“Gerhard Mercator 1595 World Atlas - Cosmographicae”

Gerardus Mercator can confidently be called the greatest cartographer of the sixteenth century. His most famous contribution to science is a technique of rendering the globe on a flat surface, still known as “Mercator’s projection,” that was first used for a 1569 world map. No less significant was the publication in 1595, one year after the author’s death, of the complete Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura (Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations on the Fabric of the World and the Figure of the Fabrick’d.) With this volume, a collection of maps was linked for the first time with the figure of Atlas, the Greek Titan, condemned by Zeus to carry the vault of the heaven on his shoulders.