Antverpia

Title

Antverpia

Description

Plan of Antwerp from a bird's-eye view with index and a magnificent coat of arms.

ca. 1642

Artist

Merian (1593-1650)

Matthäus Merian (1593 – 1650) , born in Basel, learned the art of copperplate engraving in Zurich and subsequently worked and studied in Strasbourg, Nancy, and Paris, before returning to Basel in 1615. The following year he moved to Frankfurt, Germany where he worked for the publisher Johann Theodor de Bry. He married his daughter, Maria Magdalena 1617. In 1620 they moved back to Basel, only to return three years later to Frankfurt, where Merian took over the publishing house of his father-in-law after de Bry's death in 1623. In 1626 he became a citizen of Frankfurt and could henceforth work as an independent publisher. He is the father of Maria Sibylla Merian, who later published her the famous and wellknown studies of flowers, insects and butterflies.

Historical Description

Antwerp a port city in the Belgian region of Flanders and the capital of the province of Antwerp. The city was first mentioned in documents in 726. After the division of the Frankish Empire, which began in 843, and other, mostly warlike, divisions of the Middle Kingdom, Antwerp became part of the Eastern Frankish Empire, the early medieval forerunner of the Holy Roman Empire, and received city rights in 1291. The city experienced its first heyday in the 14th century. Thanks to its port and cloth trade, it was a leading trading center and financial center in Europe. Antwerp fell to Burgundy in 1430 and to Habsburg in 1477. Antwerp was the end point of an important medieval long-distance trade route, the Brabanter Straße. It was a trade fair route that ran from Leipzig via Erfurt, Marburg, Siegen, Cologne, Aachen and Liège to Antwerp. A large part of the former East-West trade in furs, hardware and cloth was carried out through them. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Antwerp was one of the largest cities in the world, at times the most important trading metropolis in Europe and an important cultural center where artists such as Peter Paul Rubens worked.