Ichnographia Antverpiae

Title

Ichnographia Antverpiae

Description

Map shows the city map of Antwerp with partial map of the surroundings of Antwerp. With decorative ships on the Scheldt.

ca. 1720

Artist

Weigel (1654-1725)

Christoph Weigel the Elder (1654-1725) was a German engraver, art dealer and publisher. Christoph Weigel learned the art of copperplate engraving in Augsburg. After various positions, including in Vienna and Frankfurt am Main, he acquired citizenship in Nuremberg in 1698. The first Weigel work from his own, successfully run publishing house in Nuremberg was Die Bilderlust from 1698. This publishing house published around 70 books and engravings during his lifetime. One of his most important works is the status book from 1698. In it, Weigel described and described more than two hundred types of handicrafts and services, each illustrated by a copper engraving, based on life. Because Weigel visited almost all the workshops himself, drew and observed on site, agreed the content of his articles with the master craftsmen and signed important equipment from the original. Weigel worked particularly brilliantly in the scraping and line manner. He was the first engraver to use a kind of machine for the underground. In Nuremberg he worked very closely with the imperial geographer and cartographer Johann Baptist Homann (1664–1724) to create his maps. His younger brother Johann Christoph Weigel ran an art dealership in Nuremberg around the same time and was also very successful.

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.