Claes Jansz. Visscher was a leading Amsterdam map publisher whose output played a central role in shaping Dutch cartography in the first half of the seventeenth century. He established his publishing house in 1611 on the Kalverstraat, close to leading contemporaries such as Pieter van den Keere (#8, #109, #122, #155, #217, #273, #285) and Jodocus Hondius I (#80, #212, #253, #272). The firm was continued by his son Nicolaes Visscher I (#25, #93, #129, #287, #299) and later by his grandson Nicolaes Visscher II, maintaining its prominence well into the eighteenth century.
Following the death of the publisher Cornelis Claesz. in 1612, the copperplates for Barent Langenes’s Caert-thresoor (1598; #294, #295, #296, #383, #388) passed through several hands before being acquired by Visscher. In 1649 he reissued and expanded this material as Tabularum geographicarum contractarum libri quatuor denuo recogniti, a compact atlas divided into four parts: Europae, Asiae (this titlepage), Africae, and Americae.
Alongside the inherited Caert-thresoor plates, the 1649 edition includes twenty-three newly engraved maps, among them ’t Landt van de Eendracht (#12), Anthoni van Diemens Landt aldaereerst beseylt ofte ontdeckt by de Schepen Heemskerck ende Zeehaen den 24 November 1642 (#11), Java Maior (#371), and several plates engraved engraved by Benjamin Wright (#369, #370). The atlas also includes two revised world maps: Typus Orbis Terrarum (this map) and Iehova (#293), both originally engraved fifty-one years earlier by Jodocus Hondius for Langenes’s Caert-thresoor (1598; #294 and #296).
This engraved plate depicts a standing male figure in “Oriental” dress, turbaned and holding a bow, with a cloak draped over his right arm. He leans against a low parapet upon which are arranged various objects suggestive of wealth and abundance — including a bird, strings of pearls, large vessels, and a shield — alongside plumes and a sword.
Peter van der Krogt, ed., Koeman’s Atlantes Neerlandici, vol. 3 (’t Goy-Houten: HES & De Graaf, 1997–), 428–34.
Prescott, “A Little Master’s Piece,” The La Trobe Journal, 79 (2007): 31–43
Baynton-Williams, “Barent Langenes: An Unrecorded Miniature Atlas,” Map Forum 2 (1999)
See also https://mapforum.com/2022/01/24/barent-langenes-unrecorded-miniature-atlas/ Also a zoomable image at SLV (Image 8).