Rare and decorative map focusing on the islands of southeast Asia. A huge compass rose fills the Indian Ocean, an array of indigenous plants and animals are depicted in Nova Hollandia, and the seas are filled with sea monsters and flying fish. This map hardly appears on the market and is very suitable for framing.

Heinrich Scherer (1628-1704)  was a Professor of Hebrew, Mathematics and Ethics at the University of Dillingen until about 1680. Thereafter he obtained important positions as Official Tutor to the Royal Princes of Mantua and Bavaria. It was during his time in Munich as Tutor to the Princely house of Bavaria that his lifetime's work as a cartographer received acclaim and recognition.

Scherer's  Atlas Novus, first published in Munich between 1702 and 1710 and reissued in a second edition between 1730 and 1737 was a revolutionary work in terms of the development of European mapmaking at the beginning of the 18th Century.

What makes Scherer's maps unusual is their highly decorative Catholic iconography and imagery and the revolutionary thematic nature of many of the maps. Scherer himself was a Jesuit and many of the maps draw heavily from the history and development of the Jesuit order since its establishment by St.Ignatius Loyala in the early 16th century when it was the driving force behind the European Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Scherer's maps vividly chart the revival and spread of the Catholic faith in the late 16th and 17th Centuries principally through the efforts of Jesuit missionaries around the globe and most notably in North and South America, South East Asia and the Far East.

Scherer's Atlas forms an important milestone in the development of scientific and thematic cartography, providing a remarkable and revolutionary alternative vision of the World in showing only its major physical and topographical features.