H. Basnage - 'T Groot Waerelds Tafereel - 1721

Basnage, Jacobus:

The Great World Scene
Wherein are set forth the Holy and Worldly Histories and Changes since the Creation of the World, up to the End of the Revelation of John.

1721, Dutch

Profusely illustrated: hand-coloured, engraved title page (the illustrated accompanying plates are also hand-coloured), 2 double-page maps, 1 double-page view, 140 half-page etchings, numerous vignettes, illustrated by Romeyn de Hooghe, C. Huibertz and C. Luyken.


This monumental, richly illustrated work is less a classical edition of the Bible than a grand pictorial panorama of salvation and world history, unfolding sacred and secular scenes from Creation to Revelation. At its center are the opulent copper engravings — mainly by Romeyn de Hooghe — which present rites, daily life, architecture, and the symbolic world of the Jewish-Christian cosmos in impressive tableaux.

The illustrations fuse narrative historiography with a pronounced emblematic and mythological visual language, so that theological instruction and visual spectacle merge. In addition to scenes from the Old and New Testament, there are powerfully staged apocalyptic and allegorical motifs: the Archangel Michael in battle with dragons and demons, the Whore of Babylon, Lucifer’s fall and downfall, demonic beings and personifications such as Chronos, or the allegorical depiction of the Trinity in complex symbolic compositions. As a result, the book becomes a splendid pictorial Bible that merges biblical history, mythology, and Baroque symbolism into a dense, multilayered visual program.


41 x 26 cm. 482 pages. Large folio format; along the bottom edge there is some water staining and a bit of browning, slight foxing; the first two leaves have been rehinged, new endpapers in a newer quarter-leather binding. Otherwise very well preserved, with the many, sometimes double-sided illustrations in the large folio format.