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Abstract
Matthäus Merian, a native of Basel, arrived in Paris in 1610 soon after the assassination of Henri IV, when the new king, Louis XIII, was only nine years old. At that time France was exhausted by war and famine, divided between Protestants and Catholics and struggling to recover. The regent, Marie de Médicis, soon to be confronted by public discontent, was urgently trying to consolidate the fragile Bourbon dynasty by rekindling the universal veneration of the late king for the benefit of the young monarch. Merian's plan of Paris was created with a similar objective. Rejecting the bird's‐eye style of existing plans, he based his work on the rules of perspective as outlined in Jean Cousin's Livre de perspective (1560). The symbolic message conveyed through Merian's arrangement of the map's decorative elements was supported by the main axes of perspective in the city plan. Merian's map was copied on numerous occasions, but the updated decorations lost their natural link with the map. The copies reflect the shift from the concept of royalty incarnated within the king's person towards a more abstract notion of monarchy that refers to the state apparatus of government.
Dr Catherine Bousquet‐Bressolier is a member of the research unit PRODIG, where she coordinates applied research on early maps, and a lecturer in the historical section of the École pratique des hautes études, Paris.
Notes
Dr Catherine Bousquet‐Bressolier is a member of the research unit PRODIG, where she coordinates applied research on early maps, and a lecturer in the historical section of the École pratique des hautes études, Paris.
1. Dietrich Meyer is thought to have been the inventor of soft‐ground etching. The suggestion that Meyer passed his secret recipe to Merian, made by Lucas Heinrich Wüthrich, ‘Matthaeus Merian der Ältere’, in Neue Deutsche Biographi (Berlin, Dunker und Humboldt, 1994), 17: 135–38, contradicts the opinion of earlier biographers. Meyer also experimented with the use of pastel: see the online encyclopaedia LoveToKnow 1911 (2004; ⟨http://75.1911encyclopedia.org/⟩ (article ‘Pastel’).
2. Brentel worked in the Antwerp workshop of Martin de Vos (1532–1603) from 1596 to 1600, where he encountered some of the best artists and engravers in the city. Brentel was well known as an engraver and even more as a miniaturist. He introduced Merian to the Flemish style, and especially to the urban prospects drawn by Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600) which were published in Braun and Hogenberg's Civitates orbis terrarum, 6 vols. (1572–1617). Although Merian did not embark on his perspective plan of Paris until some years later, there can be no doubt that the idea was Flemish.
3. The painter La Ruelle, about whom little appears to be known, supplied Brentel with several series of important preparatory drawings, including the plan of Nancy that Merian engraved. Brentel was interested in the question of perspective. While in Antwerp, he had met and been stimulated by Hans Vredeman de Vries, a specialist in perspective. De Vries had engraved various triumphal entries, such as the one showing François d'Anjou's entry into Antwerp in 1582. Brentel certainly had access to Vredeman de Vries's Architectura (1559), effectively an expanded edition of Sebastiano Serlio's treatise, with identical title, of 1537.
4. Jean Pélerin, called Viator, De artificiali P[er]spectiva (Toul, 1505). The 1505 edition was published in facsimile by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Papers no. 8), in 1938, and the 1509 edition, with a commentary by Liliane Brion‐Guerry (Paris, Jardin de Flore, 1978), is also available. The first edition of Viator's opus, containing 44 folio‐sized pages, of which only six are text with the rest woodcuts, is the oldest work dedicated to perspective. A third edition followed in 1521: see Liliane Brion‐Guerry, Jean Pélerin Viator, sa place dans l'histoire de la perspective (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1962), in which she analyses the impact of Viator, particularly on Serlio and Jean Cousin.
5. Le profil de la ville cite universite de Paris dont l'aspect est pris depuis la montaigne de Belleville (Bibliothèque nationale de France, estampes, rés. Hennin, XX 1798). Compare Lucas Heinrich Wüthrich, Das Druckgraphische Werk von Matthaeus Merian der Ältere (Basel, Bärenreiter Verlag, 1966), 1: 31–32, no. 84. Jean Boutier, Jean‐Yves Sarrazin and Marine Sibille, Les plans de Paris des origines (1493) à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, étude, carto‐bibliographie et catalogue collectif (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2002), 123, no. 50.
6. See Will Keller, ‘Der Chronist Europas’, in Matthaeus Merian; Deutsche Städte (Offenburg, Verlag Die Gabe, 1962), 7–15; and Wüthrich, Das druckgraphische Werk von Matthaeus Merian (note Footnote5), 1: xi–xiv, 194–97. The map, a bird's‐eye plan, is reproduced in Arthur Berchtold, Bâle et l'Europe. Une histoire culturelle, 2 vols (Lausanne, Payot, 1990), 1: 9. It was dedicated to the consuls, tribunes, senators and people of the republic of Basel, who commissioned the work. Below the plan are male and female figures, of different social status, derived from maps in Braun and Hogenberg's Civitates orbis terrarum (see note Footnote2).
7. Marianne Grivel, Le commerce de l'estampe à Paris au XVIIe siècle (Genève, Droz, 1986), 157–58. The Mathon(n)ière were an important dynasty of imagiers in rue Montorgueil, centre of popular imagery in Paris and where the famous woodcut map of Paris by Olivier Truschet and Germain Hoyau, c.1553, was printed. Nicolas de Mathonière produced his own prints and published those of others; he also issued histories. He worked in rue Montorgueil with his brother, Michel, at the Sign of ‘La Corne de Daim’, with presses for both woodblock and copperplate printing. Their production was usually rather rough, but they printed from copper plates, notably almanacs.
8. The text contains the dedication and a history of Paris. It is interesting to note that Merian's name appears in the city's accounts for 1613 (Archives nationales de France, KK432), and in the register of the argentier of Louis XIII (KK 197–203, 1612–1614); see also the directories of the CARAN, Archives nationales de France, Paris. I would like to thank Jean‐Charles Capronnier, curator, Archives nationales de France, for sharing his findings with me.
9. Mariette's restrikes are pale, and the plates are visibly worn.
10. See Boutier et al., Les plans de Paris (note Footnote5), 121.
11. Ibid., 75–120. Léonard Gautier's view was reduced for the frontispiece in a number of books published up to 1620 by the bookseller Claude Morel (1575–1626). It was also included in the frontispiece of Jean Le Clerc's Theatre Geographique du Royaume de France (1619).
12. François Quesnel (c.1542/1545–1619) was the son of Pierre Quesnel (d. c.1574), a French painter in the service of James V of Scotland: see Hilary Ballon, ‘Carte ou description nouvelle de la ville, cité, université et faubourgs de la ville de Paris’, in The Paris of Henri IV. Architecture and urbanism, ed. Hilary Ballon (New York, The Architectural History Foundation, and Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1991), 233–44. For a comparison of Quesnel's map with others of that period, see Boutier et al., Les plans de Paris (note Footnote5), 77–121, which includes a thorough index, with reproductions, of maps of Paris in public collections.
13. The map, now in the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (A 117 (1)), was updated about 1645, when the portrait of the Louis XIII replaced that of Henri IV.
14. The cartouches are attributed to the engraver and merchant Léonard Gautier (1561–c.1635), renowned for his delicate compositions. See Grivel, Le commerce de l'estampe (see note Footnote7), 304.
15. The ship on the coat of arms of Paris represents the city's trade and commerce. These arms and the device Fluctuat nec mergitur [She pitches but does not founder] had been chosen in about 1582 by the burghers of Paris: see Alfred Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris (Paris, Robert Laffont, 1996), 820–21.
16. ‘He had no more taste for war than for military power’. The word pietas, the taste for, or the attachment to, also contains the notion of justice and clemency; arma as used here has a metonymic sense.
17. ‘In the reign of this great and clement king / so valiant and so just / Paris is like Rome under Augustus: / scourge of the world’.
18. See Ballon, The Paris of Henry IV (note Footnote12), 114–65.
19. Historians are divided on the reason for the creation of the Place Royale, and whether it was for the display of the products of the silk industry or whether it was to house aristocratic families. We agree with Ballon, The Paris of Henry IV (see note Footnote12), who favours the first premise.
20. See Henri Hauser, Les sources de l'histoire de France XVIe siècle 1494–1610, vol. IV, 1589–1610 (Paris, Picard, 1915); and Emile Bourgeois and Louis André, Les sources de l'histoire de France XVIIe siècle 1610–1715, vol. IV, Journaux et pamphlets (Paris, Picard, 1924). Both works, which are based on the Catalogue de l'histoire de France in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, have been wonderfully exploited, together with contemporary popular images, by Hélène Duccini, Faire voir, faire croire l'opinion publique sous Louis XIII (Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2003).
21. Vassallieu incorrectly represented the open space in the shape of a horseshoe. On Quesnel's map, the shape corresponds more closely to reality.
22. After Concino Concini—whom public rumour accused of being ‘the tyrant, usurper, and regicide’—was assassinated on the 24 April 1617 on Louis XIII's orders, the crowd suspended his body by the feet in front of the statue. For a long time, the statute evoked, by standing for Henri IV's (the Great's) virtues, the model of the good king. It was used in Italian theatre décor, for example, by J. A. Potestas for Ottaviano Castelli's Sincerita triomfante (1639), produced in Rome to celebrate the birth of the future Louis XIV and in the illustration for Act 1, scene 1, of Giacomo Torelli's Finta Pazza (1645), a print engraved by Nicolas Cochin. It is also found as in the background of the monumental door in the frontispiece to the suite of plates engraved by Israel Sylvestre illustrating the scene and machines of the Noces de Pelée et de Thetis produced in Paris in 1654.
23. ‘This is a king, but in bronze, who by the example of his immortal virtues will aide and guide you in the administration and the regency of your kingdom. He is armed, but this is to maintain and defend you through the renown of his courage and invincibility against the oppression of the envious and the enemies of this state. He is mounted as a mark of his great courage and will come speedily to your rescue. He is in your capital's principal place; but in order to keep obedient to you that which he redeemed with his blood from the hands of strangers, snatched from the chaos of his ruin and his loss by his prowess and his valour, conserved, embellished and enriched by his clemency, by his good deeds and by his generosity. In short, it is the portrait of your progenitor, placed facing the Louvre, to invite you to follow the example which he has left you’ (Meteorologie ou l'Excellence de la statue de Henry le Grand eslevee sur le Pont‐Neuf avec un discours au Roy et quelques éloges françois et latins sur le mesme subject par D.L.C.TH. [Denis le Comte, théologien] (Paris, Jean Guerreau, 1614), cited by Françoise Siguret, L'œil surpris, perception et représentation dans la moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris, Klincksieck, 1993), 277–78).
24. Alfred Bonnardot, Etudes archéologiques sur les anciens plans de Paris [1851], newly edited, with preface and additions, by Michel Fleury (Paris, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, 1994), 87–101.
25. Jean Cousin, Livre de perspective (Paris, Iehan le Royer, 1560). Towards the end of the third part of Erwin Panofsky's La perspective comme forme symbolique (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1975), 149), the author underlines Cousin's originality. He also emphasizes the way that, like Hans Vredeman de Vries (Perspective (Leiden, 1599)), and following Jean Pélerin Viator (De artificiali Perspectiva (see note Footnote4))—Cousin advocated starting from the distance point. In this respect the French were ahead of the Italians, who were not advising this practice until Egnazio Danti's publication of Le due regole di prospettiva de Barozzi di Vignola (1583).
26. Cousin may have designed the stained glass windows in the cathedral of his native town of Sens. In Paris he had become a master painter, and glass painters came from all over France to be taught by him. It was he, too, who was responsible for the preparatory drawings for several windows at the church of Saint‐Etienne‐du‐Mont in Paris and the cartoons for the tapestries in the cathedral at Langres. He had also been required to contribute to the pomp and splendours of Henri II's entry into Paris in 1549.
27. ‘Iay voulu servir aux rudes & ignorans qui voudront en cognoitre quelque chose [de la perspective]’ and ‘le present livre donnera instruction a un million d'hommes de bien portraire toutes choses apres le naturel, sans travail de corps et d'esprit ains plustot avec grand contentement qui procedera de la raison’.
28. Text on a copper plate was often engraved by someone who specialized in lettering. In this instance, the engraver could easily have misunderstood the drawing, but his error does not invalidate the interpretation of the diagram.
29. Compare Panofsky, La perspective (see note Footnote25), 135–37.
30. Giorgio Vasari, ‘Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori’, in his Le Opere, with a commentary by G. Milanesi (Florence, 1906), 8: 173–75. This text, written in 1560, concerns the view of Florence painted in fresco on the wall of the Palazzo Vecchio, representing the siege of Florence in 1530. Vasari explains how he portrayed the town and how he used his measuring instruments to complete the picture which otherwise would have remained unfinished.
31. Bonnardot, Etude archéologiques sur les anciens plans de Paris (see note Footnote24), 88, commented that ‘Toutes les maisons particulières sont tracées de fantaisie, cependant il y a certaines rues, notamment en la Cité qui paraissent dessinées d'après nature’ [All private houses are imaginary, certain streets, however, notably in the [Île de la] Cité seem to have been drawn from nature].
32. Joseph Milz, ‘Der Duisburger Stadtplan von 1566 des Johannes Corputius und seine Vermessungsgrundlagen’, Cartographica helvetica 11 (1995): 1–10, in discussing Corputius's codex for the construction of the map of Duisburg, shows how Corputius identified an axis of reference for the whole structure of the town and used axis translation for that. What is surprising is how Merian used an axis to direct attention to the statue.
33. The juxtaposition of arms in this manner was a classic device in the 16th century to emphasize sovereignty over a town.
34. Louis Marin, Utopiques: jeux d'espaces (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1973), 268. See also Siguret, L'œil surpris (note Footnote23), 101–7.
35. This type of representation of the theme of the monarchical body corporate was developed by Charles Loyseau (1564–1627) in his Traité des ordres et simples dignités (1610). Loyseau was following in the tradition of French lawyers such as Claude de Seyssel (1450–1520) in La grand' Monarchie de France (1515) and Jean Bodin (1530–1596), author of Les Six livres de la République (1577).
36. ‘Un être de l'utopie urbaine’ (Siguret, L'œil surpris (see note Footnote23), 102).
37. Given the state of the plates bought by Mariette, a figure approaching 7000 for the total number of maps printed by Mathonière may not be too great an exaggeration.
38. Jacques Gomboust (dates unknown) is twice recorded as a royal engineer responsible for defensive works (ingénieur du roi et conducteur des fortifications), first in Normandy (Archives nationales de France, minutier central étude XLI 104, 2 mai 1641), and then in Picardie (Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des manuscrits, fichier Laborde n.a.f. 12113, no. 30669). Pierre Petit (1598–1677), mathematician and supervisor (intendant général) of fortifications, published L'usage ou le moyen de pratiquer par une regle toutes les operations du compas de proportion (Paris, Melchior Mondière, 1634).
39. After granting a privilege to Gomboust, Louis XIV appointed him ‘son ingénieur pour l'élévation des plans des villes et maisons royales’ [his surveyor for the creation of plans of towns and royal palaces].
40. The engraver of the map is unknown.
41. Marin, Utopiques: jeux d'espaces (see note Footnote34), 274–81, has analysed in detail the principles underlying the construction of Gomboust's map. Here I refer only to some of the major aspects of Marin's analysis.