Leiden Blaeu Maps

The Blaeu family of map publishers dominated the Golden Age of Dutch cartography during the seventeenth century. Their sumptuous and ornate colour atlases remain the pinnacle of artistic mapmaking and a new site has been launched by the Archive of Leiden to showcase a gorgeous 6-volume work, 'Toonneel des Aerdrycks', produced in the mid-1600s.

The Dutch cartographic style was characterised by increasingly decorative embellishment that tended to highlight the development in exploration, trade and commerce. Imagery was derived from a combination of exotic contemporary scenes and elements of classical mythology.

The 6-volume series was apparently produced specifically for a Leiden Mayor from the Dutch East India Company. The work has become sufficiently fragile that public access to the original books is restricted; hence the books have been digitised. It hardly matters that there is no English at the website.

I'm not sure whether the selection of images (spliced screencaps) above of name plates and medallions really does this work the justice it deserves. Maps are a fairly difficult breed of illustration to display successfully in static form on the internet, so I went off on a bit of a tangent for a change. [Most of the above are from Volume 1 - I didn't even notice the other five until later on (the stupid is strong in me at times)]

'Toonneel des Aerdrycks' : click 'Bekijk de atlassen in de viewer' [direct link to viewer] ---- this is the best flash viewer I've seen. The viewing screen can be increased by maximizing your browser size. Note: click 'Kaartenindex' for thumbnail displays. There's a little arrow top right that gets rid of the sidebar to increase the viewing area. [Home page of Regionaal Archief Leiden] [via]
UPDATE (Jan 2013): the link to the map site has been updated but I'm not sure where/how to link direct to the viewer.

Lace Typography

The above images are an intriguing mix of patterns for lace making surrounding various alphabet and script styles. The suite of engravings was produced in 1604 by Antonello Bertozzi and Sebastian Zanilla in Padua and is simply known as 'Book on Lace'.

I have found exactly zero background (again) to this work and only a passing reference to Bertozzi on this page.

The book belongs to the University of California Libraries* and, as mentioned a few weeks ago in the Ornamental Typography post, is available in various formats from Archive.org. I have taken the liberty of removing the holepunched library markings as well as the digital trade watermarks from the above images. I won't embarrass the Redmond outfit who digitised the work by mentioning their name. It could only have been an oversight on their part that the company brand name and statement was plastered onto the actual illustrations in this public domain book right?

All of the images were taken from a pdf file and a dozen more (slightly cropped but otherwise untouched) pages from the suite can be found in this Webshots album. That is all or very close to all of the images in the book.

A Casual Baptism

From Munich State Library: 'Beschreibung der historischen und allegorischen Personen der acht Inventionen zum Ringelrennen in den Aufzügen gehalten 1596 anläßlich der Taufe der Prinzessin Elisabeth von Hessen' [BSB Cod.icon. 340]

The work is approximately 150 pages long. I have posted less than a quarter of the illustrations. Each of the ten or so chapters is prefaced by a titlepage, as seen in the final image above. The chapter divisions commence each time with a few pages of beautifully written text. Otherwise there is an illustration on virtually every other page.

This outstandingly eccentric watercolour album portrays the festival held in honour of the baptism of Princess Elizabeth of Hessen in 1596. Mythological and historical figures, virtues, muses and planets are personified through the participants involved in the parade.

I've seen this allegorical style of presentation in festival books before. I'm never sure how much of the artist's display corresponds to an actual role-playing and costume-wearing theatrical parade during a festival and how much belongs to artistic license and court propaganda. Obviously the outlandish elements we see above fall within the latter categories; the album(s) being presumably forwarded to peers in other royal courts to dazzle and impress.

"The festival book is an artistic product, a literary work which can be read in its own right. We should marvel at it in the same way we marvel at a painting. As such it forms part of the festival rather than being simply an account of it." [Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly]

There is some commentary (in German) about this album [which was produced in ~1600, incidentally] at the Munich BSB site. [The online translation doesn't really do it justice.]