Typus Orbis Universalis - Sebastian Münster, 1550. (World Map In Color)
This map gives you a mid 16th century view of the whole world on one print. The land is drawn inside a long oval and surrounded by clouds and little wind heads, all printed on warm parchment style paper. Small ships and sea creatures move across the oceans, so it feels like a page taken out of an early world history book. It works well in a study or library, especially next to books, dark wood and brass details.

About this map print
Typus Orbis Universalis is a woodcut world map by Sebastian Münster, made for the 1550. edition of his book Cosmographia and printed in Basel by his publisher Heinrich Petri. The map uses an oval projection and a strong black frame. Around the border you see twelve wind heads blowing in from every side, each one labeled with its name.
 
Inside the oval, the geography mixes older ideas from Ptolemy with new reports from early sea voyages. Europe, Africa and Asia follow the older tradition, but the Americas appear as a newer landmass with an experimental outline and the Pacific Ocean is named for the first time as “Mare Pacificum”. The Indian Ocean is open to the wider sea and there is no solid southern continent, which shows how far Münster had moved away from strictly Ptolemaic world maps.
 
This map sits between older Ptolemaic style world maps and later atlas maps. It still keeps the wind heads and simple outlines you see in Münster’s Ptolemaic World Map, but the oval shape and open oceans already point toward more modern world maps such as Ortelius’s Typus Orbis Terrarum and Visscher’s Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis.

Craft & finish
This historical map art print is made on hand processed paper, with subtle gold added by hand and a beeswax finish so it feels close to real parchment when you hold it. The surface catches the light softly on the raised parts of the paper, but colors can look a little different from screen to screen.
 
Find more prints like this in our Antique Maps collection.