Although unsigned by him, Durer's map was, after Waldseemuller’s of 1507 and 1516, the largest and visually most impressive, early world map to have been produced in woodcut. The map, one of the first on a stereographic projection, was produced in collaboration with Johann Stabius, the court astronomer to Maximillian I. The pair had previously worked upon a set of star charts - the first printed charts of the heavens - which also bear the date 1515. It is hard not to assume that these two works were meant as companion pieces. With the world map’s rather unsuccessful attempt to render the globular world as a flat sphere, the pieces certainly bear a uniformity of design. The map features are essentially Ptolemaic, with Europe and East Asia appearing on the extreme left and right of the map. The only nod to modernity is the acknowledgement of the circumnavigation of Africa, which was taken from Martin Behaim’s globe of 1492. To the bottom right is the privilege dated 1515, with the arms of Johann Stabius lower left. The borders also bear the arms of, and dedication to, the work's patron, Cardinal Matthaus Lang, Archbishop of Salzburg.
It is in the depiction of the twelve winds that Dürer's hand is most evident. Each wind is depicted as a head borne upon a cloud with a winged headdress, a few bearing peacock feathers, all with very expressive faces.
Although the map is dated 1515 (as well as 1781), the only surviving examples are of the 1781 issue and a few strikes pulled in 1864. Likely fewer than ten impressions in all survive. The woodblocks for the map have survived and are at the National Library of Austria. The map was published by the Austrian scholar and artist, Johann Adam von Bartsch who would later produce a catalogue of Old Master prints, one of the cornerstones for the study of history of old prints. In 1781 Bartsch was on the staff of the Royal Court Library in Vienna (becoming Head Curator of its print collection in 1791), when woodblocks by or associated with Durer were found at the Castle Ambras in the Tyrol and at the former Jesuit College in Graz, Austria. At the time of the publication from these blocks in 1781, many were already known as great rarities with no impressions from the sixteenth-century extant.
With the financial help of the publisher, Joseph Elden von Kurzbeck, this map was published in a portfolio with 13 other woodcuts, in a very limited edition, with an introduction by Bartsch.
OCLC records examples of the portfolio at Herzogin Ann Amalia Biblothk; Staats Bibliothk Zu Berlin; Bibliotheque Nationale De France (possibly just text); Danish Union Catalogue & National Library; British Library. Kurth, Dr. Willi The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Durer.