Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / Parergon / Nomenclator Ptolemaicus.

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by Abraham Ortelius, published 1601, being the final edition printed at the Plantin press, complete with the Parergon and the Nomenclator, with gold leaf to the title page, rich contemporary hand colouring throughout, including the ornamental woodcut initials on the verso. The records of the Plantin archives establish that Moretus printed just 200 copies, well under half the size of the preceding Latin editions, making this one of the scarcest of the folio Latin printings.

Three parts in one volume, folio. Engraved allegorical title in contemporary hand colour, engraved portrait of Ortelius by Philips Galle with the Epitaphium Abrahami Ortelii printed on the verso, Parergon title within woodcut architectural border, Nomenclator title with the large Plantin printer’s device. 153 engraved maps, complete, collating as Van der Krogt 31:052: 118 in the Theatrum (numbered 1-115 with the supplementary plates 25*, 25** and 25***) and 35 map sheets in the Parergon (numbered j-xxxvij, two sheets each carrying two numbers), including the views of Tempe and Daphne; most double-page, mounted on guards, in fine contemporary hand colour throughout. Map 104 (Russia) supplied from another example of this edition, the margins extended slightly to sheet size, its period colour refreshed to harmonise with the volume.  Antwerp: Jan Moretus, Officina Plantiniana, 1601.

Ortelius’s Theatrum, first published in 1570, is recognised as the first modern atlas; a systematically organised body of uniform maps drawn from the best available sources and continuously revised across more than four decades of publication. The pairing of Europe’s greatest atlas with Europe’s greatest printing house defined the book’s later career: Christoffel Plantin printed the Theatrum from 1579, and the association continued under his son-in-law Jan Moretus after Plantin’s death. This 1601 edition was the last published before the heirs had sold the plates and publishing rights to Jan Baptist Vrients.

This atlas unites all three components of the complete Theatrum:

• The atlas proper contains the celebrated sequence of maps of the world, the continents and the regions, including the iconic oval world map Typus Orbis Terrarum in its third and definitive plate, Islandia surrounded by sea monsters, whose menagerie of creatures after Olaus Magnus has made it perhaps the most beloved of all the atlas’s plates, and Chinae, through which European atlas readers first met a printed map of China. The Jenkinson map of Russia, compiled from the English Muscovy Company expeditions to Moscow and Bokhara and among the most pictorially rich maps of the atlas; the example here supplied from another copy of this edition, as noted above.

• The Parergon, Ortelius’s atlas of the ancient world, was enlarged with four new maps and renumbered for this edition, and occupies a special place in his output: unlike the modern maps, which he compiled and scrupulously credited to their original authors, the Parergon plates were Ortelius’s own compositions, the product of his deep classical scholarship, and they stand among the finest engraved expressions of Renaissance humanism’s engagement with the geography of antiquity.
• The Nomenclator Ptolemaicus, a concordance of Ptolemaic place names.

Complete Plantin-press editions of the Theatrum with the Parergon are now genuinely rare on the market, and examples in contemporary colour of this quality rarer still.