Table des cartes etc

Alexis-Hubert Jaillot was a French map publisher who enlarged and reissued the work of Nicolas Sanson, one of the leading French cartographers of the seventeenth century. Through his partnership with Sanson’s heirs, Jaillot transformed Sanson’s smaller maps into large-format atlas sheets suited to the prestige market of Louis XIV’s France. His Atlas nouveau presented Sanson’s geography in an expanded and more decorative form. Pierre Mortier’s Amsterdam editions then carried this French cartographic material into the Dutch atlas trade, where it could reach a wider international readership through one of Europe’s most active centres of map publishing.

This engraved sheet is an index page listing the maps contained in the volume. It was issued in Pierre Mortier’s Amsterdam edition of Jaillot’s Atlas nouveau. Although it functions primarily as a table of contents, its elaborate allegorical design presents the atlas as a learned and ordered body of geographical knowledge. At the centre is the printed list of maps. Around it are allegorical scenes linking geography with cosmography, scholarship, and royal authority. At upper left, a crowned figure with an eagle appears among clouds. Below him, Atlas supports a globe showing the northern Atlantic and surrounding lands. At upper right, a winged figure gestures from the clouds, while beneath her a female figure stands beside a celestial globe and instruments of measurement.

The lower section shows a library or scholarly interior, with books, maps, a globe, and figures consulting or arranging geographical works. This scene turns the practical index into an image of atlas-making itself: collecting maps, ordering knowledge, and making the world accessible through books, tables, and instruments.

Within the collection, this index page is closely connected with Jaillot’s title page to the Atlas nouveau #~375.~