MELLAN, Claude

Mellan was a master burin engraver. His Face of Christ built up from a single, spiraling line is a demonstration of pure virtuosity.

Mellan was a master burin engraver. His Face of Christ built up from a single, spiraling line is a demonstration of pure virtuosity.

This engraving is the frontispiece for a de luxe edition of the Bible published by the Imprimerie Royale in 1642. It was executed after the design by Nicolas Poussin.

The artist depicts on the left the winged personification of History, looking behind her and writing down what she has seen, and on the right the veiled figure of Prophecy, holding a small sphinx before her as a symbol of the enigmatic nature other pronouncements. Above these two figures, who symbolise the Past and the Future, floats God the Father, who as the source of all things also created Time. Poussin took the inspiration for his composition from Raphael’s Transfiguration, where Christ is portrayed in precisely the same fashion.

Henriette-Marie de Buade, sister of Louis de Buade de Frontenac, the future governor of Canada, was the wife of Henri Louis Habert de Montmor (c. 1600-1679), a French scholar and man of letters.

Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564-1637) was one of the most brilliant, and knowledgeable lovers of art in early seventeenth-century Rome. He assembled a renowned collection of roughly 1.800 works of classical sculpture and 600 paintings, among them eleven of Caravaggio’s most important works.