Christian von Mechel

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Portrait of Christian von Mechels, around 1770.

Christian von Mechel (born April 4, 1737 in Basel , † April 11, 1817 in Berlin ) was a Swiss engraver , engraver and art dealer.

Life

Christian von Mechel came from a long-established family of craftsmen in Basel. His father Johannes and his father Josias worked as cooper , his mother Salome was the daughter of a guild master. The von Mechel family can be traced back to the 16th century. However, she did not belong to the nobility. There is also no connection with the city of Mechel.

Christian Mechel attended Latin school in Basel in preparation for a career as a clergyman , but from 1753 onwards he was apprenticed to Georg Daniel Heumann in Augsburg as a copperplate engraver. In 1757 he worked briefly for Johann Georg Pintz in Nuremberg. From 1757 to 1764 he stayed in Paris, where he learned from Johann Georg Wille and later ran his own studio. He published his own work and traded in art objects.

Christian von Mechel, silhouette 1791.

In 1764 he returned to Basel and married Elisabeth Haas, the daughter of a respected type caster in the city. Like the second marriage with Friederike von Wagner in 1795, the relationship remained childless. On a trip to Italy in 1767 Mechel met Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein , who in the following years regularly supplied him with art objects from Italy for his trade. In addition to founding an engraving workshop ("Kupferstecherakademie") in Basel, whose students included Christian Haldenwang and Johann Heinrich Troll , in 1767 Mechler also opened an art business that soon became internationally known. In addition to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , an important customer was Emperor Joseph II , who visited the Mechel shop during his stay in Basel in July 1777. Mechel was officially entrusted with the emperor's tour of the Basler Holbein collection and accompanied the emperor on his onward journey to Waldshut until July 26, 1777. Joseph II invited Christian von Mechel to Vienna in November 1777. Mechel traveled to Vienna in 1778, where he reorganized the gallery in the Belvedere to open it to the general public in the service of the emperor.

In Vienna, Emperor Joseph II had the imperial picture gallery relocated from the narrow rooms of the stable castle of his residence to the Belvedere Palace , where the works were to be housed on the floors of the Upper Belvedere. Christian von Mechel was called to Vienna to reorganize the paintings. For the first time such an expert was entrusted with the reorganization and cataloging of a picture gallery, which was carried out according to purely scientific criteria. Christian von Mechel was one of the first to organize the works of art according to masters and schools.

In 1783 he returned to Basel, where he created works on Johann Karl von Hedlinger's medals, the Düsseldorf picture gallery and Holbein's dance of death . After a trip through Vienna in 1787, the first trip through southern Germany followed. In 1794 he returned to Basel, where the effects of the French Revolution led to the loss of his art trading business. In the following years Mechel went to Germany, where he met Goethe and Schiller in Weimar . In Dresden he made the acquaintance of the Swiss painters Anton Graff and Adrian Zingg and finally settled in Berlin in 1805. He dissolved his art trading business in 1808 and began to work as an art dealer in Berlin. Mechel died in Berlin in 1817. His nephew, the engraver Johann Jacob von Mechel (1764–1816) was one of his students .

In 1875 the Mechelgasse in Vienna- Landstrasse (3rd district) was named after him.

meaning

Mechel introduced the classical style in Basel. He made Hans Holbein the Younger known to a wider audience with his work on Holbein's dance of death and wrote the first history of art in Switzerland. Mechel was also one of the first art experts to organize large galleries according to the then new principle of painting schools.

Works

  • Oeuvre du Chevalier Hedlinger ou recueil des medailles de ce celebre artiste (1776)
  • La Galerie Électorale De Dusseldorff (1778)
  • Hans Holbein - Le triomphe de la mort (1780)
  • Directory of paintings in the Imperial and Royal Picture Gallery in Vienna (1783)
  • Karl Gottlieb von Windisch's letters about the chess player of Mr. von Kempelen (1783)
  • Catalog des tableaux de la Galérie Impériale et Royale de Vienne (1784)
  • Costumes de Paysans et Paysannes de la Suisse (1785)
  • Concepts and plans of the strangest incidents of the current war between the Austrians and Russians against the Turks (1790)
  • Explication des renvois de l'estampe enluminée, qui représente la vallé de Chamouni, le Mont-Blanc et les montagnes adjacentes (1791)
  • Draft of an art history of Helvetia (1791)
  • Itinéraire du St. Gothard, d'une partie de Vallais et des contrées de la Suisse, que l'on traverse ordinairement pour se rendre au Gothard (1795)
  • Recueil de Vues choisies de la Suisse (1796)
  • Tableaux historiques et topographiques, ou relations exactes et impartiales des trois événemens mémorables qui terminèrent la campagne de 1796 sur le Rhin (1798)
  • Soldiers and Plotons School for the Infantry from the French Regulations (1799)
  • Plan, section and elevation of the three strangest wooden bridges in Switzerland (1803)
  • Tableau comparatif des montagnes de la Lune, de Venus, de Mercure et de quelques-unes de plus hautes montagnes de la Terre (1806)
  • Lucas Cranach's Studbook (1814)
  • Portraits of all the Bourbons recalled to the throne of France (1814)
  • Now assembled in Vienna to the crowned liberators of Europe ... dedicates the image of the Iron Hand of ... Götz von Berlichingen (1815)

literature

Web links

Commons : Christian von Mechel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Christian von Mechel  - Sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Mechel, Christian von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mechel, Chrétien de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss engraver
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1737
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 1817
Place of death Berlin