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The British Library in London is home to a staggering four and a half million maps.
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Mysterious and beautiful, these rarely seen treasures
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are much more than just two-dimensional physical depictions of a physical world.
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Among its greatest treasures are the world's very first atlases.
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Masterpieces of scientific endeavour and artistic beauty,
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they are the spectacular achievements of the Golden Age of map-making in the Netherlands.
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The Dutch in this period were perhaps the leading mercantile nation,
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in the world, and so I suppose maps are a natural extension of that.
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The world had never seen printed maps so lavish, so physically large, so expensive.
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For a the super-rich merchants of the Netherlands, the atlas became
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a unique opportunity for conspicuous consumerism and personal display.
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A lot of the decoration of maps is about showing wealth.
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You want to show that you can afford to have a map like this, you can have a gilded map.
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But at the same time it's got entertainment value.
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The more beautiful it looks, the more wonderful, the more spectacular,
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the more entertaining it is, the more lovely it is to have in your home.
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There's an artistic value to them.
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Atlases revolutionised map-making
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and changed the way we see the world.
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Beyond their physical beauty, they were also celebrations of an entire culture,
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objects of power and persuasion in a world of commerce and political intrigue.
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The Golden Age of the atlas had its beginnings here,
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in the Flemish town of Antwerp at the heart of the Netherlands.
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From the 1550s, it became a boom town for commerce, banking, map-making and publishing.
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It was home to The Golden Compasses, the largest printworks north of the Alps.
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From these miraculously preserved printing presses 400 years ago,
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came the maps that started the atlas revolution.
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The reason that map-making
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becomes so much part of Dutch life
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is really to do with a confluence of factors. What you have
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is a moment at which the Dutch themselves are very much part of the overseas race.
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They're expanding into the East Indies. They're competing with the Portuguese.
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The want to understand those places as traders and as politicians.
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They want to know about the places they're expanding into.
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The boundaries of geographical knowledge were expanding as never before.
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And in the 100 or more printworks in Antwerp,
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the most highly skilled printers and engravers in northern Europe
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set about turning that knowledge into maps.
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Here at the Golden Compasses,
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400-year-old copper plates are still producing perfect prints.
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For map-makers, it was a time of unprecedented opportunity.
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And one map-maker would rise above them all.
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His contemporary Abraham Ortelius
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called him "the best geographer of our time".
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His name was Gerard Mercator.
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This is an era of intellectuals.
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It's an era of men who are polymaths.
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They specialise in all kinds of things.
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And Mercator is very much one of those men.
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He wants not only to be able to know about his own locality,
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but also to know about the wider world.
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In the 16th century it's all about understanding the universe
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as a product of a divine plan,
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and Mercator is very much one of those men that feels
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through knowledge of the world you can come to knowledge of God.
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To serve God, Mercator used science.
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A man from humble origins, his father was a lowly cobbler.
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Mercator's intellectual ambition was boundless.
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His ideas and his methods transform map-making
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and the way we see the world, forever.
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Using his scientifically rigorous world view, Mercator's projection,
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he mapped the continents to the same accurate scales for the very first time.
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Then he gathered his maps together in a single volume,
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and gave it a name we still use every day.
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He called his book Atlas.
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London's British Library is one of the world's great centres of cartographic learning.
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It is also home to a unique collection of
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Mercator's extraordinary maps, under the care of curator Peter Barber.
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Mercator's Atlas is important because it's the earliest attempt at
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a really scientific view of the world, one that's based on
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deep thought, on the valuation of information,
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and on the presentation of a coherent
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and integrated view of the whole world.
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Geographer and Mercator biographer Nick Crane
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has come to see the Library's Mercator collection at first-hand.
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- Do you think this was actually coloured by Mercator?
- Oh, yeah.
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This, to me, is one of the most exciting books ever published.
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It's the world's first atlas.
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The first bound book of maps that carries the title Atlas.
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It was devised in the late 16th century by Mercator,
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as the ultimate book of the universe.
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It was a cosmography, it was a book that he was attempting to compile
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that would describe absolutely everything in the heavens and on Earth,
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in the whole cosmos - it was a cosmography.
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I've never actually seen
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a Mercator map
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with his own handwriting on it.
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I've seen the prints. I've seen copies.
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In the Atlas, Mercator developed a new method of looking at the world.
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A method that, 400 years later, still seems incredibly modern.
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This is in ink. It's not in pencil, it's ink.
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The beauty of Mercator's Atlas is very much in the idea, the concept,
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and in that sense it's quite invisible. It's invisible beauty. It's a mathematical beauty.
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I can show you very simply just one element of it, which is the zooming element.
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You're very used to Google Earth, just clicking a button
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and zooming in on a panel of the Earth's surface.
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What Mercator does in the same way is to produce five step changes of scale through his atlas.
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For example, you can move in from the world map,
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zoom in a bit further you've got a map of the British Isles,
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and zoom in a bit further, you've got a map of Northern Scotland.
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And move in a bit further, a map of the tip of northern Scotland.
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So it had a very rigorous approach
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to presenting geographical information in such a way that it all made sense.
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You could effectively travel
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seamlessly, virtually across the whole planet
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from the comfort of your own library or scholarly studio.
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This was the era of so-called armchair travel,
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when maps were bought as much for entertainment as for navigation.
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And in his single-minded pursuit of science, and accuracy, Mercator
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had omitted a crucial element in map-making - art and beauty.
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If you read contemporary books about maps, you don't actually
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get very many comments about how nice it is to see exactly where Lisbon is.
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This sort of comments you get is how fantastic it is
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when you're sitting by your fireside
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to see the different parts of the world and the people who live there,
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and the birds that have been found and the activities of the people and to learn about the history.
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This was still the expectation, and Mercator failed to satisfy that.
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And that might help to explain why when his atlas was published,
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it didn't enjoy the great sales that might have been expected
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from a work that was genuinely so trail-blazing.
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The atlas, considered too plain and austere for the time, sold badly.
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But when Mercator died, a shrewd Dutch map publisher,
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Jodocus Hondius, bought the copper plates of his maps.
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And with an eye to a beauty-obsessed market,
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Hondius produced new lavish, illustrated editions of the atlas.
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They became instant bestsellers.
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He had reinvented Mercator.
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Mercator a man about 500 years ahead of his time,
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and he was a long way ahead of his time.
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He produced a rigorous book of mathematically constructed maps
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to a method that we use today.
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And to see these copper plates,
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to my mind desecrated with cartoon characters around the edges,
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and gigantic ships, that was a step back to medieval map-making.
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That's precisely the kind of nonsense that Mercator
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had scraped from the surface of his copper plates quite deliberately.
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He'd have been spinning in his grave if he'd seen what Hondius was doing,
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I'm absolutely certain. He'd have hated it.
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What Mercator hated, the buyers of atlases loved.
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Hondius' success showed that art mattered just as much as science
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in the new world of the atlas.
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In Cecil Court, London's largest concentration of antiquarian map and print shops,
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buyers' tastes remain remarkably unchanged today.
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From my experience as a map seller in the 21st century,
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there's still a demand for decorative maps.
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Given a choice between a map which is scientifically accurate
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or shows something remarkable for the first time,
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and a map perhaps like Blaeu's,
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which is remarkably luxurious and decorative,
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there's always going to be a group of people who are more interested
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in a decorative map, and I can't blame them.
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Blaeu's map here is a wonderful piece of 17th-century art.
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Joan Blaeu, creator of the some of the most ornate maps of the Dutch Golden Age,
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made his spectacular historical map of Britain in the 1660s.
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It's called the Heptarchy, and shows Britain as it was in Saxon times -
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a nation of seven separate kingdoms,
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each king beautifully rendered in the margins of the map.
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Perhaps to our eyes, some of these images seem a little naive or even inappropriate,
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but they're extraordinarily detailed.
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The attention, the care that's been lavished on these, not just the figures in the foreground,
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but the attention that's been lavished on the background detail as well.
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A quite extraordinary amount of work has gone into this, very little of it
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directly connected to the cartography.
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But I suppose in another sense, all of it helping to understand what the map is about.
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By the mid 1600s, the world of map-making
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had moved from Antwerp to Amsterdam.
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Here, the Dutch had thrown off the yoke of Catholic Spanish occupation.
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Amsterdam was now liberal, democratic, and rich.
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Its new wealthy merchant class had cash to spare
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and an eye for prestige objects.
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The arts flourished with painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer.
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The Dutch Golden Age was poised to enter its most spectacular phase,
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and atlases and art would be at the heart of it.
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Art in 17th-century Holland was completely revolutionised.
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I mean, they got rid of the dominance of the Catholic church.
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They'd proclaimed their independence.
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It was almost like a new beginning.
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It was like saying, actually, there's a whole new world out there.
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And we're going to look at it as if for the very first time.
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This is a time when people are looking for somewhere to spend their money.
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They're stopping putting money into churches,
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because that's a very Catholic thing to do, to adorn churches.
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So they're looking for things to spend their money on, and you see that reflected in the Dutch art.
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It begins to become more ordinary scenes, scenes of everyday life,
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scenes of mercantile activity, of things people are familiar with.
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And atlases are an ideal object for them to start putting their money into.
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So while the rich of Italy and Spain commissioned churches,
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the rich of Holland commissioned atlases.
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And in the 1660s, the atlas itself
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became a tool of commerce and politics.
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It is partly about display of wealth and also technical superiority.
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If you bear in mind that something like Blaeu's Atlas Major,
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we're talking about 600 maps in 11 folio volumes,
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was used as a diplomatic gift -
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for example, a set was given to Algiers.
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You have to imagine this book, with its extraordinary broad margins,
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sometimes heightened in gold,
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and it's a symbol of Dutch technical superiority.
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And I think that's one reason why the Dutch were so interested in maps.
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The ultimate gesture in the political world of Dutch map-making was the Klencke Atlas.
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Made 350 years ago, it's still ranked by
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the Guinness Book of Records as the largest atlas in the world.
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And it's the jewel in the crown of the British Library's map collection.
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This atlas is something that I've been aware of
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ever since I joined the British Library, because of its sheer size.
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And having the responsibility for it is actually quite awe-inspiring.
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I mean, it is quite something.
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I've been in the library for 35 years.
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I've never had the opportunity to open it in the way that I'm opening it now.
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Created by Dutch sugar merchant Johannes Klencke as a gift for King Charles II
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on his Restoration in 1660, its purpose was to buy royal favour.
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Well, the frontispiece is something which was intended to impress.
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And perhaps the most important thing about it is,
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if you look at the surroundings, they're all gold.
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So it immediately establishes that this is really something splendid,
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and this is further emphasised by the wording of the dedication.
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"Soli Britannico Reduci Carolo Secundo Regum Augustissimo."
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Translated, that means, "To the British son restored to his kingdoms, the most august Charles II."
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This is a golden book meant for a returning son.
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Made up of 41 of the finest Dutch wall maps,
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the Atlas was the ultimate political sweetener
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that would encourage Britain, Klencke hoped, to buy his sugar.
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The King loved it, placing it in his private cabinet of rarities,
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where the diarist John Evelyn saw it, describing "a vast book of maps in a volume near four yards long".
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The atlas is extremely precious.
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It's one of the most important things the British Library has.
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It's also, despite appearances, one of the most fragile.
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To leaf through it like this,
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as carefully as one can, is just a unique experience.
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In a sense, er...
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I shouldn't really say this, but you almost become Charles II. You become Evelyn.
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You're actually seeing the things with their eyes, and, if you like, with the real dimensions.
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This is sort of reliving the past,
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almost 100%.
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For Klencke personally, the map delivered the hoped-for rewards.
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He received a knighthood from a king deeply impressed
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with one of the most lavish gifts of the age.
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The Atlas offered not just the knowledge of the world to a powerful monarch,
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but a dazzling display of the greatest Dutch art of the day.
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When you think, for instance, that the joins on this particular map
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were etched by Pieter Lastman, who taught Rembrandt, it's just superb.
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Look at this - I'm looking now at a map of Germany surrounded by
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beautifully executed views of the different towns of Germany,
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and with tremendous decorative features - the coats of arms, the allegories all around.
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I'm actually not surprised that Vermeer wanted to include this sort of map in his paintings.
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And this map is in much better condition
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than the maps painted by him in his paintings.
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One of the great masters of the Golden Age,
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Vermeer was fascinated by maps, using them in many paintings.
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For art historians, they are not just background decoration,
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but a mark of how maps had become an integral part of the Dutch psyche.
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I think maps appear in so many of Vermeer's paintings because he finds them ravishing.
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I think very often
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when you look at a Vermeer painting, first off you think,
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"This is a domestic scene, it couldn't be more quiet."
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And then suddenly, it's almost like a sort of shock, actually.
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You see that beyond the figures, beyond the tables and the chairs
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and all the rest of it, there is this image hanging on the wall,
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often quite large, often very detailed,
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and it's an image of the rest of the world, effectively.
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And you think to yourself, actually Vermeer must be saying,
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"Although I'm concentrating on these small little episodes in tiny little places,
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"I'm also aware, as are we all in 17th-century Holland,
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"of this massive thing out there, which is stretching all around us,
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"and which we are, in fact, discovering."
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They went out there, they colonised, they were great shippers.
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They would travel the oceans.
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They were very brave, actually.
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You can sense that in the maps themselves, in the paintings, this sense of wonder.
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It's almost like a miracle.
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Nowhere expresses the miracle and wealth of the Golden Age
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like the Burgerzaal in Amsterdam.
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It's a monument to how maps themselves had become central to Dutch culture.
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From the giant hemispheres in the marble floor,
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to the globes in the light fittings.
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And towering above above it all is the figure of Atlas,
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supporting the world on his mighty shoulders.
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But the ultimate achievement of Dutch Golden Age map-making resides here at the British Library.
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An atlas that combines the precision and ambition of Mercator,
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the beauty and art of Blaeu, and the sheer scale of Klencke.
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And here it is, emerging from the British Library's basement
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on a convoy of trolleys, a 24-volume atlas.
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Like a hymn of praise to the Golden Age that produced it,
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it covers just one country - the Netherlands.
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Named the Beudeker Collection, after the super-wealthy merchant
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who assembled it, even its bindings are tooled in gold.
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This priceless set of atlases represents wealth and luxury
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on a scale not seen before or since in the history of maps.
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Well, this whole atlas dates from the end of the Golden Age of Dutch map-making.
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And it's the fruit of the development of maps
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in the Netherlands since about 1600.
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So the scale of the maps goes from maps of the whole of the Netherlands,
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to plans of individual buildings and even individual parts of gardens.
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It covers the whole range of human experience.
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And it's produced by people who've had generations of
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experience and training in map-making.
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So this reflects itself in two ways.
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First of all, the quality of the engraving is absolutely superlative.
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Secondly, the quality of the colouring is superb.
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I don't think you'll find any atlas
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which has better colouring than these atlases here.
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In the 17th century, the Dutch map trade
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became so dominant in the whole of the world,
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that it became possible for artists to earn a living just colouring maps.
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The results are amazing.
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The colouring was developed to a level of sophistication
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that had never been seen before, and really has never been seen since.
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The maps not only reflect his pride in the Netherlands,
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they show not only the towns and the provinces,
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but also they depict the famous people and their homes,
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and they depict the homes of these famous people because Beudeker knew these people.
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He knew the regents, he was one of them.
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So this is a collection of maps of the Netherlands,
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viewed not only from a standpoint of almost near perfection in map-making,
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but by a person who stood at the pinnacle of society
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and wanted to show just how splendid the nation he lived in was.
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From its beginnings, rolling out maps on the printing presses of Antwerp,
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the atlas revolution of the Golden Age of Mapping
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brought cartography, art and commerce together as never before.
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It changed the way the world looked forever,
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and produced maps the like of which the world may never see again.
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To explore the new world of digital mapping, and to find out more about
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the British Library Map Exhibition, go to bbc.co.uk/beautyofmaps
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Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
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E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk
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