Abraham Ortelius

After his friend Gerard Mercator, Ortelius is the most important 16th-century cartographer. Inspired by Mercator's landmark 1569 Orbis Terrae, he created his own most important work: the 1570 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

This first modern world atlas set the precedent for incorporating a comprehensive world map and a set of clearly related component maps of distinct and smaller regions. This distinguished Ortelius' work from the Ptolemaic Geographia and other atlases that were assemblies of unrelated regional maps.

Typus Orbis Terrarum, the Theatrum's world map, is generally regarded to be a "mother map" because it had a profound and lasting influence on cartography.