Hieronymus Cock

Printer and publisher
Hieronymus Cock was a Flemish painter and etcher as well as a publisher and distributor of prints. He was one of the first in Northern Europe to establish a publishing company for prints, and thus helping to spread Renaissance ideals of beauty.

Cock was born into an artistic family, his father Jan Wellens de Cock and his brother Matthys Cock were both painters and draftsmen. In 1545 he was admitted to Antwerp’s guild of Saint Luke, and three years later he founded his print-publishing house Aux Quatre Vents (At the Sign of the Four Winds) which issued hundreds of important etchings and engravings.

His publishing house played an important role in the spread of Italian 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. He also disseminated in large numbers all over Europe paintings by artists from the Low Countries such as Frans Floris, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Lambert Lombard, Maarten van Heemskerck and Hieronymus Bosch as well as architectural and ornament designs by Cornelis Floris and Hans Vredeman de Vries.

After Cock’s death in 1570 his widow Volcxken Diericx continued the publishing house until her death in 1601.