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The frontispiece in the 1640 edition of Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning (originally published 1605), engraved by William Marshall. Folio. The terrestrial globe (upper left), labelled Mundus Visibilis, is joined by clasped hands to the blank sphere (upper right) labelled Mundus Intellectualis, representing the connection between reason and experience. The composition borrows from the iconography of the frontispiece to Bacon's Novum organum (1620), in which a ship sails beyond the Pillars of Hercules, representing the limit of the known world. Here, the pillars are replaced by representations of sound learning, with obelisks symbolizing the universities of Oxford and Cambridge supported by plinths composed of the constituent parts of science (left) and philosophy (right). The motto, 'Many shall pass through and knowledge will be increased', suggests that discovery is made possible through the conjunction of learning and experience. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. (Image in the public domain.)
Source publication
Throughout the early modern period, the intellectual and symbolic value of globes ensured these objects enjoyed a broad cultural appeal. Consequently, their design was subject to a wide range of social, commercial and intellectual pressures. The ways in which the intellectual and cultural concerns of seventeenth-century England became manifest in t...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... was surely not accidental that in the frontispiece to the 1640 edition of Bacon's Of the Advancement of Learning the terrestrial sphere labelled Mundus Visibilis is joined by clasped hands to another (but blank) sphere labelled Mundus Intellectualis, as an explicit articulation of the connection between experience and true knowledge of the world (Fig. 3). The same idea is expressed in the frontispiece to Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum (1627), where it is the terrestrial globe itself that is labelled Mundus ...
