The sensual pleasures of Jan Gossart

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Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures. Jan Gossart’s Renaissance. The Complete Works

Maryan Ainsworth, Stijn Alsteens and Nadine M Orenstein

The Netherlandish painter Jan Gossart (or Gossaert) (c. 1478–1532) was one of the most Italianate artists of his day, a veteran of an influential early trip to Rome (1508–9) and an artist given to erotic nudes, both mythic and Edenic. The explanation for this visual conversion lies chiefly in Gossart’s role as a court artist, particularly (1515–24) for one sensual patron, Philip of Burgundy, admiral of the Burgundian fleet but subsequently bishop of Utrecht, who had brought the young artist to Rome on a diplomatic mission. 

A catalogue essay by Stephanie Schrader makes clear how Philip provided the impetus for erotic display, even of Adam and Eve.  In addition, Ethan Matt Kaveler’s essay, ‘Gossart as Architect’, reveals how the artist’s adoption of newly fashionable design elements of florid Late Gothic ornament as well as Renaissance visual vocabulary also stemmed from his other court contacts, such as that of regent Margaret of Austria.  Yet Gossart also used traditional Burgundian models from the fifteenth century, such as the art of Jan van Eyck (c1385–1441, painter of the National Gallery’s Arnolfini Marriage Portrait) and Rogier van der Weyden (c1400–64), particularly for religious devotional panels and their companion portraits.  A dazzling final section of the catalogue of paintings (also a final gallery in the New York exhibition) makes clear what a sumptuous depicter of fabrics and faces Gossart became, particularly during the 1520s.  In many respects, the newcomer to this artist will surely see the harbinger of Rubens in his works.

Several new attributions emerge from the catalogue, including the surprising dependence by the young Gossart on the late-fifteenth-century Bruges painter Gerard David (1460-1523); Maryan Ainsworth, a noted expert on David, actually ascribes the Madonna figures of two early Gossart pictures to David himself in a previously undetected collaboration.  In one case, a National Gallery picture, the curators differ, and London demurs, ascribing all The Adoration of the Kings (c. 1510–15) to Gossart rather than seeing (with Ainsworth) the intervention of David. 

Ainsworth’s remarkable ability to secure loans brought some very remote paintings into their proper relief within Gossart’s oeuvre: the charming small Madonna triptych from Palermo (no. 6); a new Christ Carrying the Cross (private collection; no. 26), the massive Christ on the Cold Stone (no. 28) from Valencia; and a standing Venus (no. 34) with a mirror, from Rovigo.  The newly cleaned small Christ on the Cold Stone from Budapest (no. 27) is now convincingly ascribed to Gossart himself, despite numerous lesser copies. Sometimes, paintings that were once together have been separated in their history are reunited in an exhibition such as this one. A convincing reunion here has rejoined The Norfolk Triptych (no 55), comprising a central Madonna and Child from Norfolk, Virginia, with a painting from Brussels of the couple who probably commissioned it.  

Alternatively, as in one case here, paintings once thought to have been connected are shown not to be related. So two wings (side panels) from Toledo (no. 24) are appropriately disengaged from a previous association with the Hermitage Deposition (no. 25).

Similar close re-examinations of Gossart’s drawings by Stijn Alsteens and of his prints by Nadine M Orenstein restore the wide-ranging graphic arts of Gossart to rightful prominence.  One striking element of the prints is that the artist was an early practitioner of etching in the Low Countries, besides creating other works by engraving (surely prompted by the visit of German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer in 1520–1) and designs for woodcuts of nudes.  In drawings, the artist worked on coloured papers and in both ink and chalk, and his images range from finished compositions of figures to independent collectibles. (Several works are also shown that are clearly copied carefully after lost original Gossarts).

Their delicate condition and  sheer size prevented a few major works from inclusion in the otherwise very complete exhibition, but they too are analysed in the catalogue with full entries. A hand-coloured etching of Emperor Charles V on iron (1520; no. 115) was the lone graphic holdout, along with fragile panels from Berlin, Prague, and Munich. Like most museum catalogues, this massive tome is intended as a permanent record of a major exhibition, so it certainly will have greatest appeal for scholars. As its subtitle suggests, it is intended to be definitive, ‘the complete works’, indeed the first full re-examination in half a century of a major, if unfamiliar, painter and draughtsman of the early-sixteenth-century Netherlands.

This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition has introduced specialists and newcomers alike to the allure and strangeness of this innovative and path-breaking artist.  Londoners are fortunate to have their own turn at this new discovery at the National Gallery this spring (23 February to 30 May).  And for the long term, this magnificently produced and richly illustrated catalogue will serve as the indispensable and solid foundation for understanding anything about Jan Gossart.

This book is published by the Metropolitan Museum, New York, 2010. 484 pp., 337 colour /116 mono illus, ISBN 978-0-300-16657-6.