Exhibition Hieronymus Cock - The renaissance in print

From 14 March to 9 June 2013 Hieronymus Cock - The renaissance in print runs at M - Museum Leuven. This is the first time in twenty-five years that the activities of the Aux Quatre Vents (At the Sign of the Four Winds) publishing house have been the focus of an exhibition. More than one hundred and fifty rare and fragile works on paper give a broad overview of the production of Cock and his associates.

Hieronymus Cock (Antwerp 1517/8-1570) was a painter and printmaker. Together with his wife Volcxken Diericx he was one of the first in Northern Europe to establish a publishing company for prints. From 1548 onwards their Aux Quatre Vents (At the Sign of the Four Winds) print-publishing house issued hundreds of important etchings and engravings. Prints after frescoes and paintings by Raphael and Bronzino, the first series of classical ruins and antique sculpture, as well as designs by Northern artists such as Maarten van Heemskerck, Frans Floris and Hans Vredeman de Vries were disseminated in large numbers all over Europe, helping to spread Renaissance ideals of beauty. It was Cock who had an eye for the talent of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who was to supply him with over sixty designs for prints. Cock also took the initiative to produce engravings of some of Hieronymus Bosch's monumental imaginative compositions.

Providing the core of the exhibition are prints and drawings from the rich holdings of the Royal Library of Belgium, where in recent years new research on the ‘In de Vier Winden' publishing house has been carried out. Added to these are a number of exceptional prints and drawings from the Fondation Custodia - Collection Frits Lugt. The overview is completed by many important loans from Belgian and foreign collections. The exhibition can be seen exclusively at M - Museum Leuven before it travels to Paris.

From 18 September to 15 December 2013 the exhibition will be shown at the Institut Néerlandais in Paris.

More info: www.mleuven.be