Jan Gossart, called Mabuse

Jan Gossart, also known as Mabuse, was one of the earliest artists from the Netherlands to travel to Italy, and following his return, became a central figure of northern renaissance art, combining influences both from the antique and from inspirational foreign masters such as Luca Signorelli and Albrecht Dürer. He was one of the most innovative and versatile artists working in the 16^th century, and was aptly described by Philip of Burgundy’s court poet in 1516 as “the Apelles of our age”.  

Gossart is the first Netherlandish artist who has left us a substantial corpus of drawings. Some forty autograph sheets survive and these are very varied in technique and subject, ranging from studies after antique sculpture to mythological and biblical compositions and ornament drawings. No drawing by Gossart has, however, appeared on the market since the sale from the Franz Koenigs collection, more than 20 years ago, of the fine small drawing of The Holy Family, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.¹ 

Born in Maubeuge, near Hainault, around 1478, Gossart became a master in the Antwerp painters’ guild in 1503.  In 1508, he was taken by Philip of Burgundy to Italy, to make drawings after the ancient sculptures that they saw there. Returning to the Netherlands, Gossart brought with him not only a considerable knowledge of antique sculpture, but also an understanding of the emerging trends in Italian art of the beginning of the 16^th century, which he passed on to his pupils such as Jan van Scorel, and contemporaries like Bernard van Orley and Lucas van Leyden.

Like most artists of his time, one of the genres in which Gossart worked was the designing of stained-glass roundels. Six such drawings are known, though the other five (of which one is signed) are all executed in the very different medium of brush and black ink and white gouache on paper prepared with a blue-gray ground.² Here, on the other hand, Gossart draws only in pen and ink, using a darker, stronger ink for the foreground figure of St. John and also for the Virgin and Child hovering in the sky, but drawing in the rest of the landscape background more delicately, in a lighter shade of ink. This use of two contrasting shades of ink was something that Gossart employed, to great pictorial effect, in several drawings, including The Conversion of Saul, in Berlin³ 

The scene shows John, the future Evangelist, in exile on the island of Patmos, inspired by the visions that are the subject of the Book of Revelations, also called the Apocalypse. Though the image of him staring up at an apparition of the Virgin and Child has no actual Biblical source, the subject was depicted by a number of artists, including Albrecht Dürer, in a 1511 print made for the title page to his set of woodcuts depicting the Apocalypse. Gossart also incorporated the same subject in the top section of his modello for a large window depicting Scenes from the Life of Saint John the Evangelist, a drawing now in Florence.⁴ 

As regards dating, the drawing seems consistent with Gossart’s style of the period around 1515-1520. As Maryan Ainsworth noted in her Metropolitan Museum catalogue entry, the head of Saint John is similar to the figures in the right foreground of the drawing of The Adoration of the Magi (Paris, Louvre⁵), ‘with their sharply defined profiles and gaping mouths’, and to figures in other drawings of this period, and the ‘agitated draperies, with their characteristic hooked strokes for folds and even, parallel hatching for the volume and shading of forms, are [also] comparable to those in the Louvre Adoration.’  

Gossart was one of the most tirelessly inventive and technically accomplished draughtsmen of his time. Every surviving drawing is somehow different from all the others, and this innovative roundel design is no exception, allowing us to appreciate to the full the artist’s immense imagination and skill.

1. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 2001.190; sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 23 January 2001, lot 4

2. The other drawings are in Paris, ENSBA; Paris, Fondation Custodia (two drawings); Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum; exh. cat., op. cit., New York 2010-11, nos. 84, 94-97

3. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. KdZ 8484; exh. cat., op. cit., New York 2010-11, no. 87

4. Florence, Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, inv. 1335 E-1335 E²; exh. cat., op. cit., New York 2010-11, no. 86

5. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Inv. 20000; exh. cat., op. cit., New York 2010-11, no. 75