Ludwig von Siegen

Ludwig von Siegen (c.1609 – c. 1680 Wolfenbüttel, Germany) was a German soldier and amateur engraver, who invented the printmaking technique of mezzotint, a printing-process reliant on mechanical pressure used to print more complex engravings than previously possible. He was a well-educated aristocrat, and a Lieutenant-Colonel who commanded the personal guard of William VI, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel), and acted as a personal aide to the ruler, with the title kammerjunker or Chamberlain.

Siegen came from an aristocratic family, and may have been born in the family castle of Von Sechten near Cologne, not in Utrecht, as traditionally believed, as he was baptised in Cologne on 2 May 1609. His mother had died (perhaps in his birth) and his father moved to Holland when Ludwig was young, apparently because of his Calvinist beliefs. Here his father remarried, to an Anna Perez, a widow from Spain, also adopting her son Marcus Perez. Anna died in 1619 leaving Johann to resolve the future of both boys (Ludwig and Marcus). He obtained a place in a German school for Marcus but Ludwig remained in Holland with his step-mother's family to avoid the dangers of the recently begun Thirty Years War in Germany.

Sechten was in Hesse-Kassel, and his father Johann von Siegen became an advisor to the Landgrave, Maurice, who in 1620 appointed him chancellor of the Collegium Mauritaneum, a school for young aristocrats which Siegen attended from 1621 to 1626. Then he studied law at the Hohe Schule in Herborn. His father moved to Holland to again in 1627, when the new Landgrave William V dissolved the Collegium Mauritaneum.

...
Wikipedia