![]() ![]() Merian died in 1650 following several years of illness. Merian is considered one of the grand masters of the city view and a pioneer of the axonometric projection. Of this corpus, which is substantial, Merian is best known for his finely engraved and highly detailed town plans and city views. The De Bry name is therefore dropped from all of Merian's subsequent work. Around this time, Merian became a citizen of Frankfurt as such could legally work as an independent publisher. Merian continued to publish under the De Bry's name until 1626. In 1623 De Bry died and Merian inherited the family firm. Merian and De Bry produced a number of important joint works and, in 1617, Merian married De Bry's daughter Maria Magdalena. In time Merian was drawn to the publishing mecca of Frankfurt, where he met Johann Theodor de Bry, son of the famed publisher Theodor de Bry (1528 - 1598). Merian was born in Basel and studied engraving in the centers of Zurich, Strasbourg, Nancy and Paris. Matthäus Merian (SeptemJune 19, 1650), sometimes referred to as 'the Elder' to distinguish from his son, was an important Swiss engraver and cartographer active in the early to mid 17th century. We identify about ten examples of later editions of Merian's Neuwe Archontologia cosmica in institutional collections, and six examples of this separate map. This may indicate that this later plate was engraved by a different hand. The new plate was a close copy of the first, with minor typographical changes in the lettering, and lacking only Merian's imprint. The first, 1638 edition of Merian's work contained a very similar map, but for whatever reason a new plate was required for later editions. Publication History and CensusThis map was executed in 1646 for inclusion in Matthias Merian's Neuwe Archontologia cosmica, a German translation of Pierre d'Avity's 1616 Les Estats, empires, et principautez du monde. 'Beach' itself is a reference from Marco Polo's narratives. A large promontory south of Java identified as 'Beach' bears a striking resemblance to northern Australia's Arnhem Land and the Gulf of Carpentaria, despite the fact that Australia had not yet been discovered. The seas around Nova Zembla, in the Russian Arctic, are mapped according to the discoveries of Willem Barentz made between 15. There is as yet no trace of the Great Lakes or Hudson Bay. The discoveries of Martin Frobisher and John Davis's expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage in 1576 - 1587 appear in the Canadian Arctic. The Straits of La Maire, discovered by Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten in 1616, appear just to the east of Tierra del Fuego - which is now correctly an island. Real DiscoveriesDespite a plethora of geographical confusions, the map genuinely attempts to embrace the most up to date cartographic information. In North America, the cartographer maps the supposed Seven Cities of Gold, noted here as 'Septem Citao' - a legend dating to the saga of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the discoveries of the conquistador or Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and ancient Portuguese legends relating to the Moorish invasion of Iberia. Both Lake Parima (Manoa) and Laguna de Xarayes (Lacus Eupana), fictional locations of El Dorado, appear in South America. In Africa, the map follows Ptolemaic speculation regarding the sources of the Nile, mapping two speculative lakes in southern Africa. The strait of Anian is identified between Asia and America. Cartographic Anomalies of the AgeThe map exhibits the apocryphal southern continent of Terra Australis, presumed to exist based upon ancient Aristotelian philosophical speculation regarding geographical balances. ![]() While this map does not retain the decorative borders of its source, the cartographic detail is reproduced faithfully, including the polar projections shown in the lower corners of the map. It is a meticulous and beautiful reduced version of Blaeu's similarly-titled 1606 map, which remained the dominant depiction of the world using that projection - appearing as it did in all of Blaeu's successful atlas editions up through the 1640s. This is a scarce 1646 map of the world on the Mercator Projection, produced for inclusion in the 1646 edition of Matthias Merian's Neuwe Archontologia cosmica. Minnesota - North Dakota - South Dakota.Massachusetts - Connecticut - Rhode Island.
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