Cornelis Cort was an engraver and draughtsman from the Netherlands who lived the later years of his life in Italy. He spent his career engraving artists' paintings onto copper and, in doing so, invented a technique that changed European printmaking. Today we're taking a closer look at his life, his method, and why Titian worked with him extensively. Let's go!
The Forge of the Cyclopes, Cornelis Cort, after Titian, Rome, 1572.
Who Was Cornelis Cort?
Cornelis Cort was born around 1533 in either Hoorn or Edam in the northern Netherlands. Historians think he trained in Haarlem under the engraver Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert before moving to Antwerp, the print capital of Europe in the early 1560s, to begin an apprenticeship.
Aux Quatre Vents (French for ‘The Four Winds’) was the Antwerp-based publishing house run by Hieronymus Cock, a Flemish painter and etcher and his wife, Volcxken Diericx. The publishing house’s role was to curate the designs, manage the presses, and develop the distribution network the prints would feed into. Cort’s role was to adapt the original paintings and with images after artists including Frans Floris, Michiel Coxcie, and Giulio Romano. These prints would be delivered to the publishing house’s distribution network for sale throughout Europe. While working for Cock, Cort's name did not appear on the plates, only Cock's, as was standard practice within a publisher's workshop. Cort only began signing his own plates after leaving Aux Quatre Vents in 1565.
Patience (Patientia), from the series Virtues, Cornelis Cort, after Frans Floris, published by Hieronymus Cock, Antwerp.Cort in Italy: Venice, Florence and Rome
In 1565 Cort left Antwerp for Venice, where he moved into the household of Titian, one of the most celebrated painters in Europe. Between 1565 and 1566, he produced some of his most celebrated plates after Titian's paintings, including Saint Jerome in the Desert, the Magdalen, Prometheus, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. These prints brought Titian's compositions to collectors across Europe at a price a merchant could afford, and establishing his reputation in cities that would never see the original canvases.
After a brief return to the Netherlands, Cort returned to Venice in 1567, then moved on to Bologna and Rome, where he engraved after the great masters of the age, Raphael, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Federico Barocci, Girolamo Muziano, Giulio Clovio, and the Zuccari brothers. Between 1569 and 1571, he visited Florence, probably working for the Medici family. He returned to Titian in Venice one final time in 1571–72, and then settled in Rome for the remainder of his life.
Hercules Wrestling with Antaeus, from the series Works of Hercules (9/10), Cornelis Cort, after Frans Floris, published by Julius Goltzius, Antwerp, c. 1563.
The Swelling Line: Cort's Great Innovation
Let’s rewind to the basics of engraving. Engravers use a tool called a burin to etch their marks; it is a steel rod with a lozenge-shaped tip that is pushed through the copper substrate by the heel of the hand. Engravers before Cort treated it as a fixed instrument: it cut a line of a single weight, and if you wanted a darker area, you added more lines, crossed them, then added flicks and dots between the crossings.
Cort varied the pressure as he cut. His line thickens where he leans in and tapers where he lifts, so a single stroke carries a gradient from dark to light along its own length. If you cross those swelling lines and vary their weight and spacing, you can model the curves of something like a shoulder, a bronze cauldron, or a bank of storm cloud with far fewer marks, with each surface portrayed differently. The effect is that the engraving stops looking like hatching and starts looking like light.
In Rome, Cort founded a school where he taught this technique directly. As the curator and printmaker Adam von Bartsch later noted, it was here that a brilliant touch of the burin transformed the simple line of Marcantonio Raimondi. That method was afterwards imitated and perfected by Agostino Carracci in Italy and Nicolaes de Bruyn in the Netherlands, and taken even further by Hendrik Goltzius in Haarlem, whose development of the swelling line we've explored in our post on Hendrick Goltzius. By the end of the century, it was the standard method for reproductive engraving.
Prometheus Chained to the Rocks of the Caucasus (Tityus in Hell), Cornelis Cort, after Titian, 1566.
Cort’s Legacy
During his lifetime, Cort's prints were copied by rival engravers up to a dozen times each, a measure of the demand for his work. Because he mostly signed his plates as the engraver after another artist's design rather than as an originator in his own right, his name is less well known than those of the artists he engraved after. But the reproductive engraver was the mass medium of the sixteenth century, and the only way a picture could travel across Europe, and Cort was the finest practitioner of it in his generation. He died in Rome in early 1578, aged around forty-five, leaving more than 200 confirmed engravings.
Landscape with Saint Jerome Reading, Cornelis Cort, after Titian, Rome, 1565
