Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688) was a prominent German Baroque painter and art historian who visited Naples in the late 1620s or early 1630s. During this time, he created studies of Mount Vesuvius.
Sandrart’s on-the-scene drawings were later transformed into engravings by the prominent printmaker Matthäus Merian the Elder in 1640.
The "Vesuvius Mons Neapoleos" engraving recording the volcano and the surrounding Bay of Naples were widely circulated across Europe.
Merian was the master printmaker who personally adapted Sandrart's eyewitness drawing onto a copper plate to print it for his famous geographical books, such as the Theatrum Europaeum and Martin Zeiller's travelogues.
Because it was standard practice for Merian's publishing house to place the German narrative title right above the Latin 'Vesuvius Mons Neapoleos', the presence of this exact text is the definitive proof of a Merian engraving.
Mattheus Merian was a notable Swiss engraver, born in Basle in 1593, who subsequently studied in Zurich and then moved to Frankfurt where he met Theodore de Bry, whose daughter he married in 1617. They had numerous children together, including a daughter, Anna Maria Sibylla Merian, born in 1647. She became a pioneering naturalist and illustrator. Two of their sons followed Merian into publishing.
In Frankfurt Mattheus Merian spent most of his working life and with Martin Zeiller (1589-1661), a German Geographer, and later with his own son, he produced a series of Topographia consisting of 21 volumes including a very large number of town plans as well as maps of most countries. He also took over and completed the later parts and editions of the Grand Voyages and Petits Voyages originally started by De Bry in 1590.
