Brandenburga

Title

Brandenburga

Description

View shows the town of Brandenburg, today Uschakowo in former East Prussia, situated directly on the Vistula Lagoon.

ca. 1640

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

The village of Ushakovo is located on the Vistula Lagoon in the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, in former East Prussia. For the Teutonic Order, Margrave Otto III of Brandenburg built a castle at the mouth of the Frisching in 1266 to monitor the entrance of ships to Königsberg. From 1283 to 1499 it was the seat of a commander. Burned out in 1520, after its restoration it was the seat of a magistrate from 1525 to 1752. In the protection of the castle had developed a Lischke, which received the Handfeste in 1513. From 1818 Brandenburg belonged to the Heiligenbeil district in the Königsberg administrative district of the province of East Prussia. After the occupation by the Red Army in 1945, the village fell to the Soviet Union and was renamed Ushakovo in 1947 after a buried Soviet soldier named Ushakov.