Let’s be frank about this: when it comes to the heavy hitters of the High Renaissance, you wouldn’t normally expect Jan Gossaert to make the cut. Not that that’s necessarily his fault: the Netherlandish tradition of painting to which he belonged simply didn’t go in for the sort of high-octane, heroic idealisations that have made his Italian counterparts – Raphael, Michelangelo – household names. And, as for his near-contemporary Northern artists, tastes nowadays tend to prefer the more hauntingly outlandish visions of Dürer or Bosch. And yet, here comes the National Gallery, with the first show dedicated to Gossaert’s work in almost 50 years, to convince us that really he’s one of the absolute, bona fide greats.
He’s not. His major works are generally too stilted, too pristinely severe – albeit with moments of fleeting wonder. What he is, rather, is an intermittently fascinating artist, one who stood at the crossroads of two distinct artistic traditions. In 1508-9 he visited Rome, the first Northern artist to do so, boning up on the latest, most modern developments in art – the obsession with the sensuous forms of classical art and architecture, and the showy use of mathematical perspective effects – and incorporating these aspects into his own, Flemish training, which emphasised the exact observation of minute surface details.
The result of this marriage can be seen in a work like ‘The Adoration of the Kings’ (1510-15) – a huge painting, often considered Gossaert’s supreme achievement. Certainly, the level of detail is utterly astonishing: an almost delirious profusion, in which every glimmering stitch of gold cloth, every individually weathered brick, every miniscule speck of stubble on the kneeling Magus’s chin have all been painstakingly rendered – even as the whole scene recedes, masterfully, towards the curious onlookers and sumptuous cityscape in the distance.
And yet, in terms of conveying the drama of human emotion, the painting fails. Its combination of epic distance and intense detail somehow ends up uninvolving, artificial, strangely unreal. It’s as though the main characters don’t properly inhabit their environment – like in some CGI-laden movie nowadays, where the effects, for all their technical sophistication, feel oddly weightless.
A similar criticism holds for most of his portraits – which, unfortunately, the exhibition tends to rather tediously emphasise, allocating to them the largest room. Simply because they display the most stunning verisimilitude doesn’t necessarily give them, as the wall texts claim, a sense of psychological depth. Rather – to continue the television analogy – it’s like watching something in high-definition: you become so engrossed with, say, observing the single stray strands of grey hair embedded in a man’s fur collar, that any sense of the actual personality of these Flemish grandees gets lost.
There are a few paintings where Gossaert’s hyperrealism seems more effective. In ‘Saint Luke Painting the Virgin’ (1520-22), for instance, where a sense of illusion and dislocation, of differing levels of reality, feels entirely appropriate for Luke’s miraculous vision of the Virgin and Child. Or, alternatively, in the sexually charged paintings he produced for his notoriously licentious patron, Philip of Burgundy – where various mythological scenes seem to be basically an excuse for depicting, as salaciously as possible, women getting their kit off: from Salmacis and Hermaphroditus frolicking in water, through to a coquettishly self-regarding Venus. Yet, even with the erotic works, it’s generally only when you move beyond these rigourously detailed paintings to the quicker, simpler forms of his drawings, that you get any real sense of vigour and raunch – as in his cartoon of female bathers preening and languorously stretching and leaning over… well, you get the idea.
If such sauciness seems relatively tame by modern standards, then consider his pictures of Adam and Eve – not only his famous, full-length painting, where he accentuates their sense of torment and bewilderment by giving them oddly warped, almost rubbery poses; but especially his drawings in ink and chalk, where their naked bodies are shown entwined, their limbs groping and exploring. This sort of eroticising of a Biblical scene was genuinely groundbreaking; and his vision of Adam and Eve’s sudden sexual awareness as something both obviously shameful, yet also keenly pleasurable, still comes across as incredibly powerful.
Certainly, looking at Dürer’s much more traditionally placid Edenic studies, hanging alongside, you can’t help but wonder if Gossaert had a sort of genius for portraying conflicted, extreme emotions. So too with Gossaert’s woodcut, ‘Cain Killing Able’ (1529), possibly influenced by another similar composition by Dürer: so that while Dürer’s feels comparatively dainty, almost prissy, Gossaert’s entire scene, from the wind-wracked landscape to the brothers’ distorted postures, conveys a sense of jealous energy and demented fury. Whether he felt more artistically liberated working outside oil painting, or whether he was simply most excited by the subjects of sex and violence, it was in works like these, and not in his more microscopically detailed, superficially lifelike depictions, that Gossaert managed to actually capture the complexities of human psychology.