The etchings of Jacques Callot (1591–1635) won him fame across seventeenth-century Europe, far beyond the boundaries of his native duchy of Lorraine, a state now absorbed into eastern France. He was, with Rembrandt, among the most famous printmakers of the century, whose impact was enormous on subsequent prints but also on every aspect of the visual arts. His career spanned cultures and countries. Callot grew up within Lorraine's heterogeneous court society of French, Flemish and German speakers. His father held the position of herald at court in Nancy and was also a painter of heraldry for the court and the city. In Callot's childhood a number of artists and skilled craftsmen socialized with his father. However, just as Claude Lorrain was to do a decade later, Callot left his native Nancy to travel southward to Italy for his artistic education. In Rome he learned to engrave in the workshop of a Frenchman, Philippe Thomassin. His Florentine biographer Filippo Baldinucci tells us that Callot was then drawn to the Medici court by the fame of the architect and engineer Giulio Parigi's teachings at his scuola on the via Maggio. Moving to Florence where he remained from 1612 to 1621, and working for the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici from 1614, he made etchings for the most brilliant court in Europe at the time.