 contributed this world map with a lengthy introduction to the 1532 edition of ‘Novus Orbis Regionum’ compiled by the protestant theologians Simon Grynaeus and Johann Huttich - the latter compiled most of the work. The contents stem from the German-speaking, Protestant intellectual milieu that produced other important early geographical publications. Huttich was able to access accounts of early Spanish and Portuguese voyagers to America while in Madrid as part of the embassy associated with Charles V's election as Holy Roman Emperor. Included are the three voyages of Christopher Columbus, as well as those of Amerigo Vespucci, Pedro Alonso Niño, Vicente Yánez Pinzón, Pedro Alvares Cabral, and Alvise da Cadamosto. In addition to the Portuguese discoveries in Brazil and the East, Huttich incorporates accounts of Marco Polo and material collected by Peter Martyr. There are also numerous accounts of other European voyages. Huttich's work is one of the earliest to bring together in a single volume a number of otherwise extremely rare contemporary accounts of the earliest explorers, some of which are now lost in the original.

Geographically, Münster based the configuration of the Americas on 

’s world map of 1520, while radically adjusting the projection from a cordiform to an oval. He retained Apianus’s tentative separation of North and South America while naming the former ‘Terra de Cuba’. Münster used different cartographic sources for Africa and was to reuse much of this information later for the continental map in his ‘Cosmographia’ of 1540, including the splendid image of the sailing ship.

The Sunderland Collection

This famous and beautiful map, published in 1532, was created by Sebastian Münster for an edition of ‘Novus Orbis Regionum’ compiled by the protestant theologians Simon Grynaeus and Johann Huttich. It features stunningly engraved elaborate borders by great Renaissance artist, Hans Holbein the Younger. It anticipates Münster's greatest work, the 'Cosmographia', and his oval world map produced eight years later.

The map draws on many sources, including Petrus Apianus. The illustrations around the map contain sensational and fanciful descriptions of the exotic spices, flora, fauna, and peoples who were believed to populate the four known continents. Exquisitely rendered sea monsters and galleons ply the oceans on the map.

At the poles, two angels are shown turning the Earth. This alludes to the radical claim by Nicolaus Copernicus that the Earth moved around the sun and turned on its axis. This heliocentric theory disrupted earlier Ptolemaic and Christian concepts that the Earth was the centre of the Universe.

The spectacular border by Hans Holbein the Younger (d.1543) makes this map especially unique. One of the most celebrated artists of the Northern Renaissance, Holbein was working in Basel at the time before moving to London to become the official court painter to King Henry VIII. The illustrations in the corners loosely represent the flora and fauna of the four continents, and include depictions of their supposed inhabitants. These semi-allegorical representations combine the ancient ethnography of Pliny the Elder’s so-called ‘monstrous races’ with sensationalised encounters recounted by contemporary explorers.

A particularly intriguing detail in the border is the depiction of two angels energetically turning cranks inserted into the North and South Poles. This is likely a reference to Nicolaus Copernicus’ theories that advocated for a heliocentric solar system and a rotating Earth. While Copernicus’ fundamental work ‘De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium’ would not be published until 1543 - eleven years after this map - his theories had achieved considerable currency among Northern European humanists with whom Sebastian Münster and Hans Holbein the Younger were closely associated. Ptolemaic celestial theory - the generally accepted orthodoxy - demanded a stationary Earth and this splendid image is therefore one of the earliest references to Copernicus’ hugely important, and at the time highly controversial theory.

Only a few years after this map was published, Münster completed his ‘Geographia Universalis Vetus et Nova’, an updated edition of Claudius Ptolemy’s ‘Geographia’, which included twenty-one 'modern' maps that would influence Abraham Ortelius and other early atlas makers. He is best known for his ‘Cosmographia Universalis’, first published in 1544 and released in at least thirty-five editions by 1628.

Sebastian Münster’s celebrated world map with superb border decoration attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger, which cleverly reveals a implied understanding of the controversial Copernican heliocentric theory.

Münster's World Map, with Hans Holbein the Younger