Matthew Merian

European Engraver and Historian

In the work of the Basle-born engraver Matthew Merian, we have an example of graphic art at its most documentary. Merian, part cartographer, part topographer, part social scientist, used his art as a kind of visual journalism, to record for posterity the spread of city and country life, the political traumas and the daily round in the first half of the seventeenth century in Europe. He worked in Paris, Frankfurt and a host of other towns, particularly in Germany and the Low Countries. His panoramas teem with incidents like modern-day comic strips. We get a glimpse of an engraver's tools and copper plates in use - when this film was made in the late 1950s, the narrator described the `burins, scrapers, crayons, the tools of the copperplate engraver' as those of an art `nowadays almost forgotten.' Today, after a resurgence of interest in print-making, the tools of the intaglio printer are once more widely in use among artists (see Etching, page 245).

For more information see section 9

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