Wolffstein.

Title

Wolffstein.

Description

General view of the town of Wolfstein with the ruins of Neu-Wolfstein Castle on the Königsberg. Furthermore, at the top right, the coat of arms of the Wolfstein noble family.

ca. 1646

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

Wolfstein is a town in the district of Kusel in Rhineland-Palatinate. Wolfstein was founded in 1275 on the orders of Rudolf I of Habsburg and was immediately granted town charter. Wolfstein passed to the Palatine Counts in 1357 under Emperor Charles IV. After 1792 French revolutionary troops had occupied the region and annexed it after the Peace of Campo Formio (1797). From 1798 to 1804 Wolfstein belonged to the First French Republic and subsequently to the Napoleonic Empire. Due to the agreements reached at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and an exchange treaty with Austria, the region became part of the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1816. In 1818, Wolfstein was assigned to the Kusel district commissariat in the Bavarian Rhine district before this was transformed into a district office in 1862.