Dec 8, 2019
Happy birthday, Claude Mellan! The virtuoso French engraver was born on May 23, 1598 in Abbeville, France. Mellan studied and practiced in Rome from 1624 to 1637, when he returned to Paris. He eschewed the cross-hatching and stippling of his contemporaries for an unusual technique involving laying down parallel lines of varying width and depth to achieve three-dimensionality (which inadvertently creates a moiré effect when photographed). We have some of the garden statuary prints he made for the Cabinet du Roi, and they are a wonder to behold.
