The Content Reader

If you are visiting Antwerp and are interested in culture, you just have to visit the beautiful house of Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens was born in 1577, in Antwerp. However, to study classical Roman and Italian Renaissance art, he spent eight years in Italy. He liked it so much there so he hardly wanted to come back to Antwerp. But alas he had to. In 1610 he and his wife Isabella Brant bought a house and a piece of land in Antwerp. He enlarged the house and gave it a flair of an Italian palazzo. If you can't go to Rome, take Rome with you! He had himself assembled an internationally admired collection of paintings and sculptures at the house. Here he also produced most of his work. Even on a slightly, clouded autumn day the garden was beautiful, and you can imagine it in the summer. The audio guide takes you around the house and all the paintings and other art work. The paintings are explained, here are also the wonderful, gilded wall papers, absolutely amazing (again!). I pass...

I was visiting Antwerp the other day. Wanted to look around a little bit and find out more about this interesting, medieval city. Looking around for interesting museums to start with, I found the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Turns out to be much more than I could ever have bargained for. The museum/house tell the history of one of the greatest printer-publishers of all time. It was founded by one of the first ‘industrial’ printers, a brilliant, self-taught man who only Gutenberg himself could beat. His name is Christopher Plantin (ca 1520-1589), from Saint-Avertain, near Tours, in central France. He was the most important printer-publisher of the time, and one of the great pioneers of Western civilisation. Countless are the publications he printed in the fields of humanism and the sciences. Christopher Plantin, was the arch-typographer to Philip II Spain, and in the mid 16th century he transfered his well-known printing office, called The Golden Compass to where it is situated today, i...