Painter of the Bible
Claude Mellan
Claude Mellan was a leading French engraver of the seventeenth century and the principal innovator of the technique of engraving in single unbroken parallel lines — a virtuoso pictorial signature that distinguished his p…
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Life & work
Claude Mellan was a leading French engraver of the seventeenth century and the principal innovator of the technique of engraving in single unbroken parallel lines — a virtuoso pictorial signature that distinguished his prints from every other European engraving tradition of the period. Born in Abbeville in Picardy in 1598, trained briefly in Paris before traveling to Italy in 1624 (where he spent twelve years in Rome working under Francesco Villamena, Simon Vouet, and the Roman Caravaggesque circle), he returned to Paris in 1636 and worked there for the rest of his life. He died in Paris in 1688 at the unusually advanced age of ninety.
His Christian religious work is concentrated in engraved compositions for the French Catholic publishing market and in the great single-plate religious portraits that became his signature. The Sudarium of Saint Veronica (1649 — Mellan's most famous single plate, an extraordinary technical demonstration in which the entire image of the Holy Face on the cloth of Veronica is engraved as a single continuous spiral line beginning at the tip of the nose and unwinding outward to the edges of the cloth, with the variation in the line's thickness producing the entire chiaroscuro modeling of the face), the great series of Apostles and Evangelists, the Madonnas in workshop variants, the Visitation, and dozens of other religious-portrait engravings circulated through the French Catholic publishing market for over a century.
His secular output is equally substantial — court portraits of Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Mazarin, and the principal seventeenth-century French aristocratic clientele; the great series of Roman antiquities he engraved during his Italian sojourn; the architectural plates for the Paris royal building projects.
The Sudarium of Saint Veronica became the canonical demonstration of his single-line technique and was widely admired in his lifetime as a virtuoso curiosity; the eighteenth-century French academic tradition treated it as one of the supreme technical demonstrations in the history of European engraving.
