Fig. 10. The Pyramids of Giza in
Egypt, with a crowned and bearded
pharaoh looking up toward a bird of
prey carrying a shoe in its beak. To the
right, a group of workers building the
pyramids prepare bricks and fire them
in a large oven from which smoke rises.
In the background appear a tall stepped
pyramid and numerous obelisks. This
print, engraved by Philips Galle and
published by Theodoor Galle in 1572,
after Maerten van Heemskerck, was
the source for Blaeu’s Nova Totius
Terrarum Orbis Geographica ac
Hydrographica Tabula (Amsterdam,
1635). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (RPP-1904-3298).
sun in the center and the earth rotating around it. Moreover, it also
Copernicus’s heliocentric system was depicted in a totally
depicts the moon around the earth, and the orbit of the comet seen in
different—and very original—way in Joan Blaeu’s Nova
1680 and 1681 that prompted Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. The
et accuratissima totius terrarum orbis tabula, inserted in
lower margin of the map includes depictions of Mercury, Venus, Mars,
the first volume of his Atlas Maior, Sive Cosmographia
Saturn, and Jupiter with its four moons discovered by Galileo Galilei
(Amsterdam, 1662) that was concluded in 1672 with a total
in January 1610, and the first scientific map of the moon, according to
of eleven volumes in Latin, followed by translations into
Giovanni Domenico Cassini (ca. 1679), as well as the appearance of
French, Dutch, German, and Spanish (plate 31). In this map,
the sun from Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (Amsterdam,
not only did Joan Blaeu correct the geocentric system evoked
1664). Kircher’s sun is conceived as a body of wondrous fire, unequal
in the Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis (plate 27), but the
in surface and composed of different substances—some fluids, some
whole map itself, more than just the decorative borders, is a
solid: a sea of fire wherein waves are in perpetual agitation (plate 30).
celebration of the Copernican universe.
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