Ortelius atlas, part 2: Tracing influence, finding traces

March 4, 2026

A few years ago, the U-M Library acquired Abraham Ortelius’s "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum" (Theater of the World), an atlas that revolutionized map making when it was first published in 1570 by presenting a global compendium of 16th-century cartographic expertise in one volume.

The library's copy is extraordinarily rare, being one of the first forty ever printed. It's also in need of extensive conservation and repair. 

This is the second in a 3-part series of stories and videos about the atlas, its creator and many contributors, the provenance of the library's copy, and the work of the Conservation Lab to make it available to the research community. Start with Ortelius atlas, part 1: The first modern atlas.

The library's copy of "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum" is a portal in time to a moment of creation — of an atlas, of course, the first assemblage of coherent, linked, global geographic knowledge in a single volume. But it was also a vision, one that both reflected the ideas and viewpoints of its creators, and influenced the ideas and viewpoints of the generations that followed.

A Renaissance man

The creator of the atlas, Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), was born into the thick of the European Renaissance and in a city, Antwerp, that was a major center of publishing and commercial exchange. 

He first worked as a map colorist (an important skill at a time when color printing was rare) and began traveling Europe to attend trade fairs in major centers like Frankfurt. During these travels, he met many of the great humanists of his day, befriending like-minded intellectuals interested in the dissemination of knowledge and information, including his good friend the cartographer Gerard Mercator (1512-1594).

It was his social network that made Ortelius’s Theatrum possible, and that underwrote his most brilliant innovation: synthesis. Ortelius solicited the most accurate, up-to-date maps that his friends and acquaintances could find, and his sources included some of the leading cartographers of the sixteenth century (Mercator, as well as Jacobo Gastaldi, Diego Gutiérrez, Olaus Magnus, and others). 

After sifting through these maps and determining which he thought were most accurate, Ortelius consolidated the shapes, place names, and descriptions into maps of a uniform size and aesthetic, and commissioned many of Antwerp’s greatest engravers to make the plates his maps would be printed from. 

Another Ortelius innovation was his bibliography — a "Catalogus Auctorum" in the front matter, which credited each contributor to the atlas and acknowledged the less direct contributions of other well-known cartographers of the day. 

In yet another innovation, the verso (reverse side) of each map includes descriptions of the culture and terrain of the depicted region, written by Ortelius based on his extensive reading, travels, and correspondence. These descriptions were a significant factor in the atlas's popularity, says Anna Rohl, the library's map curator — he was meeting an audience eager for information about the world in the midst of the Age of Discovery, a period of European exploration, conquest, and colonization that gave rise to today's global, interconnected economy.

Those descriptions had their limitations. Rohl points to Oretelius's take on Europe, for example (from the 1606 English edition):

This [continent] Plinie [Pliny the Elder] calleth the Nurse of the victorious and conquering people of all other nations of the world, most beautiful and farre surpassing the rest: and so it is sometimes compared to Asia and Africa, not for his greatness and compasse, but for his might and power. Certaine it is, that this part, being most plentifully inhabited, is for multitude of nations inferior to neither of the other.

Europe, in other words, is small but mighty. 

Knowledge that transcends

Five centuries later, it's possible to both marvel at the extraordinary advances in knowledge creation and sharing that the atlas represents and to observe that it's imbued with notions of European and Western superiority that persist to this day.

"His sources, these European explorers and traders, had particular perspectives and, you could even say, agendas," Rohl says. "They saw themselves as the inheritors of the great classical civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome." 

That they would also see other, remote places as uncivilized, ripe for conquest, not capable of self-government, and culturally inferior is perhaps not surprising. It's a set of beliefs upon which colonial empires are built, and perhaps an illustration of the principle that a little learning is a dangerous thing — though the poet Alexander Pope wouldn't put that into writing until 1709.

Oretelius would continue to receive maps from correspondents for decades to come, and he continued to update the Theatrum with new information in each new edition.

Between 1570 and 1612, the Theatrum appeared in thirty-one editions, in seven languages, with more than 7,300 copies printed. It ultimately expanded from 53 maps and 87 bibliographic references to 167 maps and 183 sources, so that the editions themselves record the expansion of geographic knowledge over its lifespan.

The Theatrum also served as source material for the generations of cartographers who followed him. With so many copies and editions published, Ortelius’s maps spread across the globe in the 1700s, inspiring mapmakers everywhere to synthesize and reproduce new geographic information.

And while it's impossible to fully know the reach of the atlas, its global geography offered new perspectives in regions beyond its primary European audience. For example, in 17th century Japan, the arrival of maps like Ortelius’s expanded the predominant view of the world, then rooted in Buddhist cosmography, in which "Japan was traditionally depicted as an outlier due to its distance from the places the Buddha lived," Rohl says. 

This new information influenced the development of a Japanese national identity in the coming centuries that was distinct from Japan’s metaphorical position in the Buddhist universe.

It also demonstrates the power that knowledge has to transcend the perspectives of the people who create and share it.

Provenance

Unlike other surviving examples, the library's copy of the atlas is uncolored, which brings us as close a look as possible at what its original buyers saw before adding coloring to enhance its visual appeal.

"The people who were buying it were educated, and interested in its scholarly value," Rohl says. But, she adds, there was also a certain prestige to owning the hot new atlas, which might be on display for visitors to admire, a demonstration of their host's wealth and taste.

A handwritten inscription on the title page offers valuable information about whose drawing rooms and studies the library's copy of the atlas occupied.

This information about the book's provenance — who owned it and where it's been — deepens its value by revealing information about the context in which it was purchased, read, and shared.  

This is especially true of a book like the Theatrum, which shaped how generations of readers perceived the world beyond the parts of it they experienced for themselves. Tracing the ownership and locations of its earliest copies can help historians understand how the ideas within it took hold and spread.

The library's copy spent its earliest years in the hands of two of Antwerp's most influential figures.

The first was Christopher Plantin, one of the 16th century's most prolific publishers and printers in northern Europe, and a long-time friend of Ortelius. Plantin, who went on to publish later editions of the Theatrum, was a major distributor of the first edition, including the library's copy.

It's hard to overstate Plantin's importance as a publisher at a time when the printing press was influencing and transforming many aspects of life in Europe, not least among them religious life (Plantin was a Protestant sympathizer who secretly published works considered heretical by the Catholic Church.) His home and printing establishment in Antwerp is now a museum and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

"If you know anything about the history of printing, you know about Plantin and that museum," Rohl says. "Someday I want to go there!" 

Per the inscription, Plantin gave this copy of the Theatrum to fellow Antwerpian Dominique Lampsonius, a poet, painter, and scholar who corresponded widely with some of the era's most notable European humanists, artists, and intellectuals. In October 1570, just months after its publication, Plantin wrote that the atlas was a “pulcherrimum hoc munus” or “beautiful gift” he was giving Lampsonius. 

A living resource 

Lampsonius died in Liège, Belgium, in 1599. If he still owned the atlas, it would have been passed on to his heirs. Further research might reveal additional information about how this book made it through many tumultuous centuries — including the Sack of Antwerp in 1576, the greatest massacre in the history of the Low Countries — to a place not even noted in Ortelius’s maps of North America.

As part of the the largest cartographic collection in Michigan, the atlas now resides among other primary source materials — many of them likewise milestones in the history of cartography — that bring students and researchers from a range of disciplines into contact with mapping traditions across the globe and the centuries. 

"Ortelius was an early participant in a global cartographic conversation that rapidly expanded in the 17th century," Rohl says, "and this copy of his atlas, alongside the materials that influenced its creation and were influenced by it, is in the perfect place to help us trace how maps became crucial cultural and political currency at the start of modernity."

by Lynne Raughley