Mercator,+Gerardus

=Mercator, Gerardus=

toc Read here pertinent facts about someone whose work is critical to a proper comprehension of scale.

=Biography=

Gerardus Mercator Rupelmundanus (1552-1594) is the adopted Latin name of Gerhard Cremer. Various renderings of Mercator’s name invite confusion. Although his German father apparently went by Hubert Cremer, vernacular versions of the family name include de Cremer, Kramer, and Kremer. Krämer (the modern spelling) is the German word for merchant or shopkeeper, Cremer is its Dutch equivalent, and Mercator is the Latin version, which the future mapmaker adopted at ’s-Hertogenbosch. (Latin was the langauge of Europe’s educated elite, and young scholars routinely latinized their names.) Although Gerhard Cremer and Gerardus (or Gerhardus) Mercator might be more historically correct, American and British cartographic historians prefer the partly anglicized Gerard Mercator. A reasonable compromise, I’m sure, as an obsessive purist would need to write awkwardly about Gerardus Mercator Rupelmundanus (Gerard Mercator of Rupelmonde), the name under which Mercator enrolled at the University of Louvain in 1530 and published his epic world atlas.

=Atlas= As a second installment of his vast, comprehensive work, Mercator published an authentic version of Ptolemy’s Geography, deliberately devoid of the distracting interpretations and misinterpretations by earlier editors intent on improving the Egyptian geographer’s seminal work. Mercator’s goal was an accurate portrait of Ptolemy’s second-century view of the world. To understand the present, the mapmaker believed, one must appreciate the past. The atlas, published in 1578, included Ptolemy’s twenty-seven maps, carefully restored, handsomely engraved, and supplemented by an index of place names and an enlarged boundary map of the Nile Delta. The maps vary slightly in size, with the typical display measuring approximately 13 by 18 inches (34 by 46 cm). Seven subsequent editions, published between 1584 and 1730, attest to the book’s importance to scholars. An engraved portrait of Mercator holding a globe and dividers (fig. 3.3) suggests that the mapmaker, now in his seventies, had become a brand name in geographic publishing. While working on Ptolemy’s Geography, Mercator had started to compile maps for his celebrated world atlas, which would provide the modern geographical component of the massive treatise he envisioned. Resolving discrepancies between sources and engraving most of the plates himself was a slow process, especially for a seventy-year-old mapmaker. Trading off delay and fragmentation, he published Atlas sive Cosmographi† Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura (Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations on the Fabric of the World and the Figure of the Fabrick’d) in three installments: a 1585 edition, with 51 maps focused largely on France, Germany, and the Low Countries; a 1589 volume, with 23 maps taking in Italy and Greece; and the complete, 1595 edition, which reprinted the 74 maps issued earlier and added 28 new maps covering most of the remaining parts of Europe. Because the atlas lacks detailed maps of Spain and Portugal, “complete” is misleading. Mercator no doubt desired a more comprehensive treatment of Europe, but time was running out. Weakened by strokes in 1590 and 1593, he died on December 2, 1594, leaving completion to his son Rumold and grandsons Gerard, Johann, and Michael. Mercator not only compiled all the maps for the atlas but also engraved the printing plates, with only occasional help from his grandson Johann and Frans Hogenberg, a skilled artisan who engraved most of the seventy maps for Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theater of the Whole World), published in 1570 by Abraham Ortelius, a publisher and map seller living in Antwerp. Although a competitor, Ortelius was also a close friend of Mercator. So close, according to Walter Ghim, that Mercator deliberately delayed his own atlas. As Ghim tells it, Mercator “had drawn up a considerable number of models with his pen” and could easily have had them engraved. Yet he held up publication until Ortelius “had sold a large quantity of Theatrum…and had subsequently increased his fortune with the profits from it.” A nice story, perhaps, but the tedium of map engraving as well as the fifteen years between Theatrum and the first installment of Mercator’s Atlas suggests Ghim was spinning a yarn. In pioneering the notion of a consciously organized book of mainly maps with a standard format printed in uniform editions of several hundred copies, Ortelius has a stronger claim than Mercator to the title Father of the Modern World Atlas. According to map historian Jim Ackerman, the innovative ingredient was Theatrum’s structure, not its format. After all, bound collections of portolan charts copied by hand had been around for more than a century, and books of printed maps published by Martin Waldseem’ller (1470-1522) and others in the early sixteenth century clearly qualify as atlases. What is noteworthy is Ortelius’s demonstration of atlas making as a systematic process orchestrated by an editor who selects information, standardizes content, and maintains quality. Ortelius and Mercator had decidedly different views of the editor’s role. Whereas Ortelius relied largely on readily available sources, which he selected for reengraving, Mercator energetically sought new source materials and authored original maps, which he personally designed and engraved. Unencumbered by this spirit of scholarship, Theatrum not only beat Atlas onto the market but was so much more successful at the outset that Akerman considers it “remarkable that Mercator’s name [for a book of maps] should have eventually triumphed.” Remarkable perhaps, but hardly inexplicable. The “Atlas” of Mercator’s title commemorates an ancient ruler of Mauritania. In classical mythology, the immortal Atlas was forced to atone for his role in an unsuccessful revolt by supporting the heavens on his shoulders. In Mercator’s interpretation, Atlas was really a mere mortal magnified to legendary proportions for his accomplishments in science and philosophy. Although Mercator’s mythology is questionable, Atlas as a geographer and cosmographer provided an appropriate visual metaphor for the title page (fig. 3.4) of a massive work based on the hard work and persistence of the first truly hands-on atlas editor. In the expanded edition of Mercator's Atlas published in 1606 by Jodocus Hondius and his sons, this engraved portrait of Mercator and Hondius signified the merger of two important cartographic trademarks. From Averdunk and Müller-Reinhard, "Gerard Mercator," pl. 18. As a word for a book of maps, atlas might have vanished shortly after Mercator’s grandsons brought out a second complete edition of the Atlas in 1602. Apparently disappointed by sales, they sold the plates to the family of Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612), who ran a successful engraving and publishing business in Amsterdam. Hondius and his sons had a two-fold strategy for challenging the less meaty but still popular Theatrum. In 1606 they published a new, more geographically complete edition with forty additional maps. Recognizing the value of a brand name, Hondius listed Mercator as the author and himself as the publisher. A contrived engraving of the two collaborators seated at a table with globes and dividers (fig. 3.5) reinforced the continuity. To lower the cost of engraving, printing, and hand coloring, the Atlas maps, which measured about 14 by 18 inches, were simplified and reengraved to roughly 7 by 9 inches and published as the Atlas minor, a less expensive version introduced in 1607 and modeled after pocket-sized editions of Ortelius’s Theatrum. Translation of Mercator’s Latin narrative into Dutch, French, German, and English created a still wider market for the thirty editions of the full-size Mercator-Hondius Atlas published between 1606 and 1641. The Atlas minor enjoyed an even longer run in the twenty-five editions Hondius and his successors published between 1607 and 1738. By 1700 numerous other publishers were issuing atlases, and the term was well established.

See also Atlas.