He was also one of the first professional cartographers, drawing and designing maps on commission. This is one of ten woodcut maps he produced for volume three of an edition of Giovanni Ramusio s travel collection, Delle Navigazioni et Viaggi. Relief and various illustrations are drawn in elevation and juxtaposed upon the map. Rivers, drawn in plain, are laid atop mountains that appear frontally and define the limits of the mapped landscape. Changes in elevation are hinted at through the use of hatching, which in turn creates the effect of shadow.
Color is used on the map to differentiate the lush green valleys from the brown mountainous areas.
The Tabula Peutingeriana, or Peutinger Table, is the only surviving example of a Roman map. Although geographic relations are not drawn to any sale, the map includes some 5,000 place names and gives accurate numeric distances between points. A medieval manuscript copy of the map was found in a monastery in the sixteenth century, and was once owned by the sixteenth-century German humanist Konrad Peuntinger, from whom its name derives. Parts of the map were engraved and printed in 1591 by Marcus Velser. Ortelius re-drew the map in 1598, and it was printed by the firm of Moretus.