Joan Blaeu

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Joan Blaeu's 1648 world map put the sun at the center of the universe. It was the first world map to embrace the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus. That same map was also the first to include the discoveries of the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman. On that map, Blaeu named the land we call New Zealand Nieuw Zeeland, after the Dutch province of Zeeland. The anglicized version of that name is still used today. Blaeu, also known as Johannes Blaeu, ran the family cartography workshop in Amsterdam. What carried a lawyer's son into the center of that trade, and what would his firm risk to outdo its rivals?

• 2. A Lawyer's Detour

  ›

  Joan Blaeu was born on the 23rd of September 1596, the son of the cartographer Willem Blaeu and the brother of Cornelis Blaeu. In 1620, he completed a doctor of law degree. He set the law aside and joined his father's cartographic and publishing business instead. There he took up work on the globes, maps, and atlases that carried the family name across Europe.

  In 1635, father and son published the Atlas Novus, formally titled Theatrum orbis terrarum, sive, Atlas novus, in two volumes. Willem Blaeu died in 1638, and Joan took over the firm together with his brother Cornelis. With that inheritance came their father's old post at the Dutch East India Company, which Joan now carried in his own name. The two brothers were about to test their inherited house against Amsterdam's other great map firm.

• 3. A Map Underfoot

  ›

  In 1655, the Dutch architect Jacob van Campen used Blaeu's map as a template. He built its design into the pavement of the Groote Burger-Zaal, inside Amsterdam's new Town Hall. That building is known today as the Amsterdam Royal Palace. Visitors could walk across a floor charting the same world Blaeu had drawn on paper.

  Blaeu's Hollandia Nova also appeared in his Archipelagus Orientalis sive Asiaticus, published in 1659 within the Kurfürsten Atlas, or Atlas of the Great Elector. Five years later, the scholar Melchisédech Thévenot drew on that work to produce his own map, Hollandia Nova-Terre Australe, in 1664. Blaeu's next project would turn from foreign coastlines to the streets of Dutch cities themselves.

• 4. An Atlas Arms Race

  ›

  Around 1649, Blaeu released Toonneel der Steeden, a collection of Dutch city maps whose title translates to Views of Cities. In 1651, Amsterdam's council voted Blaeu onto its ranks. Three years later, in 1654, he published the first atlas of Scotland, a work devised by Timothy Pont.

  Blaeu's fiercest contemporary rival was Johannes Janssonius, and the two competed over which of them could pack more maps into a single atlas. That contest peaked in 1662, when Blaeu published the Atlas Maior in 11 volumes holding 600 maps. The Atlas Maior became a status symbol for its owners and stood as the most expensive book of the 17th century.

  Blaeu also produced the 12-volume Le Grand Atlas, ou Cosmographie blaviane, en laquelle est exactement descritte la terre, la mer, et le ciel. One edition, dated 1663, measured 540 by 340 millimeters in folio and held 593 engraved maps and plates. The firm that had just out-mapped its rivals would soon face a threat no atlas could chart.

• 5. Fire And Inheritance

  ›

  In December 1672, a fire destroyed Blaeu's studio and every piece of work stored inside it, including a planned cosmology that was never finished.

  Blaeu died on the 21st of December 1673, in Amsterdam, almost exactly a year after the fire. He was buried in Amsterdam's Westerkerk. His son, Joan II, carried the family's cartographic work forward until 1712, forty years after the fire had threatened to end the Blaeu name.