One of Visscher’s most important and iconic works, this rare double-page map presents the world on Mercator’s projection, overlaid with a longitudinal and latitudinal grid and red-lined tropics.

Surrounding the map are elaborate Baroque-style illustrations. The left and right borders feature alternating vignettes of major world cities and ethnographic depictions of various races. The upper and lower borders display equestrian portraits of Julius Caesar followed by the first eleven Roman emperors of the Principate, in chronological order—earning the map its colloquial title, The Twelve Caesars Map. Each corner contains a female personification of one of the four continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.

The map incorporates several 17th-century geographical misconceptions: Greenland is mistakenly connected to North America; the semi-mythical Strait of Anian separates America and Asia; false lakes appear in South America and Africa; and the Great Lakes of North America are absent, with the St. Lawrence River shown instead originating from an unnamed western lake. A vast, vaguely defined Terra Australis, also labelled “Magellanica,” merges Antarctica and Australia into a single landmass. A circular inset in the lower-left corner shows a polar projection of this southern continent, mirrored by a similar inset of the Arctic in the lower-right.

Notably, California is correctly depicted as a peninsula, and the recently discovered Hudson Bay is included.