Nova totius terrarum orbis tabula ex officina G. a Schagen Amstelodami

Gerard van Schagen, also known as Gerrit Lucasz. van Schagen, was an Amsterdam engraver, publisher, and mapmaker active in the later seventeenth century. Although he did not publish atlases under his own name, he worked within the Amsterdam map trade and produced maps that drew on the decorative models of publishers such as Frederick de Wit and Nicolaes Visscher I. This matching suite of five maps, centred on Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula ex officina G. a Schagen Amstelodami, was first published in Amsterdam in 1682 and is represented here in the 1689 issue.

The suite consists of a double-hemisphere world map and four matching continent maps of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The world map relates directly to Frederick de Wit’s Orbis Maritimus (207), while the continent maps draw on decorative continent-map designs associated with Nicolaes Visscher I. Together, the maps offer a compact survey of the world as understood in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam, combining geographical information with allegorical and decorative imagery.

The southern hemisphere remains especially significant. On the world map, Australia, New Guinea, and the southern oceans are shown within a geography still shaped by incomplete Dutch and European knowledge. The arrangement reflects a moment after the major Dutch discoveries on the Australian coast, but before the later eighteenth-century voyages that would revise the Pacific and southern oceans more fully.

Within the collection, this Schagen suite is closely connected with Frederick de Wit’s Orbis Maritimus (207), on which the world map is based.