Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance: The Complete Works

by Maryan W. Ainsworth (Editor), Susan Foister (Contributor)

Jan Gossart (ca. 1478–1532) was among the first Netherlandish artists to travel to Rome to make drawings after antique monuments and sculpture and then, upon his return, to introduce biblical and mythological subjects with erotic nude figures into the mainstream of Northern painting. Often credited with successfully assimilating Italian Renaissance style into the art of 16th-century northern Europe, Gossart is the pivotal old master who redirected the course of early Netherlandish art from the legacy of its founder, Jan van Eyck, toward a new style that would eventually lead to the great age of Peter Paul Rubens. Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures offers a much-needed comprehensive reappraisal of the artist’s accomplishment—the first in 45 years. It is not only an exhibition catalogue but also a study of the artist’s complete oeuvre as a painter, draftsman, and printmaker. The majority of the paintings in this volume have for the first time undergone rigorous technical examination. As a result, many problems relating to attributions, dating, versions, and copies have been clarified, and a fuller understanding has been obtained of the artist’s working procedures. The text draws on these unprecedented technical investigations as well as on recent original scholarship concerning many issues not adequately examined in the past, such as Gossart’s early career as a proponent of Antwerp Mannerism and the patronage of Philip of Burgundy (including a closer look at the erotic nature of court art).

Published in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Exhibition The Metropolitan Museum of Art (10/05/10-01/17/11) National Gallery, London (02/23/11-05/30/11)

Genres: Art

496 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 2010

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finding the Sensual in the Biblical Mysteries and Mythology

This hefty volume from the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an important publication on many counts: it provides us with the complete works of an important painter about who we know very little and it takes the time to explain the importance of this painter in the period in which he was as influential as he was secretive.

Jan Gossaert was a Flemish painter (1478 - 1532) who was also known as Jan Mabuse and as Jennyn van Hennepouwe. Though it was not uncommon to change names to appease patrons as painters moved from city to city, the name changes in this case led to a certain degree of obscurity. In his time Gossart (the spelling the Metropolitan wishes to use) was an accomplished painter of frescoes for cathedrals and for palaces. He was one of the most influential 'teachers' of his day: many better known painters from his period actually usurped Gossart's images and incorporated them into their own works - a tradition that should be an homage to the greatness of the original painter but in those times it often served as an advance or door opener for lesser well known artists to climb the ladder of fame.

The book is filled with as much information as we know about this reclusive man and the rest of the information in the text is very well written art history about the Renaissance. Gossart's paintings include many depictions of Adam and Eve (some rather ungainly as though after the apple bite their bodies became more corporal and less holy), many versions of the Madonna and Child and other illustrations of biblical tales. But they also include a large number of depictions of Greek mythological characters, something not always welcome under the Church's gaze. Oddly his manipulation of the nude figures of, say, Neptune and Amphitrite are truly distorted - bulky, unattractive beasties that instead of settling on fig leaves and ivy to cover genitalia, Gossart places a suggestive seashell over Neptune's virility, a move that seems to be an incident of thumbing the nose at those who disallowed frontal nudity!

The beauty of this very well designed and reproduced book is the vast number of fine paintings by an artist few of us have known by name. This volume should change that historical error.

Grady Harp

[Jonathan Lopez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although destroyed by lightning in 1568, the multi-panel altarpiece created by Jan Gossart for the abbey church of Middelburg, in the Dutch province of Zeeland, remains a subject of art-historical interest due largely to Albrecht Dürer, who saw it in December 1520 and pronounced Gossart’s work ‘Nit so gut im Hauptstreichen als in Gemäl’--not so good in design as in painting. Given that Gossart is known to have studied Dürer’s prints and shared his interest in the innovations of the Italian Renaissance, this ungenerous verdict may seem surprising. But even after visiting Italy in 1508-09, during which time he sketched avidly after the antique, Gossart retained vestiges of his early...

The rest of my review is available free online from Apollo magazine here:

http://www.scribd.com/full/48461707?a...