The Most Wonderful Map in the World: Urbano Monte's Planisphere of 1587

I had a chance to visit David Rumsey and his map collection (which this map is a part of) at his home in 2013. The breadth of that collection and this man's dedication to maps is fantastic.

This is a picture of his 2013 digitizing setup: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhodes/9066129105 which he built in what was basically his garage. I don't remember much technical detail about it.

I believe (part of?) the collection has since moved to Stanford.

The collection's web site is a great resource and fun to explore for anyone interested in maps. There's even a link to view part of the collection in Second Life.

For those that are into maps and for one reason or another haven’t learned about it yet I highly recommend the Mapire.eu website, which is basically comprised of old Habsburg and Austrian-Hungarian maps. This late 1700s Habsburg map [1] of almost half of Europe is a thing a beauty once you zoom into the details.

[1] https://mapire.eu/en/map/europe-18century-firstsurvey/?layer...

I whipped up a little interactive, high-rez version of the map for you all, here: https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/urbano-montes-planispher...

I downloaded a very high-resolution version of this map and created a 1m x 1m "poster" in my office. Accompanied with an illuminated magnifying glass, I often take a nice break from the computer monitor to examine the odd details Monte provides in his pictures.

I initially thought the map was the one also available in Marble maps, the KDE project. However, it turned out to be the behaim globe. This would probably make a worthy addition.

This is by far one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Not only because it's so detailed, but because we still have it 400 years later in such pristine condition.

On that vein, as a 25-year-old it's so incredibly hard to imagine that this was made just under 20 of my lifetimes ago.

Fascinating! Would it be too much to hope that some day Stanford university would make a hi-res version of this map available on the internet? I would absolutely love to study it in detail!

“Among other things, this map really demonstrates the degree to which the Spanish state dominated the world in the 1580s.”

It’s worth mentioning it was the crown, and not the state, the actual ruler.

> There's even an interactive version of the map available to explore via Google Earth.

Does anyone have a link to this?

This is ripe for a illustrator to touch up and apply to a 3D model.

Should make us all realize how little we know.