Plantin Museum - Moretus

Printing company in Antwerp was founded in 1555 . It soon became one of the largest printing companies in the Southern Netherlands and is considered the first industrial-type printing company. It consisted of up to sixteen printing presses, and the number of employees reached 80 people. This made Antwerp one of the centers of printing in Western Europe along with Venice, Amsterdam and Paris.

The owner of the company, Christopher Plantin , made her office a meeting place for humanists and enlightened people of the city. At the same time, he adhered to the policy of earning the greatest profit and apoliticality, therefore he published both Catholic and Protestant literature. Among the firm's clients were humanists Just Lipsy and Simon Steven, artist Peter Paul Rubens .

At the same time, Rubens not only bought books. Together with Balthazar Moret, they worked for the Planten printing company, creating a series of frontispieces that were placed next to the cover page in published books.

Museum Creation

In 1876, the last owner of printing houses Edward Moretus sold the historic building of the company, together with antique printing presses and a number of fonts, to the government of Antwerp. A year later (in 1877 ), the enterprise was quickly turned into a museum and open to visitors, in the wake of national self-identification in Belgium.

In 1944 , during the shelling of Antwerp during the Second World War , the museum building was damaged by the German V2 rocket, and the museum was closed for reconstruction. After repairs and the creation of a new exhibition, the museum was reopened in 1951 .

Since 2002, the museum was included in the UNESCO list of protected objects, and in 2005 it became the first museum institution included in the UNESCO World Heritage List ^[2] .

The museum features antique printing presses from 1600, fonts and a historical library . Here are samples of publications of Plantin printing houses of the 16th – 18th centuries, as well as incunabula , postincubnabula, more than 600 manuscripts , including the manuscript “The Chronicle of Jean Froissart” of the 15th century.

The historical library of the Plantin-Moretus Museum has more than 30 thousand publications. Old wooden blua presses are also exhibited here. The share of museum premises (formerly residential) is decorated with old leather wallpaper with gold patterns and old Flemish carved furniture. Among the museum exhibits, Gerard Mercator’s cartographic globes and old-printed atlases are also presented, including the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ortelius.

For historians, the preserved archive and accounting calculations of the Planten printing company for almost the entire period of the enterprise’s existence are of great importance. They are a rare source of information about the social and industrial history of the city of Antwerp and the working conditions of wage workers of the 16th – 18th centuries.

Among the works of art exhibited at the Plantin Museum are Moretus, paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, the head of numerous art workshops in Antwerp, and a client of the Plantin printing company.