The Continents
Africa
The continent, gilded and imagined.
- Map
- Africae Nova Descriptio
- Mapmaker
- Willem Blaeu
- Date
- c. 1617
- Held by
- University of Texas at Arlington Libraries
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
Along the coasts, Blaeu's Africa is precise; across the interior, it is a magnificent guess — elephants and lions roam a near-empty heart, and the mythical mountains of the Moon feed the Nile. Around the edges run city views from Tangier to Alexandria and figures of the continent's peoples. It is a portrait of a continent Europe traded with but had barely entered, at once a triumph of engraving and a map of everything the mapmaker did not yet know. One quarter of the four-continent set.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain map held by University of Texas at Arlington Libraries — the work is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on archival cotton-rag or textured laid stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years.
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed and linen-backed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our maps cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the sea monsters, the tiny place-names, the burin lines — on stock made to outlive its owner.
Complete the set
The Four Continents
Blaeu's Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe — the classic four-map wall of the Golden Age.
View the set →
