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REFINE
Browse All : Images of Belarus and Latvia from 1613
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Author
[Blaeu, Willem Janszoon, 1571-1638, Strubicz, Maciej, about 1530-1604, Gerritsz., Hessel, approximately 1581-1632]
Note
1 map : copperplate engraving on 4 sheets. Title at the top of the map, in a shield-shaped cartouche decorated with hanging fruit. Key of the different types of settlement in the bottom left, in a cartouche surmounted with the arms of the Duchy of Lithuania (the Vytis). Below, issuing from the bottom of the signature, is Blaeu's signature, which is flanked by two putti. Scale bars at the bottom, on a thick banner entwined around a large caliper. This sheet was the product of a cartographic endeavour that began in the mid-1580s, when Prince Nicolas Christophe Radziwill commissioned a survey of the Duchy of Lithuania from Maciej Strubicz, cartographer to the recently deceased King Stephen Báthory. Surviving correspondence suggests that Radziwill had intended to publish the resulting map as early as the 1590s, and while it has been speculated that a lost print appeared sometime before 1604, Blaeu’s is the earliest engraved version of the map to have survived. In its original state of 1613 it was accompanied by a Latin text below the map, two sectional studies of the Dniepr river, and a further Latin address to the reader, presented in a cartouche held by putti (for a copy of this state see Maps 9.Tab.15.). For some reason this address does not mention Strubicz, only Tomasz Makowski, who has often been mistaken for the cartographer, but was probably the author and/or courier of the drawing which was brought to Amsterdam for Gerritsz to engrave. After the initial run the plates remained in Blaeu’s stock. In 1631 the map was revised for publication in atlases, firstly by removing the Latin text and eventually the supplementary plans of the Dniepr. The reduced sheet remained in use for several decades in the atlases of Willem and his son Joan, who probably issued the impression used in the Klencke Atlas.
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