In the seventeenth century the city of Amsterdam became the global capital of map production, partly as a result of the extremely strong commercial competition between the workshop of the Blaeu family and that of the rival Janssonius family, which resulted in the creation of ever richer and larger atlases.
The volume with which the Morbiato bequest has augmented the patrimony of the museum is the third volume of the Atlas Novus by Willem and Joan Blaeu, respectively father and son, which was published in several languages starting from 1640. In twenty years the number of volumes published reached six, but even before the project was brought to a conclusion Joan Blaeu had begun to work on an eleven-volume atlas that emerged between 1662 and 1665 in a first Latin edition and which, known as the Atlas Major, was the biggest and most expensive book to have been published in the seventeenth century.
The third volume of the Atlas Novus, published in 1644, contains descriptions of places in German, alternated with sumptuous double-page maps, in Italian or Latin, of Italy, Greece and the British Isles, engraved on copper and water-coloured by hand. Almost every title block is set in a frame decorated with motifs referring to specific features of the area represented, and a decorative vignette also accompanies the scale indicator.
Browse the gallery and explore the volume:
Pages on the Move: Itineraries
A possession note informs us that in 1670 the volume entered the library of the Benedictine Abbey of Gengenbach in Germany, having arrived from Strasbourg. A later ex libris reveals its presence in the nineteenth century in Cleveland, USA, where it belonged first to the lawyer Charles Candee Baldwin (1834–1895) and then to the Western Reserve Historical Society, founded in 1867 as the historical wing of the Cleveland Library by Baldwin himself, who bequeathed it his sizeable collection of books and maps.
