Hieronymous Cock

Hieronymus Cock
Portrait of Cock engraved by Jan Wierix
Born	1518 Antwerp
Died	1570 (1571) Antwerp
Known for	Painting, printmaking, printing
Movement	Renaissance

Hieronymus Cock, or Hieronymus Wellens de Cock (1518 – 3 October 1570) was a Southern Netherlandish painter and etcher as well as a publisher and distributor of prints. Cock was the most important print publisher of his time in northern Europe and played a key role in the transformation of printmaking from an activity of individual artists and craftsmen into an industry based on division of labour. His house published more than 1,100 prints between 1548 and his death in 1570, a vast number by earlier standards.

Although far more important as a publisher, Cock was an artist of talent, best seen in his last series of 12 landscape etchings of 1558, which are somewhat in the fantastic style of the paintings of his brother Matthys Cock. Altogether he etched 62 plates.

He was born into an artistic family. His father Jan Wellens de Cock and his brother Matthys Cock were both painters and draftsmen. He was admitted to the painters' guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp in 1545. He resided in Rome from 1546 to 1548. When he returned to Antwerp in 1548, he founded his own publishing house, Aux quatre vents or In de Vier Winden (the "House of the Four Winds"). He issued his first prints there in 1548.

Cock's enterprise played an important role in the spread of the Italian High Renaissance throughout northern Europe as Cock published prints made by prominent engravers such as Giorgio Ghisi, Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert and Cornelis Cort after the work of leading Italian painters like Raphael, Primaticcio, Bronzino, Giulio Romano and Andrea del Sarto. The Italian historian of architecture Vincenzo Scamozzi copied many of the engravings published by Cock in 1551 for his volume on Rome entitled 'Discorsi sopra L'antichita di Roma' (Venice: Ziletti, 1583).