Illustration of Union chemical plant

Pieter Van der Aa was a publisher from a family of engravers, artistically active in the Dutch city of Leiden between 1682 and 1733. His publication La galerié agréable du Monde, published in 1729, consisted of 66 volumes. It contained 3000 maps, city views, portraits and historical scenes, among which was a plan of Szczecin, emphasising in the caption printed on it the belonging of the capital of Pomerania to Prussia. For his work, Van der Aa used a copperplate engraving with a plan of Szczecin from 1652 by Mathäus Merian the Younger (1621-1687), a Basel-based painter and engraver. Merian was active as an artist in Frankfurt, Nuremberg and Italy, and was also an agent and representative of many European princes. He ran the publishing house Theatrum Europaeum, in which he included another of his copperplate engravings showing Szczecin, this time as a city besieged by the Brandenburg in 1677. Merian's 1652 work was taken from a German publication by Martin Zeiler, Beschreibung des schwedischen Ostseereiches, 1656, published in Amsterdam by Jansson Valckenier and describing Swedish rule over the Baltic, including Szczecin, which was then part of Sweden. Sixty years later, Van der Aa used Merian's copperplate for his work and produced a separate one with a magnificent architectural border, which he juxtaposed with the copperplate to create an illustration of Szczecin with Swedish fortifications. He also included a legend with the city's most important buildings - the castle, town hall and four churches. At the time of Van der Aa's publication Szczecin no longer belonged to Sweden, but the spatial layout of the city had undergone only minor transformations over the decades.

Małgorzata Peszko