The Golden Compasses

The History of the House of Plantin-Moretus

[p. t.o. iii]

[Deel I]

(1) Overleaf: Christophe Plantin. Oil painting on panel by an anonymous sixteenth-century master (University Library, Leiden). This portrait was given to the University by the Raphelengius family. A contemporary copy is in the Plantin-Moretus Museum. In the top left-hand corner of the original the year of painting and the sitter's age are indicated with the words: anno 1584 aetatis 64. The copyist, however, erroneously wrote anno 1554 aetatis 64.

[p. v]

Preface

The Officina Plantiniana can be regarded as the most important printing and publishing house that Belgium has ever had. It was founded in 1555 by Christophe Plantin, a poor journeyman bookbinder from the neighbourhood of Tours who, in one of the most turbulent periods of Western history, succeeded in making himself the greatest typographer of his day, and it was continued until 1876 by his descendants, the Moretuses. The rise and the heyday of the officina in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries coincide with an era in which scholars from the Low Countries - the present Belgium and Holland - were able to play an extremely important part in the development of Western thought. The history of the Officina Plantiniana is therefore more than an account of the fortunes of a large capitalist enterprise: it also reflects and is part of the great cultural currents of the West. Since the records of the house have, providentially, been preserved almost intact it is possible to illumine the story in all its aspects and problems with an incredible wealth of detailed and accurate data.

The first chapters of Volume I outline the life and work of Christophe Plantin and of his successors the Moretuses, and attempt to show these successive generations of masters of the Officina Plantiniana at work against the political, social and cultural background of their times.

After moving several times Plantin settled in 1576 in a house in the Vrijdagmarkt in Antwerp, where for three centuries his Gulden Passer (Golden Compasses) was a unique combination of luxurious patrician residence and industrial workshop, and was then handed over to the city of Antwerp in 1876 with all the treasures it contained and made into a museum. There are chapters which trace the architectural history of the Gulden Passer, list the objets d'art that were assembled there in the course of the

[p. vi]

centuries - and in some cases disappeared on one or other of the occasions on which the estate was divided up, and describe the formation and the contents of the library, one of the few private collections of books that, after belonging to the same family for three centuries, can still be seen and used in its original setting.

These two facets of the history of the Officina Plantiniana - the story of the masters of the firm and of the house in which they resided and worked - culminates in the chapter ‘The Plantin house as a humanist centre’. This was the most difficult chapter to write, for it was here that the task of weighing and assessing was most delicate; it attempts to estimate the significance of the Gulden Passer and its masters for the cultural life of the Renaissance and the Baroque.

The Gulden Passer became a museum in 1876, but it had long before been one of Antwerp's tourist attractions. In the two final chapters of Volume I, past visitors and their reactions are described, and then the reader is taken on a tour of the venerable Plantinian house as it is today.

The Officina Plantiniana was a large-scale undertaking and its account-books have come down practically complete. In Volume II the printing and publishing activities of the Plantin-Moretus family are studied. They are seen negotiating and wrangling with authors or in difficulties with the authorities over ‘privileges’ and approbationes, ordering paper and parchment or fitting out their workshop, having punches and matrices prepared and lead type cast. The reader will be introduced to the bustling and sometimes explosive world of the journeyman printers and become acquainted with the scores of problems great and small which confronted Plantin and his successors.

Producing a book is one matter; selling it quite another. A complex distribution network had to be set up to get the works bearing the Plantinian compasses on the market, and this system had to be continually adapted to changes in the general economic, political and cultural situation in Europe. This forms the theme of the second part of Volume II and it is illustrated and augmented by a series of tables.

The works which Plantin and the Moretuses printed and published, or of which they shared the costs will in due time be listed in a descriptive catalogue: it will contain an estimated 4,000 titles and comprise several volumes.

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It is hoped that these volumes of The Golden Compasses will give a suitably full and detailed picture of a dynamic family and of the production of an undertaking that must be reckoned among the greatest of the international printing houses which Western civilization has seen.

Antwerp, 26th May 1967