Atlas returned to the Berlin State Library after being lost during the war
Press release from 02/12/2010
A few days ago, the Berlin State Library received back an atlas from the 17th century that had recently been found in the archives of the French Foreign Ministry. The head of the archive, Jean Mendelson, presented the work to the President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Hermann Parzinger, during a ceremony at the French Embassy to mark the awarding of the insignia of a Knight of Art and Literature to Barbara Schneider-Kempf, Director General of the Berlin State Library.
Hermann Parzinger emphasised: "I am delighted that this magnificent volume has now returned to the Staatsbibliothek. Its reappearance shows that lost collections can still be found by both museums and libraries. We will continue to endeavour to recover our own lost works as well as to examine the existing holdings for third-party ownership and return them to their rightful owners, as the Foreign Ministry Archive has now done."
The volume is the fifth of the 12-volume atlas work "Le Grand Atlas Ou Cismographie Blaviane, en laquelle est Exactement Descrite La Terre, La Mer et le Ciel" (Amsterdam, 1667), which was relocated during the Second World War to protect it. The remaining volumes (1 - 4 and 6 - 12) are now in the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow. The whereabouts of volume 5, which has now been discovered and deals with England, were previously unknown. It is no longer possible to reconstruct how it ended up in the French archive. It was found during the consolidation of holdings from several locations of the archive and identified on the basis of the ownership stamps of the former Prussian State Library from the second half of the 19th century.
The "Atlas Maior" by the publishing house Jean Blaeu is a monumental testimony to the Golden Age of Baroque Dutch cartography. It was a gigantic publishing endeavour, as it was published not only in a French edition, but also in a Dutch and a Latin edition, and is much more than just a work of maps. In addition to numerous maps, its twelve volumes also contain extensive texts on the geography and history of the countries and provinces depicted. All maps are printed as copper engravings and coloured by hand. This is not the only reason why each edition of the Atlas Maior is individually designed. In the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, it is possible to directly compare different copies: in addition to the returned single volume, there is also a complete edition in French, Dutch and Latin, as well as two facsimiles of the atlas from other libraries. The returned volume contains more maps than volume 5 of the existing complete French edition.
The map department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin is regarded as the cartographic documentation centre of the Federal Republic of Germany. In its two specialised reading rooms, over one million maps, 32,400 atlases, 500 globes, 154,000 topographical views and 2,500 cartographic CD-ROMs as well as specialist literature from and about all regions of the earth and space can be used. The holdings from the period between 1500 and 1939 with around 450,000 units (in the Unter den Linden building) are among the most important in the world due to the high proportion of hand-drawn maps from the 18th and 19th centuries.
To mark its 150th anniversary, the Map Department is currently showing some cartographic treasures of exceptional quality in the exhibition "Belle Vue on the World". These include the Atlas of the Great Elector (1663), a work from the same period and the same publishing house as the returned volume. After its first stop at the official residence of the Federal President, the exhibition is now open to the public until 20 February in the Potsdamer Straße building of the State Library.
Belle Vue on the world
25. January - 20 February 2010
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Potsdamer Str. 33
Open Mon - Sat, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Admission free