Cartographic Wonders
De l'Isle's Roman World
The Roman world, mapped by the king of France's geographer.
- Map
- Orbis Romani descriptio
- Mapmaker
- Guillaume de l'Isle
- Date
- c. 1715
- Held by
- Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library · via Digital Commonwealth
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
Guillaume de l'Isle drew the Roman world, its provinces spread round the Mediterranean, and the sheet was placed before page one of his Atlas de géographie, published from his address on the Quai de l'Horloge in Paris in 1731, five years after his death. Relief is drawn pictorially across the empire. It is antiquity as a geographer of the early eighteenth century reconstructed it, and it opens the atlas, so a reader met ancient Rome before the modern world. The place to start is the middle, where every road of the empire seems to meet the sea.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain map held by Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library · via Digital Commonwealth — the work is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper or 400gsm canvas; framed pieces sit behind acrylic.
- 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 matte paper that holds every line without glare.
