Plantin-Moretus Museum

Just south of Grote Markt lies one of Antwerp’s main attractions, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the magnificent Plantin-Moretus Museum. The Plantin-Moretus House-Museum Complex is the only surviving printing workshop and publishing house in the world dating back to the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Situated in Antwerp, one of the three leading cities of early European printing along with Paris and Venice, one cannot but look a little bit into the history of the invention that changed the world forever. The name of the museum comes from the greatest printer-publisher of the second half of the 16th century, Christophe Plantin (c. 1520-1589), and his son-in-law, Jan Moretus I (1543-1610), who took over the best-equipped printing company in Europe upon Plantin’s death.

It was thanks to the Moretus family that the firm’s production activities continued in the same location for three centuries, from 1576 to 1867. Ten years later, the Complex was opened as a museum dedicated to presenting the relationship between the living environment of the family, the world of work, and the world of commerce during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

The Complex evolved over the centuries to include a patrician mansion as well as north, south, west, and east wings, added to the 1576-1580 core in three phases (1578-1584, 1620-1640, and 1760-1763), creating an interior courtyard. In addition to its outstanding architectural value, the Complex contains exhaustive evidence of the life and work of what was the most prolific printing and publishing house in Europe in the late 16th century.

Within its walls are the equipment of the workshops (printing press, foundry, typesetting room), the furnishings that have remained in situ (equipment, tools, an extensive library, furniture, portraits), the invaluable business archives of the Officina Plantiniana (inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register of documentary heritage in 2001), and works of art, including paintings from the workshop of Rubens. (Description by UNESCO)