This is a beautiful map of Ireland by mapmaker Abraham Ortelius. Ortelius reached a turning-point in his career in 1564 with the publication of a World Map in eight sheets of which only one copy is known. Other individual maps followed and then he gathered together a collection of maps from contacts among European cartographers and had them engraved in uniform size and issued in 1570 as the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Atlas of the Whole World). Although others had published collections of ‘modern’ maps in book form in earlier years, the Theatrum was the first uniformly sized, systematic collection of maps and hence can be called the first atlas, although that term itself was not used until twenty years later by Mercator.