1579 Philip Galle Portrait of Abraham Ortelius

Philip Galle (1537 – March 1612) was a Dutch publisher, best known to the map world for his role as Abraham Ortelius' longtime publisher. He also was active in publishing engraved prints of the paintings of old masters, which he also engraved. Galle was born in Haarlem in the Netherlands, where he was a pupil of humanist and engraver Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert. He married Catharina van Rollant in 1569. They had five children who later became active as artists. He worked for a time under Antwerp and publisher and engraver Hieronymus Cock, and began independent work in 1563. He moved to Antwerp about this time, across the street from Abraham Ortelius; he was a friend of printer Christopher Plantin. He took over Cock's publishing business in 1570 managed Cock's press and succeeded Cock in 1570 and was received as a citizen of Antwerp the following year. His publishing house proved successful and his heirs continued the business well into the next century. More by this mapmaker...

Adriaen Thomasz. Key (c. 1544 – 1589) was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and printmaker active in Antwerp. He is most known for his specialty work on portraits and altarpieces. Little is known of his early life. He is believed to have been born in Antwerp in 1544. He trained for a time under glass painter Jan Hack III, and was registered as a pupil at the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1558. It may have been as early as this that he was employed by Antwerp painter Willem Key. He would eventually take over the shop, but the two were not related: in fact, he adopted his former employer's surname when he took over the shop in 1567; previously he went by Adreaen Thomasz., or Thomaszoon. It was that year that he was admitted to the Guild as a master painter. He appears to have been very politically nimble. Despite his Calvinist beliefs, he remained in Antwerp and took students during and after the Spanish sack of the city in 1585; despite remaining there, he received commissions from William of Orange (leader of the Dutch Revolt.) His death in or after 1589 is supposed due to his disappearance from the historical record at that point: it is not actually known that he died then, or simply finally abandoned the city. Learn More...

Abraham Ortelius (April 14, 1527 - June 28, 1598) also known as Ortels, was a cartographer, geographer, and cosmographer of Brabant, active in Antwerp. He was the creator of the first modern atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and is a seminal figure in the history of cartography. Along with Gerard Mercator and Gemma Frisius, he was a founder of the Netherlandish school of cartography. His connections with Spain - culminating in his 1575 appointment as Royal Cartographer to King Phillip II of Spain - gave him unmatched access to Spanish geographical knowledge during a crucial period of the Age of Discovery. Ortelius was born in 1527 in Antwerp. In 1547 he entered the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as an illuminator of maps. He began trading in books, prints, and maps, traveling regularly to the Frankfurt book and print fair, where in 1554 he met Mercator. He accompanied Mercator on journeys throughout France in 1560 and it was at this time, under Mercator's influence, that he appears to have chosen his career as a scientific geographer. His first published geographic work appeared in 1564, an eight-sheet cordiform world map. A handful of other maps preceded the 1570 publication of the first edition of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, which would prove to be his life work. Appearing with but 53 maps in its first edition, Ortelius' work expanded with new maps added regularly. By 1592, it had 134 maps. Many of Ortelius' maps remained the standard for nearly a century. He traveled extensively, but his genius was as a compiler, locating the best informed maps on which to base his own. His contacts throughout Europe and extending even (via the Portuguese) to the Far East were formidable. Moreover, many of his maps were based on his own scholarship, particularly his historical works. His theories of geography were particularly ahead of his time with respect to the notion of continental drift, the possibility of which he mused on as early as 1596, and which would be proven correct centuries later.

In a sense his greatest achievement was his successful navigation of the religious and political violence endemic to his city throughout his adult life: The Dutch Revolt, or Eighty Years' War (1568 - 1648), fully embroiled Antwerp. Although outwardly and officially recognized as Catholic (Arias Montanus vouched for Ortelius' Catholic orthodoxy prior to his appointment as Royal Geographer), Ortelius was able to separate himself from the religious furor which characterized the war in the low countries. Ortelius showed a glimpse of himself in a letter to a friend, regarding humanist Justus Lipsius: 'I do not know whether he is an adherent of the Pope or a Calvinist, but if he has ears to hear, he will neither be one nor the other, for sins are committed on both sides'. Ortelius' own explorations of Biblical history in his maps, and the Christogram contained in his own motto, suggest him to be a religious man, but his abjuration of political religious authorities mark him as an individualist. His tombstone at St Michael's Præmonstratensian Abbey in Antwerp bears the inscription, Quietis cultor sine lite, uxore, prole. ('served quietly, without accusation, wife, and offspring.') Learn More...