Asia

Acquired From: Leen Helmink

Colouring: Coloured

Confirmed: No

Description: Published in Amsterdam by Pierre Mortier around 1700, this titlepage appropriates the Blaeu model of global allegory to position Mortiers effort to establish a French-language cartographic publishing enterprise capable of rivaling the great atlases of Paris and Amsterdam. Having trained in Paris in the early 1680s, Mortier was uniquely positioned to merge French intellectual cartography with Dutch engraving and printing expertise. By 1690, he had secured exclusive privileges to publish and distribute French geographical works in the Dutch Republic, enabling the production of some of the most ambitious and visually assertive atlases of the early eighteenth century.nThis title page bears the title Asia, and closely follows the compositional model of the Geographia Blaviana titlepage created for Joan Blaeus monumental Atlas Maior (1662) (View Record (#157)). nThe scene deploys the Four Continents as personified figures, arranged around a central crowned female (likely Europe or the Earth goddess Cybele), with animals and attributes symbolising authority and dominion. A key and other emblems of control frame geography as custody: the publisher, by extension, claims stewardship over the ordering of the world. Flanking her are Asia, associated with a camel and ancient trade; Africa, paired with an elephant to evoke power and exoticism; and America, partially clothed and holding a broken bow, representing conquest within European visual rhetoric. In this context, ornament is ideologicalan assertion of authority, market ambition, and the continuing currency of Blaeus iconographic grammar in early eighteenth-century Amsterdam.

First published: Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1700

Mapmaker: Mortier, Pierre (16611711)

Other states: Second?

Primary Category: Titlepage

Technique: Copper Engraving

This state: First