Hand-painted copper engraving, 336x482 mm. It depicts Lake Como, the territory of Rome, and Friuli. A splendid example taken from “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,” the first modern atlas, comprising maps of all areas of the world. Ortelius's brilliant intuition, later Latinized, was precisely this: before then, cartographic production had been irregular and local in terms of production, and the few atlases, the so-called “Lafrerian Atlases,” were compiled on request, collecting maps of some areas while ignoring others. Ortelius brought together the heterogeneous cartographic production of the period into a single corpus, forming the basis for an enormously successful publishing venture, published from 1570 to 1612. Perfect copy in beautiful antique coloring. Van den Broecke, 129.