By 1658, the two publishers had fought each other to a stalemate. If anything, despite Blaeu’s obvious advantages in terms of printing resources and access to VOC material, Janssonius’s atlas was more balanced and comprehensive. But by this time Blaeu, already in his late fifties, had taken a momentous decision. He decided to embark on a publishing project that was designed to eclipse Janssonius once and for all: a comprehensive description of the earth, the seas and the heavens. He proposed calling the venture Atlas maior sive cosmographia Blaviana, qua solum, salum, coelum, accuratissime describuntur, or ‘Large Atlas or Blaeu’s Cosmography, in which the Land, the Sea and the Heavens are Very Accurately Described’. Blaeu envisaged a three-stage publishing project starting with the earth, proceeding to the seas and finally to the heavens. Janssonius had already promised such an atlas, but lacked the resources to publish a truly definitive edition. Blaeu now channelled all his formidable resources into what would be his last and greatest publishing achievement.
In 1662, as work on the first part of the project neared its conclusion, Blaeu announced he was giving up the bookselling branch of his business empire to concentrate on printing the atlas, and held a public sale of all the stock in his bookshop to raise revenue for its imminent completion. When it was published later that year, it became clear why Blaeu needed all the capital he could muster. The first edition of the Atlas maior, published in Latin, was simply enormous. Nothing like it had ever been printed before, and its 11 volumes, 4,608 pages and 594 maps dwarfed all Blaeu’s previous atlases, as well as those of Janssonius. But Blaeu’s plan to dominate the European atlas market meant that he embarked on not one but five editions of the Atlas maior simultaneously. The first was in Latin – a prerequisite for the learned elite – the rest in more popular and profitable vernacular languages. The second, published in 1663, in 12 volumes including 597 maps, was in French, to supply Blaeu’s largest market. The third was in Dutch, for his home audience, published in 1664 in 9 volumes containing 600 maps. The fourth was in Spanish, the language of what was still regarded as the continent’s great overseas empire. The fifth and rarest edition was published in German in 1658. Blaeu began work on this atlas first, but delayed it to ensure that the more important Latin and French editions came out first. It was published in an abbreviated format in 1659, although its complete version ran to 10 volumes and 545 maps. Each edition varied according to the regions it portrayed and the printing formats used, but in most cases they duplicated the same text and maps as a gesture towards the standardization required of an atlas.41
The statistics involved in the creation of these atlases over a period of nearly six years from 1659 to 1665 are astonishing. It is estimated that the print runs of all five editions amounted to 1,550 copies, with the Latin edition the largest at 650 copies. But this apparently modest figure represented a phenomenal cumulative total of 5,440,000 pages of text, and 950,000 copperplate impressions. The time and manpower involved in putting all of this together was extraordinary. Setting the initial 14,000 pages of printed text across the five original editions, based on a calculation of eight hours to compose one page, involved five typesetters working for 100,000 hours. This represented a team of compositors working full-time for 2,000 days, or six years. In contrast, printing the 1,830,000 sheets of text involved was a relatively quick process. Assuming that at full capacity Blaeu’s nine presses were able to print fifty sheets per hour, the printed text for all four editions could in theory have been completed in just over ten months. Printing the engraved copperplate maps was another matter, not least because they needed to be executed on the reverse of sheets which had already been printed; probably only ten impressions of one copperplate could be printed per hour. Based on 950,000 copperplate impressions across all four editions, Blaeu’s six presses would need to have been in full-time operation for nearly 1,600 days, or four and a half years. Many of the maps were also handcoloured, which gave the buyer the satisfying illusion of purchasing a custom-made object, although Blaeu put this out to piece-workers at 3 stuivers a map, making it difficult to assess the time involved. Then the careful binding of just one multi-volume atlas could take at least a day. And all this (as well as other printing jobs completed during the same period) was undertaken by a workforce of no more than eighty employed by Blaeu in his Bloemgracht workshop.42
Such a massive and potentially risky capital investment was reflected in the sale price of the Atlas maior’s different editions. Each one cost substantially more than Blaeu’s previous atlases, most of which sold for just over 200 guilders. A handcoloured Latin atlas cost 430 guilders (although uncoloured it was only 330 guilders), while the larger French atlas cost 450 guilders in colour, 350 guilders uncoloured. These prices made the atlas not only the costliest ever sold, but also the most expensive book of its day; 450 guilders was a decent annual salary for a seventeenth-century craftsman and the equivalent in today’s currency to roughly £20,000. The Atlas maior was clearly not a publication aimed at modest working people: its buyers were either those associated with its creation, or people who might be able to assist the Dutch in their political and commercial expansion: politicians, diplomats, merchants and financiers.
After so much effort and expectation, it is remarkable that the Atlas maior was so unadventurous. Not only its layout but also its maps suggested that Blaeu had little appetite for reform or innovation. Previous atlases by both Blaeu and Janssonius suffered from a simply cumulative approach where quantity triumphed over quality, and in which huge areas of the globe were covered in minute detail while others were almost completely neglected, and there was little coherence to the running order of the maps. The Atlas maior made no effort to rectify these deficiencies, nor did it offer a substantially new body of maps reflecting contemporary geographical knowledge. For example, the first volume offered a world map, followed by maps of the Arctic regions, Europe, Norway, Denmark and Schleswig. Of its 22 maps, 14 were new, but some of the rest were more than thirty years old. The third volume focused exclusively on Germany, in 97 maps, but only 29 were reproduced for the first time. The fourth volume shows the Netherlands, with 63 maps, 30 of which were technically new, but most were actually old maps printed in a Blaeu atlas for the first time. Blaeu even opened the volume by reproducing a map of the Seventeen Provinces that was first published by his father in 1608! The fifth volume, dedicated to England, contained 59 maps; all but 18 were simply copied from John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611). The atlas only left Europe in volume 9, which showed Spain and Africa, while volume 10 consisted of just 27 maps of Asia; all but one of them had been previously published, and none showed much evidence of the VOC’s extensive exploration of the region.43
Thus, in the case of the Atlas maior, the medium of print did not help cartographic innovation, but hindered it. The maps were beautifully reproduced, their typography still regarded today by connoisseurs of copperplate engravings as in a class of its own. But with the money invested in such a vast undertaking, Blaeu faced a problem: did he risk introducing new and unfamiliar maps of places that might alienate his conservative (and necessarily wealthy) buyers, or did he gamble on the popular appetite for innovation – for which the immediate prehistory of the sales of printed maps offered little evidence? Throughout his career Blaeu proved reluctant to introduce innovative knowledge gleaned from the VOC records into his printed maps, preferring instead to keep this for his paid work on the company’s manuscript charts. In this respect, the Atlas maior was no different: it was simply, as its title implied, ‘grander’ in terms of its size than any preceding atlas.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the atlas’s very first map: Nova et accuratissima totius terrarum orbis tabula, or ‘New and Very Accurate Map of the Whole World’. Unlike so many of the atlas’s other maps, this one was relatively new. Until now, Blaeu’s atlases had reproduced a version of his father’s 1606–7 world map drawn on Mercator’s projection. This new world map abandons the
Mercator projection: instead, it returns to Mercator’s convention, established in his 1595 Atlas, of representing the earth as twin hemispheres, depicted on a stereographic equatorial projection that also showed close affinities with Blaeu’s earlier 1648 world map on which the marble maps in the Burgerzaal were based. The stereographic projection imagines a transparent earth marked with lines of latitude and longitude, sitting on a piece of paper where, in Blaeu’s example, the equator touches the flat surface. If light is cast through the earth, the shadows cast on the paper show curved meridians and parallels converging on a straight line representing the equator. The method was not new (even Ptolemy wrote about it), but during the Renaissance it was mainly used by astronomers for making star charts, or globe-makers like Blaeu who were primarily interested in representing the curvature of the earth’s surface. Nevertheless, Blaeu knew full well that the VOC were beginning to appreciate the superiority of Mercator’s projection, especially for navigation. If anything, the choice of the stereographic projection over his father’s preferred use of the Mercator projection in his new world map catered to established public tastes for twin hemispherical projections, evident in the Burgerzaal and the 1648 world map, but which stretched back as far as the 1520s following the completion of Magellan’s first circumnavigation of the globe.
The map’s intentions were not simply to adopt the most saleable projection available. Its geography adds little to the 1648 map. In the eastern hemisphere Australia, labelled ‘Hollandia Nova’, remains incomplete, with the tentative suggestion that it might be joined to New Guinea. In the western hemisphere the north-west coast of North America is similarly left incomplete, with the erroneous portrayal of California as an island. What has changed in the 1662 map is its elaborate border decorations. At the bottom there are four allegorical personifications of the seasons, with spring on the left, winter on the far right, and autumn and summer in the middle. Above the twin hemispheres is an even more elaborate allegorical scene: to the left, above the western hemisphere, stands Ptolemy, holding a pair of dividers in one hand and an armillary sphere in the other. Opposite him, in the top right-hand corner of the eastern hemisphere, is Copernicus, placing a set of dividers onto the surface of a terrestrial sphere. Between them are ranged personifications of the five known planets, depicted according to their classical gods. From the left, next to Ptolemy, sits Jupiter with thunderbolt and eagle, followed by Venus with her Cupid, Apollo (or the sun), Mercury with his caduceus, Mars in his armour, and finally, just above Copernicus, Saturn, identified by the six-pointed star that adorns his flag. Below Apollo, the moon peeps out, represented by a foreshortened head and shoulders between the two hemispheres.
This is an image of the world situated within the wider cosmos, with the earth at its centre, apparently unfolding its twin hemispheres. Or is it? Evoking Ptolemy’s geocentric beliefs side by side with Copernicus’s heliocentric theories suggests that the map is trying to have its cosmology both ways. The map actually follows an oblique Copernicanism in showing the planets in order of their proximity to the sun. Mercury is slightly closer to Apollo with his sceptre, next comes Venus, followed by the moon and the earth. Mars then precedes Jupiter and finally comes Saturn, in exactly the order promoted by Copernicus’s followers.
In the ‘Introduction to Geography’ that prefaces his atlas, Blaeu acknowledges that ‘cosmographers are of two discrepant opinions concerning the centre of the world and the movement of the celestial bodies. Some place the earth at the centre of the universe and believe it to be motionless, saying that the sun with the planets and fixed stars revolve around it. Others place the sun at the centre of the world. There, they believe, it is at rest; the earth and the other planets revolve around it.’ In what could act as a direct commentary on his world map, Blaeu goes on to explain the cosmography of the Copernicans. ‘According to them,’ he writes,
Mercury rides its course from west to east in the first sphere, the one nearest the sun, in eighty days while Venus in the second sphere takes nine months. They also affirm that the earth – which they take to be one of the luminaries or a planet like the others, and which they place in the third sphere with the moon (which moves around the earth, as if in an epicycle, in twenty-seven days and eight hours) – completes in one natural year its revolution of the sun. In this way, they say, the seasons of the year are differentiated: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.44
Blaeu goes on to describe Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in their respective positions, just as on his world map.
In a wonderfully disingenuous argument, Blaeu goes on to insist that ‘it is not our intention here to specify which of these opinions is consistent with truth and best befits the natural order of the world’. He leaves such questions ‘to those versed in the science of celestial matters’, airily adding that there is ‘no noticeable difference’ between the geocentric and heliocentric theories, before concluding that ‘since the hypothesis of a fixed earth seems generally more probable and is, besides, easier to understand, this introduction will adhere to it’.45 So speaks the entrepreneur, not the scientist, the publisher rather than the geographer.
Nevertheless, in its placement of the planets, the 1662 Atlas maior’s world map is the first evocation of a heliocentric solar system that dislodges the earth from the centre of the universe. This, aside from the sheer scale of its production, is the atlas’s historical achievement, but the commercial exigencies of its publication meant that, unlike his father, Joan Blaeu diluted its radical science. If anything, despite the Dutch Republic’s sympathy towards scientific challenges to the geocentric orthodoxy, the 1662 world map takes a step back from the 1648 map, with its insets of the Copernican and Tychonic challenges to the prevailing Ptolemaic model. The 1662 map itself offers an image of the earth within a heliocentric solar system, but wrapped in so many classical mantles and diminished by Blaeu’s preceding comments that most historians have failed to realize its significance.46 It seems that Blaeu was simply unsure if his support for the new scientific theory was good for business or not; in the end, his convoluted account of Copernicus’s theory created a magnificent but generally overlooked cartographic image of a heliocentric world.
Judged on its own commercial terms, Blaeu’s decision seems to have been an astute one, because the Atlas maior was a remarkable success. Copies were bought by wealthy merchants, financiers and political figures in Amsterdam and throughout Europe. Blaeu also dedicated the various editions to some of the continent’s most politically influential figures, dispatching it with customized colouring, binding and armorial stamps. Many of these copies were held in specially designed and elaborately carved cabinets of walnut or mahogany, adding to its status as an object that was more than just a book or a series of maps. The Latin edition was dedicated to Emperor Leopold I of Austria, and the French edition to King Louis XIV, who received his with Blaeu’s accompanying gloss on the importance of his subject. ‘Geography’, wrote Blaeu (paraphrasing Ortelius), ‘is the eye and the light of history’, and he held out before the king the prospect that ‘maps enable us to contemplate at home and right before our eyes things that are farthest away’.47 He also dispatched volumes to influential dignitaries, and took payment from the Dutch authorities for customized copies to be offered as exotic gifts to foreign rulers, including a velvet-bound Latin atlas sent to the Ottoman sultan by the States General in 1668 in an attempt to cement the political and commercial alliance between the two states. It found such favour that it was copied and translated into Turkish in 1685.48
Publication of Blaeu’s Atlas maior also marked the end of the fifty-year rivalry with Janssonius, but not because of any inherent geographical superiority. In July 1664 Janssonius died. In the same five years as those of Blaeu’s editions Janssonius had succeeded in publishing Dutch, Latin, and German editions of his own Atlas maior. The Dutch edition, published in nine separate volumes between 1658 and 1662, followed a similar running order to Blaeu’s, and contained 495 maps.
The eleven-volume German edition of 1658 featured no fewer than 547 maps. Janssonius may have lacked Blaeu’s publishing resources and his political connections, but virtually up to the day he died he continued to match his great rival in the publication of vast atlases.49 If he had lived longer, the story of Blaeu’s ultimate command of Dutch mapmaking might have been very different.
Blaeu was so successful that in 1667 he extended his printing empire to new premises on Gravenstraat. But his triumph was short-lived. In February 1672 a fire swept through the new building, destroying much of Blaeu’s stock and presses. The official account into the fire reported that, as well as the loss of books, ‘the large printing works with everything in it was damaged to such an extent that even the copper-plates stacked in the far corners melted like lead in the flames’, and put Blaeu’s losses at a staggering 382,000 guilders.50 If Blaeu held any hope of completing the atlas with the two promised sections on the sea and the heavens, it was now gone for ever. Even worse was to follow. In July 1672, as the Dutch Republic faced imminent war with France, the States General offered William of Orange the title of Stadholder. The shift in power led to the dismissal of anti-Orangist members of the Amsterdam Council, including Blaeu. His publishing house literally in ruins and his political influence over, Blaeu quickly went into decline, and on 28 December 1673 he died, aged 75.
Blaeu’s death signalled the demise of the family business. His sons carried it on, but they lacked either their father or grandfather’s brilliance and drive. The market for maps had also changed, and the political climate discouraged large capital investments in multi-volume atlases. It was just too risky. The deaths of Janssonius and Blaeu also meant that the commercial rivalry which had driven so many atlas publications between 1630 and 1665 was gone. There was neither supply of nor demand for new atlases. Between 1674 and 1694 the copper plates used to print the Atlas maior and which had survived the fire were sold off and dispersed in a series of sales and auctions.51 In 1696 the family business was finally wound up, and in 1703 the VOC used its printer’s mark for the last time, ending its long and successful association with the family that had proved so central to its mapmaking.
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 36
