The Golden Compasses

The History of the House of Plantin-Moretus

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Part II
‘The big house called the Plantin Press’

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Chapter 8
The Plantin Houses^1.

The first part of this book dealt with the lives and work of Plantin and his descendants. This second part looks at the Plantin House where they lived and worked during these centuries, a little world that has been preserved almost intact and is now the Plantin-Moretus Museum in the Vrijdagmarkt in Antwerp.

The Plantin House was one of the most important printing-presses of the Renaissance and the Baroque period. It was a paying concern which made its owners one of the richest patrician families of Antwerp. They used some of their profits to decorate its interior and to fill the house with art treasures. It is this that constitutes the great originality of the Plantin-Moretus Museum. In the past the house was both the residence of a wealthy family and a factory. A salon led directly into the workshop, which in turn gave access to another drawing-room, a bedroom, or a kitchen.

There are many more distinguished stately homes which have been preserved with their interiors and art treasures; there are a few old factories which have survived the passage of time and give an idea of how artisans once practised their trades, but the combination of a wealthy family dwelling and a well-equipped technical workshop is unique.

1. Details of Plantin's various removals and the houses which he occupied are given in Rooses, Musée, passim. There is a concise exposition of the architectural history of the Plantin House and much information on the art collections of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in the catalogues of the Museum (in Dutch, French, English and German editions) by M. Rooses (revised and brought up to date after 1919 by M. Sabbe). These publications are referred to as Rooses, Catalogus. The French catalogue text was also included in Rooses, Musée. See also the short guide by L. Voet, Het Museum Plantin-Moretus (also in French, English and German editions).

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Also unique is the fact that Plantin and the Moretuses kept their records with an almost obsessive meticulousness. Because of this it has been possible in the first part of this book to trace the family history closely, and in a subsequent volume it will be possible to give a detailed picture of the printing trade in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Thus the small world in which the members of this family moved can also be brought to life; they can be observed building and rebuilding their home and collecting their treasures; and in this way some contribution will have been made to the history of the Plantin House in the Vrijdagmarkt and the collections of the Museum.

Christophe Plantin settled in Antwerp in 1548 or 1549. Little is known about the first years of his residence there. A letter from this period, from an otherwise unknown Jean Leclerc who signed himself ‘vostre serviteur et amy à jamais’, is addressed to ‘Christofle Plantain, relieur de livres, demourant en la rue Lombartde veste près la Cammestrate à Anvers’.^1. Plantin's first Antwerp house must therefore have been situated in the Lombaardvest which, together with the Kammenstraat, formed the printers' and bookbinders' quarter in those days.

Some time later, at least by 1552, Plantin had removed to the ‘street running from the new Exchange to the Meir, on the west side’,^2. that is to say the present Twaalfmaandenstraat, the narrow street that leads from the Meir to the Exchange (in Plantin's time still called the New Exchange, because only a few years earlier the merchants had left the older ‘bourse’ in the Hofstraat for the new building near the Meir). It was a few yards from there, on the Meirbrug, that he was stabbed in the shoulder. It was in the Twaalfmaandenstraat that he installed his first printing-press.

His workshop there soon became too small, and by 1557 Plantin had already returned to the Kammenstraat and the centre of the Antwerp printing trade, moving into the Gulden Eenhoorn (Golden Unicorn) which he renamed the Gulden Passer (Golden Compasses) in 1561.^3. It was there that

1. Corr., I, no. 1.

2. Suppl. Corr., no. 227. - Original Dutch text: ‘... state lopende vander nyeuwer borssen nade Meere gaende, opte zyde westwaerts.’

3. Rooses, Musée, p. 26.

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three of his journeymen printed the Briefve instruction pour prier which put their master's head in danger and forced him to hide in Paris for eighteen months (1562-63). It was from the Golden Compasses in the Kammenstraat that Plantin's presses, stocks of type, paper and books, and his modest household effects were taken to the Vrijdagmarkt on 28th April 1562 to be publicly auctioned. Plantin re-established his firm in this house after his return from Paris and signing a contract with Cornelis van Bomberghen and his relatives.

The four presses in use up to 1562 became five at the end of 1564, six in 1565, and seven at the beginning of 1566. The Plantin press was outgrowing the former Gulden Eenhoorn too. On 5th June 1565 the merchant Fernando de Bernuy, a relation of the Van Bomberghens - and a few months later one of Plantin's partners^1. - leased the printer two houses a little further along the Kammenstraat, the Grote Valk (Great Falcon) and the Kleine Valk (Little Falcon), together with the Beitel (Chisel) in the Valkstraat.^2.

The Kleine Valk stood at the corner of the Kammenstraat and Valkstraat, now called Gierstraat, the small street which leads into the Vrijdagmarkt. The Grote Valk was sandwiched between the Kleine Valk to the south and the Konijnenberg, the corner house of the Kammenstraat and Bergstraat, to the north. The Beitel stood in the Valkstraat but the rear of the house must have abutted on the Grote Valk.^3.

The latter premises became the new core of the Plantin press. In 1614 the little house in the Valkstraat formerly called the Beitel appears to have been joined up with the Grote Valk:^4. this had probably been done at the time of Plantin's establishment there. The Kleine Valk on the other hand remained separate. At the division of Plantin's estate in 1590 it is listed as a rented dwelling, in use as a bakery.^5.

Plantin became the leaseholder of the Grote Valk on 5th June 1565, but he had already taken up residence as a tenant the year before. From the 11th to 15th July 1564 his eighteen workmen, helped by porters and waggoners, had moved his goods and chattels from the erstwhile Gulden Eenhoorn to the new

1. Cf. p. 45.

2. Antwerp City Archives, PK 2261 (F. Ketgen Ward Records).

3. Cf. below.

4. Martina Plantin's will, 12th September 1614: Van der Straelen, Geslagt-lyste, p. 20.

5. Deed dividing up Christophe Plantin's real estate, 9th March 1590 (Arch. 1183, no. 3; also Arch. 99, pp. 168 sqq.).

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house.^1. On 16th August Plantin, it will be recalled, paid the painter Pieter Huys 5 fl. 5 st. for ‘l'enseigne du compas pour pendre à la maison nouvelle’:^2. in its turn the Grote Valk was rechristened the ‘Golden Compasses’.

This removal was only a temporary solution. The new expansion which started in 1567 obliged the printer to look for additional space in which to set up his presses and house his stocks of materials. In his Relation simple et veritable d'aulcuns griefz of 31st December 1583, Plantin states that in the years before 1576 he used no less than seven houses for his firm.^3. From another source it appears that a large quantity of books was also stored in the loft of the Antwerp Carmelite monastery.^4.

This dispersal was not conducive to the efficient working of the firm. In 1576, when Plantin had to leave two of the largest rented houses where his presses had been installed, and was at the same time still dreaming of further expansion, a more radical solution had to be found. In the middle of April 1576 he wrote to Arias Montanus that he had rented a house which was so roomy that he could easily set up sixteen presses in a row and five more in another part of the building. There was also suitable living accommodation and a large garden. He would move there, God willing, on St. John's Day (24th June).^5. In his letter, Plantin told Arias that this house was not far

1. Arch. 3, folio 15: ‘[Le 15 juillet 1564] Desmesnagement debiteur par casse. Payé aux compagnons qui se sont employes a demenager pour leurs iournees à chaicun 6 patt. pour iour et ont esté 4 iournees eatieres et estoyent 18 compagnons qui font: 31 fl. 12 st.; aux chartiers et porteurs pour divers voyaiges: 2 fl. 9 st.; casse crediteur par desmesnagement: 24 fl. 1 st.’

2. Rooses, Musée, p. 65.

3. Corr., VII, no. 1014, p. 125: ‘et prins expres a louage la grande maison de feu Martin Lopes pource que sept aultres maisons que j'occupois paravant de laditte Imprimerie ne suffisoient pour si grande quantité [de livres] qu'on requeroit de moy’. One of these seven houses was the Bourgondische Daalder (‘une maison nommée la Dalder située sur le derriere du logis nommé den ghulden Vlies en la rue nommée Valke straeteken d'ou par une grande porte et alee on entre en ladicte maison’) where in January 1575 the books intended for Philip II were stored (Corr., IV, no. 602), and where too Frans Raphelengius had one single bedroom for himself and his family, including the maid. It was a low room, 12 feet wide and 15 or 16 feet long (Arch. 8, folio 165ro; Rooses, Musée, p. 145; cf. also p. 149).

4. Letter from Plantin to Morillon, end of August 1574 (Corr., IV, no. 554): ‘tous les livres que j'ay en ung grand grenier au couvent des Carmes de ceste ville d'Anvers qui se montent a plus de quinze mille florins’.

5. Corr., V, no. 711: ‘A me cum auferantur duae domus maiores ex iis quas occupo ad proela, contiguas nostrae non longe a nobis aedes conduxi tam amplas ut iuxta desiderium possum facile 16 praela uno ordine constituere, in ipso loco inferiori sinque (quinque?). Praeterea habiturus habitationem commodam cum horto satis amplo, sumque Deo favente ad festum S. Joh. Baptistae migraturus eo, Johanne Moreto manente in taberna nostra libraria et domo a nobis olim empta.’

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from where he lived. In fact he only needed to turn the corner of the Valkstraat to see it, at least the part of it that faced onto the Vrijdagmarkt.

Here Plantin concentrated his presses. For exactly three centuries this was the ‘Plantijnse drukkerij’ winch in 1876 became the Plantin-Moretus Museum and a typographical shrine. As such the history of this building will be traced in more detail in a later section. The transfer of the presses to the Vrijdagmarkt did not mean, however, that the Gulden Passer in the Kammenstraat was abandoned. As Plantin wrote to Arias Montanus, ‘Jan Moretus remains in our bookshop and dwelling which we bought formerly’. For nearly three quarters of a century, from 1576 to 1639, the work of the officina was carried on in the two buildings, i.e. the house in the Vrijdagmarkt which was, of course, renamed the ‘Golden Compasses’, and that in the Kammenstraat which was often referred to by its old name of the Grote Valk. The Vrijdagmarkt premises housed the press, the Kammenstraat building contained the bookshop, where sales were conducted and orders dispatched. On 23rd April 1584 Plantin transferred the house with the bookshop to Jan Moretus.^1. For this reason the Grote Valk with its appendance, the Beitel, does not appear on the list of dwelling houses which Plantin's heirs divided among each other in 1590.

The agreement reached concerning Plantin's estate laid down that Jeanne Rivière should remain in the printing-press building. It was only on the death of his mother-in-law, in 1596, that Moretus left the Grote Valk to take up residence in the house in the Vrijdagmarkt.

Jan I Moretus was succeeded by his two sons, Balthasar I and Jan II. The former managed the press and established himself in the Vrijdagmarkt. The latter took over sales and the Grote Valk became his headquarters.

The death of his brother in 1618 made Balthasar I the sole owner of the Officina Plantiniana. Initially this did not bring about any structural changes

1. Rooses, Musée, pp. 148 and 210-211; cf. Arch. 19, folio 160. See also p. 154.

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in the officina. The Golden Compasses in the Vrijdagmarkt continued as the printing press and Balthasar's personal residence. The Grote Valk continued in use as the bookshop and Jan II's family went on living there. However, it was difficult for Balthasar I to direct and control a business which was carried on in two buildings. In 1637, at the end of his life, he began a series of reconstructions in the Vrijdagmarkt premises ‘in order to combine the shop with the press’.^1.

The work was finished in 1639: ‘In the month of November, the bookshop was moved from the Kammenstraat to the press building where it has been united with the printing-office’.^2. The Grote Valk no longer functioned in the life of the Officina Plantiniana, the firm's activities being thereafter concentrated in the Golden Compasses in the Vrijdagmarkt. In May 1640 Maria de Sweert, the widow of Jan II Moretus, left ‘the house in the Kammenstraat where the shop was’ to take up residence in St. Malcus House in the Kerkhofstraat (now the Schoenmarkt).^3.

When her estate was divided in 1655 the ‘big house with shop, kitchen, courtyard, well, water-butt, outhouse or warehouse, cellar, grounds, and all pertaining thereto, called the Golden Compasses and now the Great Falcon’ was included-in her bequest to her daughter Maria Moretus, and the latter's husband Jean de la Flie.^4. The Grote Valk had no further connection with the Moretus family.

1. Balthasar II Moretus's diary (Arch. 213), under the year 1637.

2. Idem, under 1639.

3. Idem, under 1640.

4. Deed of 20th December 1655: Van der Straelen, Geslagt-lyste, pp. 30-31.