Gerardus Mercator and Iudocus Hondius

Colletta Hondius, née Van den Keere, belonged to the Flemish-Dutch engraving and publishing network that sustained the Mercator-Hondius atlas enterprise in Amsterdam. She was the wife of Jodocus Hondius I and the sister of the engraver Pieter van den Keere, linking her directly to two of the most important mapmaking families active in the Low Countries around 1600. This engraved double portrait was introduced into the Mercator-Hondius atlas from 1613 and continued to appear in later editions issued by the Hondius family.

The print shows Gerard Mercator at left and Jodocus Hondius at right, seated within an architectural frame and surrounded by instruments of geography: globes, an armillary sphere, books, dividers, and maps. A wall map of Europe hangs behind them, visually linking their work to the learned and practical traditions of cosmography, engraving, and atlas production. The lower inscriptions record Mercator’s birth at Rupelmonde and death at Duisburg, and Hondius’s birth at Wakken in Flanders and death at Amsterdam.

The scene constructs a genealogy of cartographic authority. Mercator appears as the senior figure whose atlas plates formed the foundation of the work, while Hondius is presented as his successor, the editor and publisher who acquired Mercator’s plates in 1604 and expanded the atlas for a new seventeenth-century readership. The portrait is therefore both commemorative and promotional: it honours Mercator and Hondius while presenting the atlas as the continuation of Mercator’s cartographic achievement.