Early Book Collections | Art and Architecture

Halls of Wonder in Blaeu’s Great 1664 Atlas

The George Peabody Library’s hand-colored, nine-volume set of Blaeu’s magisterial Grooten Atlas (“Great Atlas”) is the crown jewel of JHU’s extensive early cartographic holdings. This Dutch-language set is also the rarest of them all, as only approximately three hundred copies were printed in the Dutch vernacular, compared to some four hundred copies in French and more than six hundred in Latin.

While these volumes are mainly filled with detailed maps of Europe and the wider world, there are several volumes in which the architectural wonders of certain regions are also showcased in splendid, even theatrical detail. Among the most prominent is an entire chapter of the book with multiple large-scale engravings of El Escorial, the magnificent royal palace built by king Philip II of Spain outside Madrid. The folding-plate and aerial view of the palace— complete with a dramatic embassy of well-dressed aristocrats approaching in covered coaches, complete with over one hundred cavaliers, pages, and men-at-arms—reveals the gridiron pattern of the palace that hearkens to the fiery gridiron martyrdom of the palace’s patron saint, San Lorenzo. Long before Versailles was constructed at an inconvenient distance from Central Paris, Philip II wished to create distance between himself and the mob in Valladolid, and also to invent a new home that both reflected his power and served as a destination for those he chose to grant audiences.

The distinctive and somewhat severe Spanish plateresque style of the architecture in mirrored in the gravity of the central domes cathedral whose high alter king Philip could observe during mass through a compartment window in his adjoining private rooms. This ambitious architectural vision of the richest monarch in Renaissance Europe, flush from huge shipments of gold and silver mined in Spain’s far-flung Latin American possessions, also encompassed a monastery, expansive library, royal mausoleum, and administrative spaces from which Philip and his successors ran the greatest empire of the early modern world.

The hand-coloring is as vivid as the space itself, with a striking (but incorrect) blue roof, bright red windows, pastel green in the surrounding fields, and bright reds, pinks, greens, and yellows of the guards and visitors’ clothing and coaches, pulled by brown and grey horses. Subsequent engravings examine the palace from different vantage points, both inside and out, and in remarkable detail, from a swirl of smoke puffing out of a side chimney to the neat array of perfectly symmetrical windows, to the statues and columns of the basilica, colored in pink and yellow. Even the technical blueprint for the royal palace is arresting, perfectly geometric and colored in bright red with pastel yellow, blue, and green detail. While the El Escorial engravings are described textually in the ensuing pages, they stand on their own as self-explanatory, moving the viewer around the outer and inner facades, and finally into the basilica—the tallest building and the heart, physically and spiritually, of the palace in beautiful color and sumptuous detail.

Joan Blaeu, Europe’s preeminent cartographer of his generation, was also steeped in the culture of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His father, Willem Blaeu was as well, so much so that he even spent half a year at the first large-scale, purpose-built astronomical observatory of the period, Uraniborg built by the famed cosmographer Tycho Brahe between c. 1576-80 on the Danish island of Ven. There magnificent elevations of the complex, long sequences of large-scale astronomical instruments, and the famous scene of Tycho working in his observatory with a team of assistants, boggle the mind with some of the most cutting-edge technology of the age—a wonder that was both scientific and architectural.

—Earle Havens