De Hemelsche Cloots

Barent Langenes was a Middelburg publisher associated with the compact Dutch atlas Caert-Thresoor, first issued in 1598 and distributed through the Amsterdam publisher Cornelis Claesz. Conceived as a small-format alternative to larger atlases, the work combined terrestrial, maritime, and cosmographical material and was later expanded into Latin, French, and German editions. This first-issue celestial chart, De Hemelsche Cloots, appeared in the atlas’s cosmographical section and formed a counterpart to its terrestrial world maps.

Engraved by Jodocus Hondius, the small double-hemisphere chart depicts the northern and southern skies populated with mythological constellations. It reflects the Ptolemaic celestial tradition and the late sixteenth-century habit of presenting geography within a larger ordered cosmos. The decorative strapwork frame, plate number “9, ” and printer’s signature “A 5” identify its position within the structure of the atlas.

Although not a geographic map in the usual sense, the chart is important to the atlas’s intellectual programme. It places terrestrial mapping within a broader relationship between heaven and Earth, showing that Caert-Thresoor was conceived not merely as a collection of regional maps, but as a compact cosmographical work.

This map is closely connected with the other Langenes works in the collection from Caert-Thresoor and its later editions, including the terrestrial globe diagram De Cloot der Aerden (296), and the opening world map Typus orbis terrarum (294). It also relates to the map of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands (383), and the East Indies map (388).