Blaeu – The Map Room

Antique Globes, Virtual and Real

Published on 20 March 20205 April 2020 by Jonathan Crowe

British Library digital globes — British Library

The British Library is digitizing its collection of globes, with the first seven virtual globes scheduled to be released online next week.

The digital globes will be available to view on the British Library website—www.bl.uk/collection-items—from 26 March, via a viewing platform which includes an augmented reality function (available on phone or tablet via the Sketchfab app). This online access will allow unprecedented up-close interaction with the globes from anywhere in the world and means that for the first time, a variety of previously illegible surface features on the globes can be read.

A total of 30 globes are being scanned this way. [The Guardian]

Meanwhile, in Russia, the Grabar Art Conservation Center is restoring the State Historical Museum’s badly dilapidated pair of Blaue globes. Work on the terrestrial globe has been completed; the celestial globe is next. This video (in Russian) documents the process. See also TVC Moscow (also in Russian). [WMS]

Blaue’s ‘Archipelagus Orientalis’ Restored

Published on 7 November 20177 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Joan Blaeu, Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus, 1663. Map, 118.5 cm × 152 cm. National Library of Australia. Post-restoration.

The National Library of Australia’s fragile copy of Joan Blaeu’s Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus (1663) has now been restored. (I told you about the fundraising campaign for its conservation, and its trip to the University of Melbourne to begin conservation work, back in May 2016.)

It took over one thousand hours for the 11 person team at the Grimwade Centre to painstakingly restore the 354-year-old map.

“Normally we’d only dedicate one or two people to a conservation project, but this was a very special object, and it was significantly more difficult to conserve than most of our projects.

“The surface was very fragile and there were a lot of complications along the way.

“We thought we were just removing varnish, but we discovered a dirty layer underneath which meant we had four passes at each square on the gridded map—of which there were around 300.”

There’s a video of the conservation process:

And if you need a reminder of what the map looked like before restoration:

Joan Blaeu, Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus, 1663. Map, 118.5 cm × 152 cm. National Library of Australia. Pre-restoration.

[Tony Campbell/WMS]

Recent Auctions: Joan Blaeu and Australia, Sam Greer and Vancouver

Published on 24 May 201724 May 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Joan Blaeu, Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus, 1663. Map, 118.5 cm × 152 cm. National Library of Australia.

Joan Blaeu’s Archipelagus Orientalis is to Australia what Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map is to America: a case where a first appearance on a map is referred to as a country’s birth certificate. The 17th-century map included data from Tasman’s voyages and named New Holland (Australia) and New Zealand for the first time. The National Library of Australia is working on conserving its 1663 copy, but an earlier, unrestored version dating from around 1659 recently turned up in an Italian home; earlier this month it was auctioned at Sotheby’s and sold for nearly £250,000. [Tony Campbell]

Meanwhile, at a somewhat more modest scale, an 1884 hand-drawn map of what would later become the tony Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano by colourful local Sam Greer went for C$24,200—five times its estimated price.

Map Exhibitions Around the World

Published on 28 March 201728 April 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Mapping the Philippine Seas, an exhibition of 165 maps and sea charts of the Philippine archipelago from the 16th to the 19th century from the private collections of the Philippine Map Collectors Society. At the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Opened 15 March, runs until 29 April. BusinessWorld. [WMS]

The Osher Map Library’s next exhibition, To Conquer or Submit? America Views the Great War, opens this Thursday (Facebook, Eventbrite). It “commemorates and explores American participation in the Great War—the ‘War to End All Wars’—with a sample of informative and propagandistic posters, maps, and atlases” from the Osher collections, which are based at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.

The World According to Blaeu: Joan Blaeu’s 1648 map of the world, more than two by three metres in size, will be on display at the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam from 14 April to 31 December. [WMS]

Preserving Blaeu’s ‘Archipelagus Orientalis’

Published on 11 May 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The National Library of Australia’s copy of Joan Blaeu’s Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus, a 1663 map that has one of the earliest depictions of New Holland and Tasmania, is in “an exceedingly fragile state”—and it’s only one of four copies left. After a successful appeal two years ago to raise funds for conservation work, the map is now heading to the University of Melbourne, where conservation experts will determine the best way to preserve it. [History of Cartography Project]