| This dissertation reexamines the Small Landscape prints, two series of views of the local landscape around Antwerp published by Hieronymus Cock in the middle of the sixteenth century. Previously, art historical scholarship has focused on the anonymous designer of the compositions. In this study, greater attention is paid to the publisher Hieronymus Cock, who played a determining role in the production of the prints. Cock's emphasis on landscape prints indicates how radical and prescient his commercial aspirations for printmaking were.; A close examination of Cock's potential audience for the Small Landscapes reveals that the prints had cultural as well as aesthetic value for their purchasers. As Antwerp's urban citizens increasingly turned to the countryside as a place for both economic investment and spiritual refreshment, the prints helped to define urban understandings of and attitudes toward the local landscape. By situating the prints within this cultural context, the significance of the local landscape---imagined, represented, and real---comes into focus.; The Small Landscapes resurfaced in the seventeenth century as new publishers eagerly reissued them. An assessment of the later edition of the Small Landscapes reveals not only the complex publication history of the prints, but also their changing cultural meaning in the seventeenth century. The Eighty Years' War between Spain and the rebel Northern Provinces devastated the Brabantine countryside. In the aftermath of this destruction and wastage, the Small Landscapes developed new visual and cultural resonances. Indeed, in the fourth and final edition of the prints, published in Antwerp in the 1630s or 40s, the plates were substantially altered to reflect contemporary artistic tastes and larger socio-cultural trends.; In the seventeenth century the Small Landscapes also exerted a powerful influence on other artists. An examination of their artistic afterlife clarifies the importance of the prints for the development of a distinctly vernacular landscape idiom both in the Southern and Northern Netherlands, shedding light on the continuing centrality of the local, both as an historical concern and as a category of artistic representation. |
