Matthäus Merian's 1615 Map of Paris: Its Structure, Decoration and Message

Abstract

Matthäus Merian, a native of Basel, arrived in Paris in 1610 soon after the assassination of Henri IV, when the new king, Louis XIII, was only nine years old. At that time France was exhausted by war and famine, divided between Protestants and Catholics and struggling to recover. The regent, Marie de Médicis, soon to be confronted by public discontent, was urgently trying to consolidate the fragile Bourbon dynasty by rekindling the universal veneration of the late king for the benefit of the young monarch. Merian's plan of Paris was created with a similar objective. Rejecting the bird's‐eye style of existing plans, he based his work on the rules of perspective as outlined in Jean Cousin's Livre de perspective (1560). The symbolic message conveyed through Merian's arrangement of the map's decorative elements was supported by the main axes of perspective in the city plan. Merian's map was copied on numerous occasions, but the updated decorations lost their natural link with the map. The copies reflect the shift from the concept of royalty incarnated within the king's person towards a more abstract notion of monarchy that refers to the state apparatus of government. Dr Catherine Bousquet‐Bressolier is a member of the research unit PRODIG, where she coordinates applied research on early maps, and a lecturer in the historical section of the École pratique des hautes études, Paris.