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.
 
To learn more about the history of these pieces and how we craft them in our family workshop, feel free to read our full guide to antique map prints.

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.
 
If you are curious about the history behind this piece, we put together a short background on this map for you to read.

Craft & finish
Every replica we make is individually hand-processed in our family workshop. We finish the paper with a traditional beeswax seal to give it a warm, heavy texture. Our team also adds subtle gold paint details by hand to help the artwork truly shine. To complete the look, we hand-burn the edges to give each piece the feel of a true historical artifact.
 
While our smaller sizes are perfect for gallery walls, our 43x61 cm Large replica is a museum-scale centerpiece. Because of the size, the hand-processing and beeswax application take much longer. This extra time and care ensures that every centimeter of the historic illustration is preserved with a rich, authentic glow.
 
Find more prints like this in our Antique Maps collection.