Title Page for Blaeu’s Atlas Novus, vol. IV (British Isles)

[Title page: Atlas Novus, volume IV]

This is an architectural title page, engraved for the fourth volume of Blaeu’s Atlas Novus. The central panel is blank: a label in the appropriate language would normally have been pasted down. This is the British volume, and an ancient Briton presides over a Roman, a Saxon, a Dane and a Norman representing different epochs in British history.

Condition & Materials 

Copper engraving, 42 x 25 cm, original hand colour heightened in gold, ink library stamp of a Dutch school affecting top right hand corner of image (the Gymanisum St Alberti in Zenderen, attached to the Carmelite monastery there); blank verso.

References 

Shirley, Courtiers and Cannibals, 46A.