Asia

Pierre Mortier was an Amsterdam publisher who built much of his cartographic business around the publication of French geographical works in the Dutch Republic. This engraved title page, Asia, was issued for Pierre Mortier’s Atlas nouveau, contenant toutes les parties du monde, published in Amsterdam around 1700. It introduces the Asia section of Mortier’s French-language atlas project and closely follows the compositional model of Joan Blaeu’s Geographia Blaviana title page for the Atlas Maior (157).

The scene presents the continents as allegorical figures arranged around a central crowned female figure, probably Europe or the earth goddess Cybele. Asia appears with a camel, evoking long-distance trade, caravan routes, and the wealth of the East. Africa is associated with an elephant, while America appears with a broken bow, a conventional European symbol of conquest. These figures do not simply ornament the page; they express a European hierarchy of world geography, in which the continents are visually ordered for the atlas reader.

As a title page to Asia, the print frames the continent through allegory before the reader reaches the maps themselves. It turns Asia into a theatrical and symbolic subject: ancient, wealthy, commercially desirable, and available to be organised within the atlas. The image is therefore part of the atlas’s argument about knowledge and possession, not merely its decoration.