages, including the general title page (View Record (#157)), and frontispieces for the Arctic (View Record (#284)), Europe (View Record (#151)), America (View Record (#150)), and Asia/China (View Record (#152)), and Tycho Brahe’s astronomical instruments (View Record (#148)).

The title page for Africa presents the continent through an allegorical composition shaped by early modern European ideas of geography, trade, and natural abundance.

Africa is personified as a black female figure, draped and jewelled, holding a cornucopia and a scorpion.

These attributes suggest abundance and danger, two recurring themes in European representations of the continent.

At her feet, black putti play among gold ingots and an ivory tusk, referring to materials associated with African trade in the European imagination.

The foreground includes a lion, elephant, and snakes, while an obelisk in the background evokes the ancient monuments of Egypt and Ethiopia.

This example was reissued by Reinier and Josua Ottens, prominent map and print publishers in Amsterdam.

Active from 1726 under the imprint “R & I Ottens,” they specialised in reissuing earlier cartographic works, including plates originally published by Blaeu.

The reissue shows the continuing afterlife of Blaeu’s continental allegories in the Amsterdam print market, long after their original appearance in the Atlas Maior.