Abraham Ortelius’ Theater of the World, considered the first world atlas, is deservedly famous. Ortelius continually updated the maps in each edition, as a vast network of cartographers, artists, explorers, and the learned funneled the latest discoveries about the world to Ortelius and his printers in Antwerp. And yet, while the Theater is a triumph of accurate empirical description, it is equally a work of art – especially in the Knight Library’s copy, which is hand-colored on every plate. Fantastic sea-monsters, dramatic naval fights, trompe l’oeil,  sumptuous cartouches and frames allow the artists to show off their imagination and ingenuity alongside their ability to describe reality.

Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarium (Antwerp: Apud Christophorum Plantinum, 1579 and 1584 [?]).

The fanciful cartouche above, with its cluster of birds and festoons of other airy things (insect wings, fans, brooms, paint brushes) is an example of the wonderful style of the “grotesque” – one of the most fertile mistakes the Renaissance produced in imitation of ancient Rome. Fifteenth-century Romans had long read about ancient Roman paintings, but due to he wind, water and wear of the centuries, the art of the ancients largely reached them in the form of bleached marbles, polished and whitened by time. Then, they stumbled upon the magnificent golden palace of Nero, the Domus Aurea. The extravagant villa of a notorious Emperor, the Domus Aurea was covered in wall paintings and filled with statuary. The artists who covered the walls of the palace, rebelling against former, more severe styles of wall paintings, exuberantly filled the Domus Aurea with the latest fashion for airy fantasies – realistic little still lifes recombined in impossibly airy and irrational combinations. A disgrace after the death of Nero, the Domus Aurea was quickly filled in with rubble, with a more sober and publicly useful complex of baths, an ampitheater and a temple built atop it. That destruction preserved the paintings inside, so that when Renaissance Romans stumbled upon these buried rooms and came face to face with the fantastic ancient painting, they thought they were in an underground grotto, and not an above ground palace, and named the style “grotteschi” or “grotesques” after “grotto.” Artists such as Raphael quickly reproduced the airy style above ground in the Vatican and elsewhere, and the style for grotesques spread across Europe and around the world.  The origins of modern still life painting, which sometimes we think of in terms of a simple description of reality, emerged in the context of grotesque or so-called “mannerist” artists, playing with and surpassing reality. This seemingly paradoxical combination of accurate description and fantastic imagination comes together in few places more wonderfully than in the Ortelius atlas.

Suggested Reading:

Dacos, Nicole. La Découverte de la Domus Aurea et la Formations des Grotesques a la Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1969.

Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-life Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Morel, Philippe. Les grottes maniéristes en Italie au XVIe siècle: théâtre et alchimie de la nature. Paris: Macula, 1998.

Shearman, John. Mannerism. London: Penguin, 1987.

Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past. London: Yale University Press, 1999.