Contributions
Heir to a dynasty of sculptors of Netherlandish origin, Cornelius Cure ran the most prestigious tomb workshop of Elizabethan England, set in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames. His father, William Cure the Elder, had come from the Low Countries and already worked for the Crown; Cornelius succeeded him and on 28 June 1596 obtained the office of Master Mason of the Tower of London and the royal residences, recommended by Lord Burghley, who praised his "skill, honesty, and knowledge of work in foreign places." He developed an elegant classical style for funerary monuments and chimney-pieces, and carved tombs for the high nobility — the Hobys at Bisham, Sir William Cordell at Long Melford. His masterpiece, commissioned in 1606, was the great monument to Mary, Queen of Scots, in Westminster Abbey, which James I wished for his mother. He supplied the touchstone and alabaster but died before completion: his son William finished the work, beneath which the queen was interred in September 1612.
Significance
The Cures form, with Maximilian Colt, the Flemish link that dominated English funerary sculpture around 1600, between Torrigiano's founding Italianism and the classicism of Nicholas Stone. As Master Mason to the Crown, Cornelius held a major official post under two reigns. His tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots answers, across the Henry VII Chapel, the tomb of Elizabeth carved by Colt: the two enemy queens — the beheaded Catholic and the Protestant who ordered her death — lie face to face, reunited by the political will of James I, son of one and heir of the other. Cure gave this gesture of dynastic reconciliation its marble form, one of the most meaning-laden ensembles in the whole abbey. Yet his work remains imperfectly defined: the respective shares of father and son in several monuments are still debated, and few pieces carry a certain attribution — the usual price of a workshop craft in which the master's name vanished behind the commission.
Influence
He passed the Southwark workshop and the office of Master Mason to his son William Cure the Younger, who completed the tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots and served the Crown until 1632. His classical style of monuments and chimney-pieces marked the generation of late Elizabethan tombs. As the son of William Cure the Elder, an immigrant from the Low Countries, he inherited directly the learned, mannerist Netherlandish sculptural tradition his family had planted in Southwark — the "knowledge of work in foreign places" that Burghley admired.
Anecdote
Fate decreed that Cornelius Cure should render in marble the tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots while Maximilian Colt carved that of Elizabeth, a few metres apart in the same chapel. The two queens who had fought each other to the scaffold are thus watched over for eternity by two rival masters from the same quarter of Flemish and Dutch immigrants in Southwark — and it was the son of one of them, James I, now king of both realms, who paid for both tombs. Cure died before seeing his own finished, leaving to his son the task of laying the last stone over the beheaded queen.