Hieronymus Cock – the Northern Renaissance captured in prints

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Larry Silver is impressed by ‘an astonishing variety of images, whose quantity and quality make for a dazzling overload of delights’

Hieronymus Cock. The Renaissance in Print by Joris van Grieken, Ger Luijten, and Jan Van der Stock

Most modern museum directors seem reluctant to stage exhibitions devoted exclusively to old master prints.  Perhaps it is the lack of colour; perhaps the medium remains less familiar to the viewing public.  Even exhibitions of such famous names as Dürer and Rembrandt rarely get produced.   All praise, then, to the remade museum of the Belgian university city of Leuven, which not only mounted a massive, 300-plus print exhibition devoted to 16th-century intaglios in 2013, but even devoted it to the producer of those prints, rather than the artist-designers.

Hieronymus Cock (1517/18–70) pioneered the role of print publisher in Antwerp, the most prosperous art centre of Northern Europe, using the same kind of organizational skills as his contemporary, Christopher Plantin, at the Golden Compass book press.  Cock's own house, Aux Quatre Vents (At the Sign of the Four Winds), is best known for being the publisher of Pieter Bruegel prints, crafted by a variety of professional engravers and early etchers.  The splendid catalogue of the exhibition memorably shows what a vast variety of pictorial types and styles emerged from Cock's prolific presses. 

Bruegel’s wider context is firmly established by showing his works in relation to other Cock prints of Vice and Virtue or Visualizing the World (landscapes).  Importantly, it is clear how much other work Hieronymus Cock's house produced, including images after both Italian artists and Italianizing artists from the Netherlands, especially Lambert Lombard and Maarten van Heemskerck.   Bruegel prints can never again be seen in quite the same isolation.

A selection of images highlight Cock's own maps and views of Antwerp, followed by Cock's own etched representations of ancient Roman ruins of ancient Rome.  Some of this work is familiar to specialists, but in the exhibition the monumental physical presence of the multi-sheet images of the Baths of Diocletian (no. 9) produced a visceral response. Thorough portfolios of antiquity are normally thought to be the province of 18th-century antiquarians yet here, in 1558,  24 plates were dedicated to measured plans, elevations, and details, many of them glued together and mounted on linen for fullest viewing.  To that focus on the ancient world, Cock added the Renaissance Italian vision, some of it produced by virtuoso Italian engraver Giorgio Ghisi after Raphael  (Vatican images, nos. 20–21), Bronzino, Giulio Romano (Raphael’s most important pupil), and others.      

The Renaissance in Printmakes clear the powerful influence of Italian art on the Netherlands, particularly on Frans Floris in Antwerp, whose series of the ‘Five Senses’ (no. 40), ‘Liberal Arts’ (in red, no. 44), and ‘Labours of Hercules’ (no. 38) used classical figures to epitomize allegorical learning and narrate mythologies.   This set of allegories gives way to personifications of Virtue and Vice, plus Heemskerck's remarkable eight-print cycle (1564; no. 48) on the Vicissitudes of Human Affairs, which embodies the boom/bust cycle from peace and prosperity to war and humiliation, a poignant lesson for Antwerp, poised between emerging global capitalism and the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule in the late 1560s.  This section on allegories also includes Pieter Bruegel's Seven Deadly Sins, as well as two Bruegel preliminary ink drawings for prints (Pride, Gluttony, Lust; 1557; nos. 55–7).   Like many of the prints in this exhibition, these drawings were also drawn from the Frits Lugt Collection in Paris (the second stop after Leuven) and the Belgian National Library in Brussels. 

‘The Netherlandish Tradition’ describes how printed imitations of Hieronymus Bosch were issued by Cock (including several by Bruegel, such as Big Fish Eat Little Fish, 1557, no. 67).  One particularly complex layered design features a Bosch drawing, Christ Carrying the Cross, which was re-fashioned by Lambert Lombard and issued by Cock (1556, no. 74; both the drawing and print appeared together).  In the final, landscape section of the exhibition Bruegel reappeared: his Large Landscape (c.1555, no. 107) and Ships (no. 101), plus his unique etching, the Rabbit Hunt (1560; no. 109) complement Cock’s prints after his brother Matthys (no. 94, who might be the Master of the Small Landscapes, no. 97) and landscape prints after Hans Bol (nos. 98–100).

Yet the largest number of prints issued by Cock were model designs for copies.   Varied decorative motifs and ornaments predominated, often designed by Cornelis Floris (brother of Frans and designer of the Antwerp city hall as well as designs for funerary monuments in the classical style).  Additional images of 'scenography,' perspectival designs of large buildings, including palaces, were provided for Cock by Jan Vredeman de Vries, who also provided careful analysis of classical columns (1565; no. 83).   

A remarkable late section featured works done by Cock for the Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands.  It immediately evokes comparison with the massive print projects devised and produced for Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (r. 1493–1519), magnificently surveyed late last year at the Albertina in Vienna.  For the next Emperor, Charles V, Heemskerck designed a set of prints celebrating the Victories of Charles V upon the occasion of his 1555 abdication.  The exhibition at Leuven also featured a dazzling suite of hand-coloured prints representing the 1559 Brussels funeral procession for Emperor Charles V.

‘Hieronymus Cock. The Renaissance in Print  offers an astonishing variety of images, whose quantity and quality make for a dazzling overload of delights.  As this brief survey reveals, some Cock prints were issued in suites of successive prints that formed series; others were designed for assembly to form oversized prints, even murals, usually out of two or more large plates.

This well-illustrated, definitive catalogue finally shows the full range of Hieronymus Cock and his print publishing. Every print lover will value this record of an historical and history-making exhibition, which will establish and amplify the broader visual culture of Pieter Bruegel's Antwerp. Leuven, the Fondation Custodia and Yale University Press deserve highest praise for making this experience possible.

Hieronymus Cock. The Renaissance in Print  by Joris van Grieken, Ger Luijten, and Jan Van der Stock is published by M Museum, Leuven and Yale University Press, 2013.  416 pp., 320 colour illus, €65.00. ISBN 978-90-6153-4419