![]() But it is difficult to imagine an expensive watercolored map being used in a dank captain’s cabin on the high seas. ![]() “The title makes it clear that Olaus intended his map to be used by navigators,” argues map curator Carol Urness. Magnus borrowed 440 ducats to cover printing costs however, the amount is thought to have been only enough to make a few copies. Printed from nine, folio-sized woodblocks, the map was unusually large and costly to produce. Having secured a right of publication from the Venetian Doge Pietro Lando and a ten-year imprimatur from Pope Paul III, Magnus was finally ready to print his map, to which he had given the rather lengthy title Carta marina et descriptio septemtrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium rerum in eis contentarum…. ![]() In 1537, Magnus left Poland for Venice, the mapmaking hub of Europe. His travels took him as far north as Pello, where permanent settlement ended, and as far west as Nidaros, Norway. In an era when most mapmakers seldom left their drafting tables, Magnus personally sailed much of the coastline himself, collecting not only Northern folklore “but also classical texts, eyewitness accounts, and Christian mythology,” notes Emma Thompson in The Portolan. In its day, Magnus’ map became a major source of iconography on sea monsters and a source of inspiration for other cartography on Northern lands, like that created by Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598) and Sebastian Münster (1488–1552).īorn in Linköping, Sweden, Olaus Magnus (a Latin translation of his Swedish birth name Olof Mänsson) had traveled extensively throughout Scandinavia by the time he completed his theological training in 1517. Published in 1539, his beautifully colored and richly decorated Carta Marina was the first large-scale map of any part of the European continent. Disappointed with the maps of Scandinavia that were circulating throughout Europe in the early sixteenth century, Olaus Magnus (1490–1557) set out on a twelve-year quest to map the region to a level of detail that was exceptional.
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