Jacob van Deventer (cartographer)

Jacob van Deventer (also Jacob Roelofs, * 1505 in Kampen (Netherlands), † 1575 in Cologne ) was a cartographer of the 16th century.

Life and work

Jacob van Deventer spent his youth in the city of Deventer, which explains its name. Even as a 15 - year-old boy he began to study medicine in Leuven; later he studied mathematics and their sub-areas for surveying and preparation of accurate maps, in Dutch: country meet customer called.

Around 1530 he must have received from Charles V commissioned to capture the individual provinces of the Netherlands cartographically. Here were, for example, 1536 map of Brabant finished, in 1542 those of Holland, but they are all only in later Nachstichen known, most of which copies have been lost in Wroclaw since 1945.

1558 was Jacob van Deventer from the Spanish king Philip II a second job, now the most important cities in the territory of the then Spanish Netherlands to map. Moreover he still tickets of several smaller towns in what is now Belgium. Thus arose about 300 to 1570 with watercolors colored cityscapes, remained of which 222 received in two anthologies; a third volume is lost. Van Deventer lived for this work some time in Mechelen north of Brussels. In 1572 he had to flee to Cologne, where his maps of Georg Braun for his printed atlas were received.

Jacob van Deventer was one of the first cartographers who used the triangulation for making cards ( Van Deventer mostly about scale 1:8000 ). Van Deventer had the habit at first a sketch minuut ( 1 copy ) called to make with Dutch inscriptions. Many of these minutes are now in the Royal Library of Brussels. Then he worked the map in more detail, and this made ​​the inscriptions of these so-called network card in Latin. The majority of these cards is in the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid. Finally, he then made even more detailed maps of each city side.