Typus orbis terrarum, ad imitationem universalis Gerhardi Mercatoris

Matthias Quad was a Netherlandish engraver, cartographer, and geographical writer active in Cologne. Working with Johann Bussemacher, he produced small-format maps for geographical books that adapted larger Netherlandish and Flemish geographical works for a German readership.

In 1596, Quad’s Europae totius orbis terrarum partis praestantissimae was published in Cologne. Although principally a small-format atlas of Europe, it included this world map. This example is the 1600 issue. The title makes clear that the map was modelled on Gerard Mercator’s universal world map of 1569, but Quad reduced that large geographical model into a form suitable for a portable atlas or handbook. The map uses Mercator’s projection rather than a double-hemisphere format. Above the map, the title explains that the circumference of the world is reckoned at 5, 400 German miles, while the quotation from Cicero below asks what can seem great in human affairs to someone who knows eternity and the magnitude of the whole world. A figure of Christ appears in an oval frame at upper left, placing the map within a moral and providential view of the world.

The geography retains several features inherited from Mercator and late sixteenth-century mapping. South America still has the exaggerated western bulge, and the far north includes uncertain or mythical geography, including Groclant, Thule, Frischlant, and S. Brandam around Greenland. The Pacific is named Mar del Zur quod et Mare Pacificum, retaining both the Spanish “South Sea” terminology and Magellan’s later name for the ocean. The lower part of the map is dominated by Terra Australis nondum cognita, the “southern land not yet known.” The southern continent stretches beneath South America, Africa, and the East Indies, preserving the late sixteenth-century belief that a vast southern land balanced the northern continents. This makes the map relevant not only as a small-format world map after Mercator, but also as part of the continuing printed life of Terra Australis around 1600.

Within the collection, this map is closely connected with Quad’s more specialised southern-continent map Chica sive Patagonica et Australis Terra (198), which develops the far southern geography in a focused polar format.