The Continents
Ortelius's Asia, 1570
Asia, as Antwerp pictured it in 1570.
- Map
- Asiae nova descriptio
- Mapmaker
- Abraham Ortelius
- Date
- 1570
- 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
Asiae nova descriptio, a new description of Asia, appeared in the 1570 Antwerp edition of Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum. This copy is coloured by hand, with Latin text on the back headed simply Asia, on page 3. Mountains are drawn as small hills across a continent that Europe knew mostly by report, and the colouring picks out its regions the way a reader of 1570 would have been taught them. It is a picture of how much Antwerp had heard of Asia and how little of it anyone there had seen. Hang it beside the America and Europe from the same atlas.
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.
