The Spanish fleet, led by Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521), reached the Philippines in 1521 after an eighteen-month voyage across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. At the edge of the world’s largest empire, the archipelago became a linchpin in the first global-scale colonial project, underscoring its distance from the Spanish metropole. Early colonial objects produced in, arriving to, and exported from the Spanish Philippines in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries illustrated two strategies: images of the globe’s intractable vastness and the Spanish Empire’s desire to manage, explore, and exploit it. I take “scale” [Sp. escala] as both a historical term and a heuristic for understanding how works of art developed ideas about the expansion of the globe. In art history, the concept of scale often describes the perceived difference between an object’s size in a work of art and its expected dimensions based on the viewer’s own bodily scale and their daily experiences. In the early modern period, however, the word scale, as it appears in travelogues and correspondence across the empire, indicates “the measurement” of the ground between regions (the spatial and temporal intervals during a voyage) and “a stopover on a journey” (a waystation for provisions, route calibration, and investigation of local cultures). Escala, therefore, connects the relative size of objects destined for shipment to the enterprise of long-distance empire building as conceived by Spanish explorers, artists, cartographers, and patrons. This dissertation explores how Spanish colonists manipulated the scale of works of art to assert their authority over their immense territorial expanse in the colonial Philippines.