Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity by Marisa Bass (review)

The Renaissance got its name from a rebirth of classical antiquity occurring largely in Italy. Inspired by the achievements of ancient Rome, Italian humanists, artists, and poets styled themselves as inheritors of a lost tradition, and they labeled the benighted millennium that intervened a "dark" or "middle age." By this historical scheme—still operative today—northern Europe is imagined as remaining "medieval" much longer than Italy. And indeed modern art historical textbooks often term Netherlandish and German art of the fifteenth-century "Gothic," even though, during the Renaissance itself, the great Flemish masters Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden were deemed—by Italian humanists—more revitalizing than any of their contemporary Italian counterparts. A Florentine, Giorgio Vasari, surveyed in 1550 the previous two centuries of art history to prove the actuality of a Renaissance and did so, chauvinistically, with reference only to Italian art, but he was preceded in this effort by a northerner. Some thirty years earlier, the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer referred to an epochal "regrowth" (in his German, a Widererwaxsung) of art occurring all around him. Dürer's epochal trips across the Alps to Venice, his classically influenced style and repertoire, his theoretical interests, and his modern-seeming sensibility allowed him to inaugurate (conveniently at 1500, a century after the Italians) what the textbooks awkwardly term the "northern Renaissance." It remained unclear, however, what exactly Dürer revived: the "classical" antiquity renewed by the Italians or something different, perhaps something distinctively northern or Germanic.

Dürer was not the only northerner of his period to attempt, self-consciously, to assimilate the styles, motifs, and ambitions of a classical past. In 1508, the Netherlandish painter Jan Gossart, who called himself Jan Mabuse (after his birthplace, Maubeuge), set off for Rome, probably in the company of his patron Philip of Burgundy, the powerful illegitimate son of Duke Philip the Good. In Rome, Gossart produced several remarkable sketches of Roman antiquities, including drawings of the Colosseum and the Spinario statue. These "from life" impressions of the distant past were firsts in the northern tradition, but in Gossart's art they joined other retrospective glances back in history, including ones directed toward his native northern tradition, embodied in the supreme art of Jan van Eyck. More intriguing, Gossart's mythological paintings, while derived from classical literature and art, referred to an imagined local antiquity. Philip of Burgundy, it turns out, was obsessed by a Hercules inscription washed ashore in Zeeland, where he had one of his residences, and this fragment spurred research into, and fantasy about, the prehistory of the region dubbed "Batavia" by Roman authors.

This invented past, based on classical and local lore, is the subject of Marisa Bass's lively and beautifully produced new book. Gossart has long been regarded as a highly polished, stylistically forward-looking, if also rather eclectic master, absorptive like Dürer but without the Nuremberg master's power to make his influences his own. In Gossart's "invention" of a Netherlandish antiquity, Bass discerns a consistent purpose behind the artist's varied output. It is a project Gossart shares with the greatest (and least classicizing) Netherlandish painter of his century, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. And it is a project, too, that will return, three centuries later, in Romanticism's paradoxical "renaissance" of the Middle Ages.