Virgin and Child

Claude Mellan's skills of observation and distinctive engraving style were highly regarded by seventeenth-century Parisian connoisseurs. He received training as a painter. However, most of his oeuvre consists of drawings, and around 400 prints—portraits, religious subjects, and illustrations — after his own designs and those of other artists. Mellan was born to a coppersmith in Abbeville. By 1619 he was in Paris, when his name appears for the first time on a engraving that shows the strong influence of Leonard Gaultier, who may have been his teacher. For the next few years Mellan copied prints after the old masters, made illustrations after other artists' designs, and engraved his own black chalk portrait drawings. The beginnings of a rivalry with Michel Lasne for portrait commissions began during these early years in Paris. Mellan traveled to Rome in 1624, intending to study with the talented engraver Francesco Villamena, who unfortunately died shortly after Mellan's arrival. Nonethe¬less, in their reliance on parallel hatching to model forms and suggest tonal values, Mellan's Italian prints reflect Villamena's highly systematic line work. The influence of Simon Vouet was also enduring. Both artists lived in the same house in Rome, and, in Mellan, Vouet found a sympathetic hand to reproduce his designs. In exchange, he helped Mellan with portraits from life that employed black and red chalks in the Italian manner of Federico Zuccaro and Ottavio Leoni. Mellan's Saint John the Baptist in the Desert (1629), which he dedicated to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, established his reputation as a master printmaker. He received notable commissions to document works by Bernini for the Vatican printing office, and from Vincenzo Giustiniani to record his collection of antiquities. Mellan left Rome for Paris in 1636, stopping in Aix-en-Provence to visit the humanist scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. At Peiresc's inducement, Mellan recorded two views of the moon seen through a telescope, which drew much attention when they were published in Paris the following year. From 1639-43, Mellan worked for the Royal Printing Office (Imprimerie royale) making fron¬tispieces of his own compositions and in collaboration with other artists, such as Jacques Stella and Abraham Bosse. In 1642 he was given lodgings at the Louvre, which he maintained until his death. After 1643, Mellan dedicated himself to supporting the regency of Anne of Austria. His portraits and a consistent production of religious subjects gained him prestige and a flourishing business. He was usually his own publisher. His most celebrated and virtuosic print, the Sudarium (1649), consists of a single spiral line modulated to achieve a full range of tonal values. Mellan married late in life, in 1654. In 1657 he was named engraver to the king. In 1668 he began to work for the Cabinet de Roi, a project to produce visual records of royal apartments and collections. Mellan continued to engrave throughout his eighties, and died in his ninetieth year.