imago mundi (11. 911)

Familiar with the image from our faithful cartographer Keir Clarke, we were pleased to learn about the provenance of the Maps Mania mascot as a series of homages to Abraham Ortelius’ 1570 global atlas, later imposed as an eponymous ovular projection and mapped onto the face of a court jester. The anonymous end result is a bit of an enigma left up to the interpretation of the viewer, the vanity of the belief of having encompassed, understood the world and how much, though charted is still terra incognito—then and now, which the constellation of aphorisms around the Fool’s Cap Map redress.