16th–18th century · Netherlands, Italy, Western Europe
Antique Cartography
Also known as Decorative Maps, Old World Maps
The ornate maps of the great age of exploration, where geography shares the sheet with elaborate cartouches, compass roses, and sea monsters. Information and decoration intertwine, turning each map into a printed argument about the world.
Abraham Ortelius, Maris Pacifici (1589), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ortelius_-_Maris_Pacifici_1589.jpg
About the style
Antique decorative cartography flourished from the 16th to 18th centuries, when copperplate engraving and the rise of Dutch and Italian map publishing turned the map into both a navigational tool and a luxury graphic object. Beyond coastlines and place-names, these maps carried a dense decorative apparatus: ornamental title cartouches framed in strapwork and figures, compass roses and rhumb lines, ships, heraldry, and the famous sea monsters and 'here be dragons' filling unknown waters. Publishing houses like those of Mercator, Ortelius, and the Blaeu family in Amsterdam produced lavish atlases that doubled as statements of wealth and worldview. The blend of measured engraving with allegory and ornament made cartography a sophisticated exercise in integrating data, typography, and illustration on a single plate. It matters as a high point of information design wedded to decorative invention.
Notable examples
- ▸Abraham Ortelius — Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570)
- ▸Gerardus Mercator — world map on the Mercator projection (1569)
- ▸Joan Blaeu — Atlas Maior (1662)
Anatomy of Antique Cartography
The numbered markers call out the design elements that define this style. Hover or tap a marker to see its breakdown.
Abraham Ortelius, Maris Pacifici (1589), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ortelius_-_Maris_Pacifici_1589.jpg
The map's title sits in an elaborate frame of interlaced strapwork, figures, and emblems, often the most decorated element on the sheet.
An ornate radiating star marks the cardinal directions, from which rhumb lines fan out across the seas to aid bearing.
Fanciful whales, krakens, and sea serpents populate the open ocean, decorating empty space and dramatizing the unknown.
Outline coloring, applied by hand after printing, picks out coastlines and territories in soft wash to clarify the engraving.
How Antique Cartography connects
Styles form a network, not a tree. Explore the direct neighbours below — click any to travel the map one hop at a time.
- Influenced by
- Parallel / cross-current
Influenced by Baroque Engraving — the engraver's line and the decorated cartouche
Parallel / cross-current Heraldry
Currency Engraving influenced by Antique Cartography
Describe it like this
Prompt-ready vocabulary for describing or re-creating the Antique Cartography look.