Figure nude, historie e poesie: Jan Gossaert and the Renaissance ...

Figure nude, historie e poesie: Jan
Gossaert and the Renaissance Nude in
the Netherlands
Larry Silver
Il quale fu il primo che porto d'Italia
in questi paesi l'arte del depinger
Historie, e poesie con figure nude...
L. Guicciardini, 1567
Descrittione de tutti i Paei Bassi
Anne Hollander has reminded us recently that man's 'natural' state de-
mands some sort of clothing, so that nudity is always an artificial, charged
condition. 1 After a consistent reluctance by fifteenth-century Netherlan-
dish artists to portray nude human figures at all, the explosion of such
forms in early sixteenth-century images, including a new repertoire of
themes from Roman mythology, indicates a new and conscious pur-
posefulness on the part of an artist such as Jan Gossaert. The task of this
essay will be to examine these nudes in light of the subjects they depict
- and, to a lesser extent, with their ornamental and architectural settings
- in order to analyze their significance and to suggest the connotational
meanings of these new forms in the North Netherlands. 2
I. Adam and Eve
The obvious place to begin analysis of Gossaert's heroic nudes is with
the theme of Adam and Eve, which remained a preoccupation through-
out his career. 3 From his first realizations of the Fall of Man, Gossaert
took pains to idealize the figures in an Italianate idiom. At first, the
figures are virtual copies after Durer prints, always a major source for
Gossaert's Italianisms. The earliest instance seems to be the small, arched
panel in Lugano (fig. 1) that replicates the figures from Durer's renowned
1504 engraving (fig. 2). A The striking element in this version, when com-
pared to later Gossaert Adam and Eve images, is its quiet calm. The
massive figures stand in balanced contrapposto poses. This moment pre-
cedes the actual Fall, when neither figure has yet eaten from the forbidden
fruit and become conscious of nakedness and sin. Both the subsequent
woodcut by Durer, from the Small Woodcut Passion of 1511, and Gos-
saert's emulation of it on the exterior of the Malvagna Triptych (fig. 3)
show the Fail with the two figures quietly but tenderly interlaced beneath
the tree. Gossaert's later figure groups of Adam and Eve will increasingly
diverge from Durer's example, particularly through their intensified
physical action and interaction.
Whereas Durer rather than Italy had provided the model for these earliest
Gossaert images, the artist's experience of antique statuary in Rome
would exert an increasing influence on his heroic nudes. In particular,
two figural drawings have survived as testimony of Gossaert's Roman
1

experience. 5 The first, a Standing Apollo (fig. 4), records a Roman basalt
copy after a Greek original, the Apollo Citharoedus (today in the Museo
Nazionale, Naples; formerly in the collection of Canon Benedetto Sassi,
Rome). Here the distinctive hip-shot pose, muscular torso, and upraised
arm provided elements for several future Adam and Eves by Gossaert. As
if to compete a sculpted form of Adam in the round, Gossaert's frog's-
eye view drawing from behind of a Standing Hercules (fig. 5) portrays an
even more muscular image of ideal masculinity, based on the Hercules
Boarium, discovered in the late fifteenth century hear the Circus Maximus
(today in the Capitoline Museum). 6 In this instance, Gossaert even
records the apple of the Hesperides in the left hand of the hero, the
classical motif closest to the fruit of Adam's transgression. Moreover,
the tight curls favored by Durer and already present in Gossaert are
added to this drawing after a classical source.
When Gossaert returned to the Adam and Eve theme in a series of draw-
ings during the late teens or early 1520s, he dramatically heightened the
erotic contacts between his principal figures. The Chatsworth Adam and
live (fig. 6), a presentation drawing on grey prepared paper with firm
contours and hatched white highlights, can be compared in figure types
to Gossaert's dated 1517 Hercules and Deianeira (fig. 22; see below). 7 Dur-
er's 1511 woodcut of the Fall still provided the gesture of Eve's arm
draped around the neck of Adam as well as the tightly crossed legs of
Adam; however, this latter posture, together with the powerful body
leaning forward from a tree trunk, stands even closer to the Adam and
Eve (fig. 7) engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi in Rome (ca. 1512-14). 8
The decorative, flowing, thick unbound hair of Eve owes a debt to Dur-
er's 1504 engraving, but its form and abundance more closely resemble
the engravings of II Robetta (Florence, 1462—1535), specifically his Al-
legory of Carnal Love. 9 Indeed, this unfettered hair not only attests to a
certain naive innocence on the part of Eve but also connotes sensual
abandon. Unbound hair appears in Hans Baldung's sensual Adam and
Eve woodcut of 1511 (fig. 8), in which Adam also fondles the breasts of
his mate, and in Baldung's drawings of naked witches. 10 Apparently, wild
hair was to be equated with a wild nature, as though hair without re-
straint was a corollary of uninhibited nudity (appropriate to Eve before
the Fall). In similar fashion, the body language of crossed legs suggests
eroticism in both Cranach and Baldung paintings, including several Eves,
as well as in Robetta engravings. 11 Gossaert's Chatsworth drawing fur-
ther underscores its amorous point by drawing the two figures so close
together, clasping one another. Eve's genitalia are made explicit, and
Adam's open-mouthed, vacant stare crosses Eve's body towards her hair
rather than towards the apple that is touched by both figures' hands.
Perhaps the most impressive feature about the Chatsworth figures is their
awkwardness, despite their massive bulk. Adam supports himself on his
hip and buttock against the tree trunk and tugs Eve towards him, her
standing leg leaning precariously into Adam's thigh. This arrangement
serves to destabilize the dignity and beauty of these figures and to under-
2

score their tightly interlocked intimacy, an exaggerated extension of the
clinging Adam and Eve in the Malvagna Triptych.
Gossaert's Adam and Eve body types manage to incorporate, if not to
reconcile, two contradictory aspects of the First Parents: on the one hand,
their epic dignity, beauty, and importance; on the other hand, their fal-
lible concupiscence, leading inevitably to disobedience and lust. Durer's
1504 engraving and Gossaert's Lugano copy after it present the dignity
and majesty of mankind just prior to the Fall. By the time of the Chat-
sworth drawing, only the physical vestiges of that dignity that Durer had
accorded to the Italianate forms of the nudes remains, but that very
physicality and fulness is bound up in the ardor of their sensual embraces.
One might carp at such a reading of the Chatsworth drawing were it not
for the presence of other Gossaert drawings and paintings of the Fall of
Man during the 1520s. In a Frankfurt drawing copy (fig. 9), clearly re-
vealing its Gossaert prototype, the muscular Adam, supported only on
one arm, lies hard upon the ground, pressed by a kneeling Eve who
hovers over him. 12 She extends the apple into his tentative grasp; directly
above the fruit and Adam's hand, her firm breast and unbound hair
visually equate the tasting of the forbidden fruit with the sin of lust. 13
3

Once again the source for Adam's twisted pose seems to come from Italy,
specifically from Marcantonio's river god (reversed) in the lower right
corner of the engraved Judgment of Paris (fig. 10). 14 As Schwarz makes
clear, these same poses of the Frankfurt drawing are repeated by Gossaert
in a painting (Berlin, Schloss Grunewald; perhaps a copy) in which a
sensuous Eve with her legs crossed lies upon the ground and reaches
upward to Adam. 15 Once more, Adam perches precariously against a
rock and leans forward to embrace his mate. Eve holds the apple at the
intersection of their lips.
This same motif of a kiss between Adam and Eve was carried further by
another Gossart drawing (fig. 12), where Adam's muscular torso can be
compared to the Gossaert Man of Sorrows etching (fig. 11). 16 Eve ex-
changes the apple with Adam (significantly located between their res-
pective left, or sinister, hands, although possibly this drawing was in-
tended to be the basis of a woodcut), while she pulls their heads together
in a kiss. Adam stages open-mouthed at his mate, as in the Chatsworth
drawing. Eve's bow-knotted hair can also be found in the painted Gru-
newald and East Berlin Eves (fig. 16), as well as on the 1521 Brussels
Venus (fig. 28) or 1517 Birmingham Deianeira (fig. 22), a pair of sensuous
but threatening mythical females (see below). 17 In addition, the two
figures' legs overlap in the sexualized 'slung-leg' motif.
lithe Albertina drawing heightens the figures' sexual intimacy, then a
Providence chalk drawing (fig. 13) offers an erotic climax to Gossaert's
conceptions of the Fall of Man. 18 Once more, both figures are seated, a
position that seems tied to a suggestion of sin, specifically sloth or luxuria.
The Providence drawing appears to be an amalgam of the Frankfurt
drawing and the Grunewald painting. Both figures lean towards one
another, groping for each other's genitalia. Eve reaches for the apple
with her left hand, for Adam's crotch with her right hand, thereby ex-
plicitly equating Original Sin with sexual awareness. Adam's comple-
mentary gesture is a curious, unexplained motif (also found in the Adam
of the Albertina drawing and in the Eve of both the Frankfurt drawing
and the East Berlin painting, as well as in Marcantonio's Adam and Eve
engraving): he clasps a branch of the tree. This gesture seems to redouble
or reinforce the plucking gesture, even as it underscores the instability
of the figure. It could indicate Adam's complicity in the Fall, underscore
his physical weakness, or else recapitulate Eve's own prior disobedience.
On the other hand, it could be taken in the opposite sense, that is, as the
negation of Eve's action through a prolonged contact with the Tree of
Life prior to the actual moment of the Fall. Schwarz suggests that Gos-
saert copied Adam's figure and pose from the Creation of Man fresco by
Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling; however, this portion of the
ceiling is usually assigned by scholars to the second campaign of the
Chapel decoration, i.e. after the scaffolding was moved in mid-1510 -
thus considerably after Gossaert's departure from Rome. 19 However,
Marcantonio's Adam from the Adam and Eve engraving presents an only
slightly altered variant of Michelangelo's Adam with outstretched right
4

leg and bent (now crossed) left leg, and its torsion is much closer to
Gossaert than the open figure of Michelangelo. Eve's body and pose
resemble Italian nudes only generally, such as Marco Dente's Pan and
Syrinx and Marcantonio's 'dictionary' of female nudity, the judgment of
Paris (fig. 10). 20
When Gossaert painted Adam and Eve, his overt eroticism was usually
held in check more than in his drawings (the Grunewald painting being
a notable, presumably late, exception). 21 The large Hampton Court Adam
and Eve (fig. 14) is arrayed like a Dureresque, full-figured variation on
Marcantonio, with Adam leaning against the tree to the left and Eve
echoing his cross-legged pose at the right (Eve also echoes Jacopo de'
Barbari's engraving, Mars and Venus, fig. 15). Durer's 1504 engraving still
exerts a powerful influence on the figure types (and even on Eve's fig-
leaf), but the crossed legs, leaning bodies, and linked arms provide both
instability and eros. Adam's open-mouthed stare and nervous nibbling
of his forefinger suggest sexual tension; his garlanded 'loin-cloth' fore-
shadows the aftermath of shame, when the two figures cover their naked-
ness. A wisp of Eve's hair detours suggestively toward her sex.
Another large Gossaert Adam and Eve (fig. 16) adds a lively, if unsettling
movement to the figures. Adam seems almost to be in flight from Eve,
who clutches the tree while proffering the apple. Both physiques closely
resemble the Albertina drawing by Gossaert. The odd, dancelike pose of
Adam clearly derives from Italian models, such as the nude executioner
in Marcantonio's Massacre of the Innocents. 22 Once more, Eve is an enli-
vened, Dureresque exaggeration of Marcantonio's Eve. The presence of
an ape, symbol of animal passion, below Adam in the corner of the
painting indicates the unhappy outcome of the event as well as man's
5

own kinship with the lesser animals. 23 The ape, too, is eating a fruit. This
is the only Gossaert painting where Eve's genitals are clearly visible,
although Adam's anachronistically are still covered (assuming this sec-
tion to be unretouched); in contrast, the more erotic, later Schloss Gru-
newald Adam and live shows Adam conspicuously unclad. This covering
reverses the biblical narration (Gen. 3, 7), where the two figures put on
fig leaves to cover their nakedness only after eating of the forbidden fruit,
so it indicates Adam's modesty in contrast to five's sexual awareness.
We are at a mid-point of the Fall of Man, where Eve has already eaten
the apple, but Adam not vet. Once again, Original Sin and sex are inex-
tricably linked, and Gossaert presents us with tangible signs of Adam's
reluctance and shame.
6

Death is the other product of mankind's disobedience to God, and Gos-
saert continues the story of the Fall with a woodcut rendering of Cain
Killing Abel (fig. 17). 24 These figure types resemble the figure of Adam
in the Frankfurt and Albertina drawings, but both the twisted pose of
the clubbing figure and the dense network of hatched lines in the wood-
cut can be related to an Italian woodcut by Ugo da Carpi after Baldassare
Peruzzi, Hercules Expelling Envy from the Temple of the Muses (fig. 18). 25
Ugo's seated, pointing Apollo served as the model for Gossaert's Cain,
with his powerful back view placed above a profile waist and leg. This
same model served Gossaert earlier for the male figure in his woodcut
of Hercules and Deianeira (see below). The significance of this subject of
Cain and Abel is the same as in its appearance above the figure of Eve
on the upper right interior of Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece - namely,
the connection between Original Sin and the presence of this murderous
evil within the world. 26 Once more, man's animal nature dominates over
his spiritual side, just as Adam and Eve's lust had subverted their in-
nocent state of grace. Lucas van Leyden's 1529 cycle of six engravings
of the Fall of Man concludes with two scenes of Abel, the prototype of
sacrifice: Cain Killing Abel (fig- 19) and Adam and Eve Lamenting Abel
(fig. 20). In this light, Gossaert's woodcut Cain and Abel can be seen as
the Old Testament antitype of the New Testament Passion of Christ and
as the antecedent to his own etched image of the Mocking of Christ (fig.
11).
7

Just like the figure of the savior in the Mocking of Christ, Gossaert's Adam
and Eve or Cain and Abel present surpassing strength or beauty, despite
their sinfulness. In these Old Testament instances, however, no simple
equation of beauty with holiness can be made. Gossaert takes pains to
make evident the lustfulness and violence that literally dis-grace our First
Parents. We simultaneously behold man as made in the image of God
- hence the physical likeness between Gossaert's Adams and his adult
Christ in the Mocking - yet also motivated by animal passions and ener-
gies. Such a dialectical tension between opposites is inherent to the Ren-
aissance concept of man, midway between God and the beasts on the
'great chain of being'. 27
Yet Gossaert's profound consciousness of mankind's Original Sin in the
Adam and Eve scenes (or in the Cain and Abel or Mocking of Christ prints)
accords more fully with Augustine's City of God, where the flesh begins
to lust against the spirit:
8

these mortals would run to such enormities in sin that even the beasts devoid of rational
will, and who were created numbers from the waters and the earth, would live more
securely and peaceably with their own kind than men ... 28
Even at the height of the Italian Renaissance, we find much the same
kind of understanding of mankind's nature underlying Michelangelo's
Sistine Ceiling. Esther Gordon Dotson's exegesis of the Sistine Ceiling
has elucidated the Augustinian theological foundations of Michelangelo's
masterwork, which underscores the dual nature and central placement of
man within creation. 29 The Genesis scenes are at once the typological
antecedents of Christ's future redeeming mission, yet they are simulta-
neously the turning point of human history. Michelangelo's Creation of
Eve was used also as the location of the chancel screen, thereby separating
the Fall of Man and subsequent Genesis scenes of man's later decadence
from the earlier creation scenes reserved for the space above the choir
of the chapel. As for the bodies themselves, for Michelangelo, the human
figure was the crown and the sum of creation itself as well as the op-
portunity to display artistic mastery of difficulta in complex movement:
There is nothing more noble and pious than good painting because nothing excites and
elevates devotion in persons of discretion so much as the perfection of a work that,
surpassing all difficulties, approaches and is joined to God. For good painting is nothing
if not an image of the perfection of God and a reflection of his own painting. 30
Formal grace becomes the visible manifestation of spiritual beauty. This
objective correlative is perhaps most tangible in the variety of move-
ments and posture of the ignudi of the Sistine Ceiling, intended in all
likelihood to be understood as wingless angels. 31
Even within Michelangelo's images of human perfection, however, the
nude figures of Adam and Eve were seen to be subject to sin and a fall
from grace (a pun appropriate to the awkward and 'graceless' figures of
the Expulsion, now excluded from grace forever). Indeed, Michelangelo's
Eve also implies sexual activity herself, as Steinberg's close reading of
Eve's 'idle' hand, in line with her grasping of the fruit in her other hand,
has made clear. 32 As in several of Gossaert's later Fall of Man scenes, the
sexual dimension of Original Sin is associated with a reclining position
close to the earth. Adam, joining his mate, also reaches for the fruit while
clasping the tree with his other hand.
Gossaert's comprehension of these theological implications expressed
through the idealized nude seems to emulate the achievement of Mich-
elangelo. Whether through intuition or through instruction during his
visit to Rome, Gossaert acquired an awareness of the meaning of human
beauty, wherein Christ and Adam conform to the same idealized physical
canon, yet Adam falls victim to his own concupiscence, the 'lower nature'
that wars with spirituality (1 Galatians 5, 16-21) and causes all mankind
to be mortal and lesser in future. As Augustine declares:
For God, the author of natures, not of vices, created man upright, but man being of his
own will corrupted and justly condemned, begot corrupted and condemned children
(City of God XIII, 14).
9

Unlike Michelangelo, Gossaert devotes particular attention to this sin,
especially carnal sin, as the root source of future barriers ('the whole
train of evil'; Augustine) that separate mankind from divinity - his theme
in the contrasting figures of the Mocking of Christ. In similar fashion, it
is postlapsarian lust and its attendant shame that refashions innocent
Edenic nudity into 'nakedness'. Adam and Eve cannot afterwards inter-
act physically - nor can we, their descendents with that innocent,
though seemingly erotic, intimacy reserved by Gossaert for the Madonna
and Child (see below), who restore the lost state of grace. 33
II. Mythologies
just as witchcraft literature, such as the 1484 Malleus Maleficarum, could
tie a proclivity towards evil specifically to women, beginning with the
archetype Eve, so could Gossaert present a similar misogyny in his
mythological subjects as well as in his Adam and Eve scenes. 34 Gossaert's
interest in mythological figures and scenes began with his visit to Italy
and copying of ancient statues: the Spinario, the Capitoline Hercules (fig.
5), and the Apollo in Repose (fig. 4) are the surviving instances. 35 Folie
has rightly stressed the distinctive personal intensification of qualities
that Gossaert adds to his models - the youthfulness of the Spinario, the
muscular power of the Hercules, and the graceful elegance of the Apollo.
(Obviously many of these qualities were retained by the artist when he
10

painted mythological subjects later in his career, but in these works, too,
his use of the beautiful, idealized nude is usually allied with a heightened
conciousness of the greater physicality of the figures and an attendant
greater carnal implication of nakedness.
Earliest and most neutral of Gossaert's mythological subjects is his 1516
Neptune and Amphitrite (fig. 21). 36 This picture was specially commis-
sioned by Gossaert's maecenas, Philip of Burgundy, as its inscription
tells us: A-PLUS-SER Alphe + burgne. The subject, too, was doubtless
chosen by Philip, who held the title of Admiral from October 1515 to
1517. Numerous scholars have pointed to the dependence of the two
massive figures on Durer's 1504 Adam and Eve engraving (fig. 2), already
the model for Gossaert's Lugano Adam and Eve (fig. 1). In addition,
Gossaert utilized the engraving Mars and Venus by Jacopo de' Barbari
(fig. 15), who is 'documented' as having worked for Philip at his chateau
at Souburg, near Middelburg, possibly alongside Gossaert. 37 Gossaert's
Neptune essentially repeats the pose of Durer's Adam, along with a turn
of the head and an embracing gesture like Jacopo's Mars. Amphitrite
closely approximates jacopo's Venus, especially in her stance and her
broad hips as well as in her inclined head; her small breasts and broad
shoulders echo the open stance of Durer's Eve. Gossaert, however, has
exaggerated the bulk of both figures to an almost ludicrous extreme, as
if to underscore their mythic grandeur. In addition, the ivory lustre of
the figures' skins suggests their otherworldliness, like the pallor of the
heavenly Madonna in the Vienna St. Luke (fig. 35) or the Chicago Ma-
donna in Glory (fig. 38).
Herzog has devoted considerable attention to the carefully structured,
correctly 'antique' architectural setting of the Neptune and Amphitrite. 38
He concludes that this temple precinct is a fanciful hybrid, composed out
of a combination of canonical ancient elements: bucrania, triglyphs, gut-
tae, bead-and-reel, and egg-and-dart motifs, all of which Gossaert could
have studied from ruins in Rome. Gossaert's use of Roman Doric col-
umns and capitals is appropriate to the character, power, and importance
of these divinities within such a space. Herzog even notes that the floor
of Gossaert's temple is covered with a layer of Neptune's watery element.
The perspective of Gossaert's painting implies a low viewpoint or the
elevation of these figures above the observer, another indication of their
supernatural status.
The significance of the mythological figures may not extend beyond a
casual equation of Neptune with Philip of Burgundy, who indeed never
married, so there can be no Amphitrite referent in his life. Perhaps the
goddess could be understood as a personification of the sea, domesticated
by her lord. Neptune's laurel crown clearly marks this lord of the sea as
a Roman triumphator, another obvious compliment to Philip. Neptune,
however, like his brother Jupiter, was a notorious philanderer. 39 For-
tunately for him, his bride Amphitrite was a calmer spouse than the
jealously vindictive Juno (except in the instance of Neptune's infatuation
with the nymph Scylla, whom Amphitrite transformed into a frightful
11

monster). Gossaert's affectionate couple thus offers a licit marital trans-
formation of the sinful Adam and Eve, as well as of the adulterous Mars
and Venus. The prominent, if comical, seashell codpiece of Neptune may
also allude to the nominal chastity of the admiral, future bishop of
Utrecht (1517). Trident in hand, Neptune presents a majestic and dec-
orative cult image within a classical temple, a painting wholly in the
antyksche manier and a tribute to both the taste and the office of Philip of
Burgundy.
Although Amphitrite serves as Neptune's consort and complement in
this large 1516 panel, a 1517 Gossaert painting (fig. 22) and subsequent
woodcut of Hercules and Deianeira (fig. 26) heighten the sexual tension
within a mythological scene. 40 The painting is situated once more in a
shallow classical niche, yet here the female figure occupies the central
position. Reliefs under the bench seat represent Hercules' earlier acts of
heroism: his conquest of Antaeus, defeat of the Nemean lion, and carry-
ing of the global burden of Atlas. Yet the deportment of the two seated
figures offers an ignoble contrast; despite their mythic beauty, the two
nudes are interlaced in an erotic embrace. Although Hercules holds a
club, akin to Neptune's trident, and also has an ivy leaf loin-covering,
12

oth his seated posture and overtly sexual combination of both cross legs
and the slung-leg motif indicate his erotic intentions (Possibly the ab-
sence of his protective lion pelt garb also indicates Hercules' abandon-
ment of heroic virtue). Deianeira sits upon a significant cloak, one she
had soaked in the blood of the centaur Nessus, who had deceitfully as-
sured her that it would secure for her the love and fidelity of Hercules
(Ovid, Met., 1X, 101 280). On the contrary, the cloak would inflame
Hercules' skin and stick fast to him, ultimately causing the death of his
mortal body. Thus these beautiful and powerful figures offer a mythic
parallel to Adam and Eve, whereby the blandishments of an evil and
lustful halfbeast deceived the woman and brought death to her mate.
Gossaert's painting equates their amorous liaison with this doom and
presents such sexuality as the antithesis of Hercules' heroism (indeed, his
victory over Antaeus can be taken metaphorically to be a conquest over
the earthly impulses). Visually, the idealized nudes again carry for Gos-
saert implications of potential sexuality. In particular, Deianeira's knotted
hairdo and flowing locks, trickling along the perimeter of her breasts,
would later reappear in Gossaert's overtly erotic Eves: the East Berlin
and Schloss Grunewald paintings and the Albertina and Providence
drawings. Emotions of both love and jealousy, each engendered by
woman, become the undoing of man. Thus, like the Fall of Man, does
the neutral, upright calm of Neptune and Amphitrite give way to the fatal
passions and erotic actions of Hercules and Deianeira.
The forms of Gossaert's Birmingham painting again derive directly from
Italian prints. The tightly-crossed legs and bent waist of Deianeira can
be found in Robetta's engraving, Allegory of Mother Earth (fig. 23); in
Robetta's Allegory of Envy (fig. 24) the same pose is made explicitly sexual,
when the female figure sits in the lap of a male suitor and slings her legs
over and between his. 41 Hercules' bent muscular frame seems to derive
from familiar Marcantonio engravings: the Mars, Venus, and Cupid
(fig.25) or Adam and Eve (fig. 7). In similar fashion, the Hercules and
Deianeira woodcut (fig. 26) closely copies figures from the Ugo da Carpi
woodcut after Peruzzi, Hercules Expelling Envy from the Temple of the Muses
(fig. 18). In this case, Gossaert's Hercules (like his Cain, fig. 17) emulates
Peruzzi's Apollo in presenting a complex, twisting view that exposes
both a muscular back and profile hips and face. In addition, Gossaert's
woodcut Deianeira adopts the face, hair, left arm, and cloak over her lap
from the muse in the corner of Ugo da Carpi's print.
Once more situating the mythic figures in a classical architectural setting,
this woodcut Hercules and Deianeira is even more sexually assertive. Her-
cules actually climbs onto the willing body of his mate, literally slinging
his leg over her entire lap as he places his hand onto her (cloak-draped)
thigh. Believing it to be a love talisman, Deianeira clutches her cloak
nervously and tightly with her left hand; with her right hand she lightly
caresses the shoulder of Hercules. In the woodcut, Hercules' laurel gar-
land, like Neptune's, refers to his previous triumphs, soon to be under-
mined by the consequences of his lustfulness.
13

Gossaert did not fail to represent the heroism of Hercules elsewhere. In
a pen drawing with wash (fig. 27), he shows the hero slaying Eurythion,
herdsman of the red oxen of the monster Geryon. 42 In addition, a docu-
ment of the 1580s mentions a large Gossaert Hercules panel (dated 1530)
from the inventory of Ipolito Michaeli in Antwerp. 43 A lost Hercules and
Antaeus, signed and dated 1523 (copy in Maggioni Ackerman collection,
Emmenbrucke) probably was painted for Philip of Burgundy. 44 Hercules
often served as the archetype for princes in his labors, subduing monsters
and restoring order, and in the Antaeus painting he again wears the laurel
wreath of princely triumph. 45 Thus the Deianeira episode takes on par-
ticular significance as the undoing of princely strength and virtue, repre-
sented elsewhere by Gossaert, by weakness and sinful impulses. Deianeira
serves, therefore, as a mythic equivalent of the Power of Women topos
so popular in the woodcuts of Lucas van Leyden. 46 Moreover, among
the Power of Women paintings by Lucas Cranach, we find an analogous
scene, Hercules and, Omphale, wherein the strongest of heroes puts on
women's clothing and takes up the distaff, 47
Love's dangerous power becomes explicit in the theme of Gossaert's
tiny 1521 Venus and Amor (fig. 28). 48 Here, the goddess of love herself
falls prey to the arrows of her all-conquering son. The poetic inscription
reads: 'Shameless son, you who are inclined to torment men and gods,
you do not (even) spare your (own) mother; cease, lest you be destroyed'.
Gossaert's source for the gyrating, full-bodied, nude female figure of
Venus is again Marcantonio, specifically the Venus and Cupid in a Niche
(B 311; fig. 29); the contrapposto Cupid derives from Marcantonio's Venus
after the Bath (B 297; an engraving also copied by Altdorfer, W 167).
Consistent with other Gossaert mythologies, the setting is fully classical,
a niche with columns, close in form to the Roman Doric of the Neptune
and Amphitrite. The erotic associations of Venus take on a distinctly-
negative, moralizing tone by means of the secondary images adduced, as
in the Hercules and Deianeira painting, below the main figures. Unlike the
virtuous Labors of Hercules episodes that contrast with the erotic Her-
cules in Birmingham, these 'bronze' roundels (another echo of the Sistine
Ceiling?) portray the adulterous union of Venus and Mars and their sub-
sequent discovery by the cuckolded Vulcan. The standing figures of
Venus and Mars, echoing the Jacopo de' Barbari engraving (fig. 15)
already utilized for Gossaert's Neptune and Amphitrite (fig. 21), appear at
the right after the discovery scene at the left, thus reversing (perversely?
as if deliberatley flaunting) the normal left-to-right eye movement of the
observer. Thus are the portentous words of the inscription fulfilled as if
spoken by Venus; and thus are the actions of the main figures made clear.
The goddess twists, attempting to restrain the hand and the bow of her
bold and dangerous son, yet she acts too late, as the roundels reveal. Lust
leads to adultery and then to disgrace, even among the classical gods.
Cupid's arrow vanquishes even the mighty god of war. The full-bodied,
fleshy sensuality of Venus is crowned by her flowing hair, fluttering scarf,
and top-knot, akin to the hairdo of Gossaert's Eves, seen above. The
14

movement of her hair echoes the powerful torsion of Venus's body,
urgent and unstable within the confines of the niche. This scene, then,
is fraught with unresolved and illicit sexual tension despite its formal
dignity of both figures and setting, appropriate to the mythological sub-
ject.
The adultery between Mars and Venus continued to preoccupy Dutch
artists in subsequent years. Lucas van Leyden's 1530 engraving (B 137)
(fig. 30), lifted from the Marcantonio Judgment of Paris (fig. 10), actively
shows Cupid abetting the indolent glance of Venus toward Mars. 49 Lu-
cas's print also pairs the bow of Amor with the discarded armor of Mars
15

on the floor. Yet the instability of Gossaert's panel also finds its analogue
here in Lucas's presentation of an uncomfortable twisted pose and
anxious glance out of the image by Mars (whose own headband flutters
actively around its knot on his brow) as well as in the dramatic separation
of the figures by Mars's vertical central sword, on which he continues
to lean. On Venus's side, a large ball connotes both the instability and
the global dominion of this carnal passion. Lucas's architecture as well
as his figures in Mars, Venus, and Cupid show evident dependence on
Gossaert's woodcut of Hercules and Deianeira, and he has also adopted the
same moralizing message of martial strength undone by the weakness of
the flesh.
Mars and Venus also serves as the subject of a Maerten van Heemskerck
canvas of 1536 (Milan, Gavazzi collection) as well as the panel of Venus
and Mars Surprised by Vulcan (ca. 1540; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Mu-
seum). 50 In the Venus and Mars, Cupid again urges on the amorous
couple, nude and entwined, beside a lustful satyr fragment and within a
ruinous vault, metaphors of the destruction-caused by lust. As Veldman
has made clear, the Vienna panel offers a reversal of the usual image of
carnal indulgence and depicts the triumph of righteous moral indignation
over luxuria (Prudence an Justice are the personified virtues presented
in grisaille - along with a Dutch quotation from Proverbs 11 — on the
reverse of the Vulcan panel). Again the mythological scene, replete with
muscular and sensuous idealized bodies for the pagan deities, conveys a
Christian moralizing attitude, founded upon the illicit sexuality inherent
in the subjects. Indeed, Heemsketck's 1545 panel of Venus and Cupid
(Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum) shows the same theme as Gos-
saert's 1521 Brussels panel: namely, Venus holding on to Cupid's bow
in a vain attempt to restrain her son, even as Vulcan approaches from
the background with the net that will later trap and embarrass Venus
and Mars. 51
Shortly after the telling of the tale of Mars and Venus in Book IV of
Ovid's Metamorphoses comes the story of Salmacis, which echoes the
theme of manly vigor sapped by the enervating power of women:
The tale of fifteen-year-old Hermaphroditus, named for his parents,
Hermes and Aphrodite, recounts how the youth falls prey to the non-
chaste, non-hunting water nymph, Salmacis. Here it is the beauty of the
modest boy and the lust of the nymph that set the tone of the tale, and
the intertwining of bodies inherent in sexuality becomes a literal fusion
here. Gossaert illustrates this myth in a small rounded panel (fig. 31),
where the active struggling of the powerful bodies conveys clearly the
opposed wills of the two figures. 53 Salmacis, like a reversed figure of
Gossaert's Brussels Venus, here clings to the resisting Hermaphroditus,
who is clad with the same leafy loincloth of shame/modesty as Gossaert's
16

Adams. Indeed Gossaert's unstable yet active, sensualized and inter-
twined figures grow out of his Birmingham Hercules (fig. 22), in contrast
to his earlier balanced and stable Neptune and Amphitrite (fig. 21). At the
same time, such figures presage his sexually responsive and physically
mobile Adam in the later Adam and Eve scenes. The painted Hampton
Court Adam and Eve (fig. 14) offers analogous unbalanced main figures
and figure types (plus Adam's leafy loincloth, also present for Eve but
significantly lacking for Salmacis) with a pensive but willingly inclined
Adam. Reluctance like that of Hermaphroditus can also be seen in the
'fleeing' Adam of the East Berlin Adam and Eve (fig. 16). Once more,
motion seems to be linked to emotion for the figures; stillness and reso-
17

lution are achieved only in the fused bodies of the background. For the
slenderer body type of Hermaphroditus as well as his upraised arm, Gos-
saert recycled his Roman drawing study of the antique statue of Apollo
Citharoedus (fig. 4), a work then thought to be a hermaphrodite. 54 Thus
not only was the ancient canon consulted for the beauty of the figure
itself, but also the very subject chosen was paired to an appropriate,
specific antique model.
All of Gossaert's mythological subjects (with the possible exception of
Neptune and Amphitrite and the Hercules labors, all tributes to his noble
patron, Philip of Burgundy) boil down to male-female confrontations
centered on the theme of love. In most cases, powerful and heroic males
especially Hercules but also Mars are disarmed and overcome by
female beauty and their own lustful inclinations. Love of this kind proves
to be vain, even destructive. Hermaphroditus alone offers resistance, but
he, too, succumbs to a nymph's persistence and is 'weakened' by the
fusion of their male and female natures. In Gossaert's remaining mytho-
logies, this basic warning against fleshly concupiscence takes on different
forms and stresses the female side of things but still provides erotic voy-
eurism for the male viewer.
Most striking as an erotic warning and display is the Rovigo Venus (fig.
32). 55 Here the goddess of sensuous love presents herself in isolation
upon a pedestal and offers only the classically-inspired pudica gesture as
a token to suggest her modesty. The contrapposto stance of this Venus
clearly derives ultimately from antique (or Renaissance) models and re-
sembles, in reverse, the Apollo Citharoedus of Gossaert's Roman drawing
(fig. 4); however, the fleshy female forms as well as the pose also seem
to depend on Durer's Eve, reversed, from the 1504 Adam and Eve (fig.
2; note especially her feet, plus her sloping shoulders and high waist). 56
From Jacopo de' Barbari come a number of other motifs for the Rovigo
panel. Barbari’s early 'Victory and Fame engraving (ca. 1498—1500; B. 18)
not only provides the Dureresque frontal nude adopted by Gossaert but
also suggests the theme of amor omnia vincit, made explicit in the painting
by the trophies of war lying at the feet of Venus. A later Barbari en-
graving, Victory Reclining amid Trophies (ca. 1504; B. 23) continues this
theme of love's triumph, akin to Venus's dominion over warlike Mars,
by means of piles of arms and amor. 57 Still another Barbari engraving,
Nude Woman Holding a Mirror (ca. 1504; B. 12) introduces the traditional
attribute of the vice of Vanity, into the hands of the goddess of love. 58
Gossaert has enhanced the attributes of vain splendor and pleasure by
adorning both Venus and her mirror with jewels and crowning her head
with the familiar sensuous curls and long hair. In all likelihood, the
prominent vase of flowers at her feet alludes both to beauty and to its
perishability. An early inventory (after 1520) interprets this picture as a
'Vanitas vel omnia vanitas' while recording it as a 'standing nude female
figure'. 59 Yet the attributes of a helmet and armor at her feet, together
with the adjacent winged quiver and bow appear to allude to both Mars
and Amor and to identify the nude figure as Venus. 60 Thus the figure is
18

evealed to be both a Venus and a Vanitas (a Venus vana in the formu-
lation of Sterk) - an ominous if sensuous use of the mythological nude
to provide a warning to the perceptive viewer. Here the 'cheesecake'
sumptuousness and soft modelling of the nude goddess is a deliberate
appeal to the male viewer's voyeurism and prurience, but the Venus
figure is accompanied with quite traditional attributes of Vanity (akin to
the secondary scenes in the Brussels Venus and Amor) in order to remind
the Christian observer of his own temptable sinfulness and his mortal
venality.
III. Madonna Pictures
Gossaert's final mythological figure, the Munich Danae of 1527 (fig. 33)
offers the obverse of Venus's negative coin. Although nude above the
waist, Danae embodies the virtue of modesty (Pudicita) within her tower
of Chastity according to allegorized medieval and Renaissance exegeses
of her tale. 61 Indeed, Danae, visited by a golden shower from the king
of heaven, could be seen as a type for the Virgin Mary herself (and her
heroic son, Perseus, as a type for Christ). 62 Gossaert seems to have fol-
lowed this earlier Northern tradition, in contrast to a later, recently re-
discovered 1603 Goltzius Danae (fig. 34) that shows the venality of the
19

young woman, surrounded by coins as well as a procuress-like crone.
Gossaert's setting of the Danae episode places her within a nichelike,
collonaded, hemicyclical chamber, parallel to his own, current panels of
the Madonna, most notably the Prado Madonna and Child in a Niche (fig.
43; see below). Even the pearl diadem and transparent veil of Danae link
her to Gossaert's favorite motifs to adorn the heads of his Madonnas,
and the seated figure on a cushion at ground level recalls the humility
pose of the Virgin in the Prague St. Luke Drawing the Madonna (fig. 36).
The gold shower of the god's presence falls directly down onto this
young virgin's lap, just as the Virgin herself miraculously conceived at
the time of the Annunciation. Often this conception, too, is depicted in
religious paintings by means of golden rays of light, as in Campin's
Merode Altarpiece. Yet the dignity of Gossaert's Danae figure receives
reinforcement via her surroundings. Gossaert not only envelops Danae
within the antique Ionic hemicycle, discussed by Herzog, but also places
her above and in front of an impressive skyline of buildings, including
porches in both a classicizing Renaissance and a flamboyant Gothic style
of architecture. 63 Directly over the head of Danae lies a domed circular
building, whose geometrical perfection may be an allusion to the sanctity
of the heroine and resembles both the traditional round temple of Je-
rusalem in Flemish paintings as well as the portal of Paradise on the
exterior left wing of the Malvagna Triptych by Gossaert. If, as suggested
by Herzog, Gossaert adapted the virginal rounded chamber of Danae
from the classical forms - Ionic columns on high dados in a round shape
- of the Roman Temple of Vesta, then he clearly intended to match her
surroundings to her chaste character, in emulation of the fabled vestal
virgins. Should any of the more salacious viewers be stirred to lustful
thoughts by the bared breasts of Danae, then they are no better than
lustful Jupiter, god of the pagans with all of the moral shortcomings
afforded by Roman anthropomorphism. Such viewers betray the digni-
fied, moralized Christian message of modesty and humanity inherent in
the preternatural beauty of both the figure and the architecture of the
Gossaert Danae. Once more Gossaert walks a precarious tightrope be-
tween an overt erotic appeal and a transcendent canon of beauty as the
embodiment of a moral ideal. Religiously sanctioned figures, such as the
Madonna (or her mythical type in Danae), can be at once human, and
thus physically intimate, yet beyond fleshly sinfulness. Lesser beings,
however powerful or beautiful, however mythical or heroic, are never-
theless subject to conscupiscence and temptation to luxury, usually in the
form of women or Venus herself. For mythic figures like Adam or Her-
cules such indulgence in luxury will eventually spell their downfall.
With the typological significance of his 1527 Danae, Gossaert equates the
mythic maiden with the Virgin of Christianity. In the process, he utilizes
both physical beauty and architectural classicism, based on the same It-
alianate canons, for Madonna pictures as well. The model of Durer in
the particular and of Italianism in general finds a parallel in the religious
works of the artist's own signature, where the Latinized 'Malbodius'
20

eplaces 'Gossaert'. This development is well summarized by the contrast
between Gossaert's Vienna St. Luke Drawing the Virgin (fig. 35) and the
earlier Prague St. Luke (Jig. 36). 64 Kronig has emphasized the degree to
which Gossaert's elaborate architectural spaces and decorations in both
pictures attests to his ambitions to be thought of as an accomplished and
learned artist. 65 The later, Vienna St. Luke introduces a variant on the
basic theme: that is, not Luke drawing the Madonna and Child from life,
like Van der Weyden's traditional image from Brussels (Boston, Museum
of Fine Arts), but rather the appearance of the holy figures as a vision,
surrounded by a glowing cloud and accompanied by angelic attendants.
This presentation clearly separates the realm of the holy figures from the
level of existence of even a saint, such as Luke. The saint kneels in prayer
behind a prie-dieu in the manner of Jan van Eyck's Chancellor Rolin; his
shoes are removed to denote holy ground, as in the instance of Moses
before the burning bush (Luke's shoes are also removed in the Prague
panel). 56 The distance of sanctity between the visionary holy figures and
the saint is further underscored by the presence of an angel guiding the
hand of the artist as he works. The angel thus acts as intermediary be-
tween heaven and earth, much as the patron saint intercedes for donors
on traditional altarpieces or devotional panels (e.g., Gossaert's own Do-
na diptych for Antonio Siciliano). 67 Thus, it is the transcendence rather
21

than the immanence of the holy figures that is asserted by Gossaert's
mature St. Luke.
Gossaert's fully Italianate forms convey the same message as do these
motifs. The Virgin and Child are now emphatically super-natural in their
muscular fulness and ivory lustre of their flesh. Even the supporting cast
of putti (who carry a crown of heaven above the simple linen cap of the
Virgin) are paragons of cuteness. The closest visual source again seems
to be Durer, whose otherworldly Virgin on a Crescent with Crown of Stars
(1511; B 32) presents analogous round, firm bodies hovering before a
glowing aureole. Gossaert, however, has exaggerated the fulness of both
figure's, whose physical perfection is the metaphor of their spiritual per-
fection in the same fashion as Michelangelo's nude religious figures con-
vey an ideal through their beauty. 68
Much the same suggestion of otherworldliness and perfection emerges
from the Renaissance vocabulary of architecture and ornament in the
Vienna St. Luke. The rounded arches of the arcade and the surfaces of
the pilasters are crammed with classical relief ornament: medallions with
profile portraits, urns, figures (satyrs, tritons, putti, etc.), and scroll-
work. 69 In short, the setting is Italianizing, consistent, and up-to-date,
based on the latest fashions in Rome of revived 'grotesque' ornament,
especially from the Golden House of Nero. 70 Despite the coordination
of its parts, the architecture once again perfectly supports the foreground
figures, each of whom stands before his own arched opening. On the
side of St. Luke sits a round aedicula under the arch with a sculpted
figure of Moses on top. Combined with the classical ornament, Moses
and his tablets of the law represent the two realms that gave wav to the
triumphant Christian faith, represented by Luke's vision. Both the pagan
world of Rome and the Old Testament era of law are subsumed within
this space, under grace, where we sense a blend of both palace and tem-
ple, akin to the Renaissance foreground setting and the Gothic back-
ground space, respectively, in the Prague panel. Like the vision vouch-
safed to the Emperor Augustus by the Tiburtine sibyl, St. Luke views
an epiphany of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven in a setting that is at once
richly exotic and fully classicistic. 71
With this Vienna St. Luke, Gossaert proclaims his new aesthetic vo-
cabulary, derived from both Durer and Italy, as the appropriate expres-
sion of the perfection of the Madonna and Child. He pursues this linkage
of style and subject for the holy figures in most of the mature religious
works of his career, eliminating the references to Flemish pictorial tradi-
tions or Gothic architectural spaces in favor of the new classicism. For
example, the small 1527 Madonna and Child in Munich (fig. 37) presents
a dynamically powerful young Christ akin to the classical Hercules. 72
Here, the trampling of the serpent of evil by the infant Christ is referred
to in the inscription on the back of the throne, derived from Genesis (3,
15): 'Mulieris semen IHS serpentis caput contrivit', a variant of the Vul-
gate, where a seed, i.e. Christ, will crush the head of a serpent. This
precocious victory over the serpent of evil draws upon the classical myth
22

of Hercules as a baby, strangling the life-threatening snakes in his crib.
Gossaert's exceptionally muscular nude Munich Christ draws visual as
well as moral inspiration from the model of power and beauty of Her-
cules (A decade and a half earlier in the Prague St. Luke he had expressed
much the same analogy through the presence of classical sculptures - of
Hercules, of the owl of Minerva, and of the eagle of Jupiter - behind his
traditional Rogierian figures of Madonna and Child). In all likelihood,
the source for both the squirming Child and the impassive, seated Ma-
donna (cf. especially her face) was the nearest authentic, Italian Renais-
sance classic: the Bruges Madonna by Michelangelo (1503), a work surely
known to Gossaert. Gossaert has also used the rounded-arch shape of
the Munich panel in order to create a classicizing throne niche, reinforced
by the biblical inscription. The thickness of Mary's drapery as well as of
the molding profile of the niche creates a heightened suggestion of am-
plitude and importance for the figures akin to Christ's heroic proportions
and the model of Michelangelo.
If Gossaert introduces Italianate architecture into a context of archaizing,
traditional Flemish figures in the Prague St, Luke, he also mingles his
earliest Italianate, heroic figures within a Rogierian context of a devo-
tional diptych against a monochrome background in his 1517 Madonna
of Jean Carondelet (Paris, Louvre). 73 At first, it may seem paradoxical that
the Child in the Carondelet diptych offers the athletic, muscular body
23

that was to become the rule for Gossaert's religious works in a panel
clearly intended to evoke comparison with fifteenth century precedents,
made for noblemen like Carondelet who served the Burgundian court of
Philip the Fair and Charles the Fifth. In addition to the full-bodied Child,
the fleshy, full face of the Madonna can be seen to be another derivation
from Durer, specifically from the 1513 engraving, Madonna by the Tree (B
35). 75 Our apparent paradox disappears, however, when seen within the
experimental context of other Gossaert religious paintings of the teens.
Whereas the Prague St. Luke presents traditional Flemish figures within
a Renaissance architectural setting, the Carondelet Diptych, conversely,
shows Italianate figures, derived from Durer, within an archaic Flemish
frame and format, derived from Van der Weyden. The novel forms of
these figures then become the objective correlative of their otherworld-
liness and sanctity and distinguish them from ordinary mortals, like Ca-
rondelet (a point underscored for the donor by the broken skull alongside
his own heraldic arms on the reverse of the panels).
For the mature Gossaert around a decade later, this same supernatural
beauty, in the forms of Christ's precocious muscularity and Mary's
smooth, rounded fulness, remained the principal means to convey holi-
ness. Nowhere is this Italianate canon more transcendent than in his
Chicago Madonna and Child in Glory (fig. 38), a work seemingly extracted
from the Vienna St. Luke yet continuing the devotional diptych format
of the Carondelet Diptych (although the pendant donor panel still has not
been traced). In this instance, the glowing nimbus and solar rays serve
to identify the Madonna as the Apocalyptic woman in the sun, a favorite
visual object of prayer by donors, because it was an 'indulgenced' image,
conveying remission of years in Purgatory for specific prayers said before
it, 76 Mary's preternatural beauty, with a patently otherworldly ivory
whiteness of skin, contrasts with earthly reality, just as in the Vienna St.
Luke, for the Christ Child reaches out of the frame to an obviously
contrasting site of the worldly donor. In such an ensemble, the contrast
between parts could not have been greater, and the direct access to the
holy figures in the Carondelet Diptych has been utterly broken.
Like most of the mature Gossaert religious panels, the Chicago Madonna
in Glory is undated. Fortunately, among the rare prints by Gossaert comes
a dated engraving, the 1522 Virgin and Child beneath a Tree (fig. 39), a
favorite subject of Durer, that establishes a forceful benchmark for Gos-
saert's works in an Italianizing idiom. 77 This theme is an explicit New
Testament fulfilment of the Fall of Man, as Christ clasps an apple and
tenderly kisses the Madonna's lips. For purposes of dating, this 1522
print furnishes a terminus ad quern for the Vienna St. Luke and the Chicago
Madonna in Glory, where the same fleshy Virgin with long, flowing hair
under a linen cap complements a curly-haired, muscle-bound Child, nes-
tled within densely clustered drapery folds of sleeves and swaddling-
cloth.
Slightly earlier, if we may judge by its more unsure and experimental
burin technique, is Gossaert's engraving, the Madonna with the Cloth (fig.
24

40). 78 Gossaert has given these Italianate figures an energetic physical
interaction, centered around Christ's playful sporting with the Virgin's
veil. Thus far, no specific iconography for this motif has been identified,
although in this engraving the Child appears to be seeking the breast
(Mary, in turn, offers Christ an orb, which in visual shape and proximity
echoes the rounded swell of her breasts). 79 The motif of Christ tugging
at the veil of the Virgin appears in Raphael's Madonna di Foligno (ca.
1511/12), available to Gossaert through a Marcantonio engraving (ca.
1515/16). 80 Gossaert's print uses Mary's mantle rather than her veil; how-
ever, his later, often-copied painting, the Madonna with the Veil, stands
closer to Marcantonio in showing Christ enfolding Himself within the
Virgin's ample drapery, 81 In the painting, the muscular, bent torso and
upraised arm and extended legs of Christ recall the ignudi of the Sistine
Ceiling (such as the figures around the Creation of Eve or, especially, the
Separation of Earth and Waters), 82 Of course, Gossaert would have had to
depend on copies after Michelangelo rather than direct contact with the
original, since these portions of the Sistine Ceiling were among the very
last to have been completed. An alternative source might have been the
Mars, Venus, and Cupid engraving of Marcantonio (fig. 25), allegedly
based on a Michelangelo drawing, and already seen above as a possible
model for Gossaert's Adam and Eve and mythological subjects.
25

In a number of Gossaert religious pictures, an explicit eroticism links the
Madonna and Child, as in the 1522 engraving of the Virgin and Child
beneath a Tree (fig. 39). Perhaps the most direct of these eroticized pictures
is the Prado Madonna and Child in a Niche (fig. 43). 8i Once more, the holy
figures are ivory white and preternaturally beautiful. In addition, they
are located in a fully classical niche. Christ holds an apple in one hand,
and He stands erect in the lap of the Virgin, reaching behind her head
as He clings cheek-to-cheek to plant a tender kiss. Mary, in turn, re-
sponds by clasping Christ's head an holding Him close. Her breast re-
mains exposed, although this does not appear to be an occasion of nurs-
ing (and the sturdy Child looks a bit old to be nursing still). That such
amorous overtones were consciously intended by Gossaert is evident
from several related compositions besides the 1522 engraving: a signed
panel in Munster (fig. 45), where Christ clings lovingly to His mother's
exposed breast; a Berlin-Dahlem panel (fig. 44), with a draped Christ
alongside the Virgin's proffered breast; and a lost (?) painting, known
from copies, showing Christ clasping Mary's breast and gazing lovingly
into her eyes as he clambers upward, while the two cling tightly to one
another. 84 In most cases, these paintings make explicit reference via the
presence of a prominent apple to Original Sin and to mankind's downfall
through such eroticism.
Precisely this juxtaposition of Christ and Mary as the 'new' Adam and
Eve determines the meaning of this eroticized image. The Berlin panel
by Gossaert explicitly declares Christ to be both God and man, verus deus
et homo, as it underscores the paradox of the Madonna, 'chaste mother
and Virgin' (casta mater et virgo). Thus, the inscription confirms that
remarkable combination of the human and the divine, the real and the
ideal, which Gossaert's Italianizing physical beauty brings into view.
Recently, Leo Steinberg has considered the sexuality of Christ and has
re-established the importance during the Renaissance of the human as-
pects of Christ, including his sexuality:
With this background in mind, we can actually discover details, such as
the extraordinary fact that the Berlin panel features the Christ Child with
a distinctly visible erection! Christ's body, however, and by extension
both His nakedness and His eroticism with the Virgin, was understood
by definition to be free from the taint of sin pertaining to ordinary man-
kind in the wake of Original Sin. Yet it was equally important to assert
the Incarnation, that is the adoption by Christ of human form and flesh.
Steinberg furnishes a number of examples of the inverse theme of Christ
26

fondling Mary, namely Mary fondling the Child or else displaying or
protecting his genitalia. 86 Indeed, the very nature of such unsettling eroti-
cism paradoxically underscores both Christ's human nature ('complete
in all the parts of a man', according to Augustine's City of God, XXII,
18) and His exemption from sinful human nature. Steinberg rightfully
calls attention to the 'defining traits of the human condition' in the com-
bination of nursing and sexuality associated with the Virgin's breast (so
basic to Gossaert's religious panels). 87 Thus, the overtly sexual and ideal
images of Gossaert's fully physical holy figures can at once show their
human and lifelike behavior through their actions yet also convey their
otherworldliness through their beauty. Indeed, the intimate bond be-
tween Madonna and Child has both a literal and a mystical meaning:
27

Herein lies the essential mystery of the holy figures as well as their vital
link to the First Parents, Adam and Eve. On the one hand, both pairs
are created in God's image, filled with the beauty and physical power
that is the sign of their exalted importance. The difference between them
lies in the holiness of the New Adam and Eve, Christ and Mary, who
can at once participate in human passions and fleshliness yet still can
transcend the accompanying weaknesses that were the undoing of Adam
and Eve. Gossaert seems to have understood and to have exploited this
very paradox. He shows us active and amorous holy figures, usually
bearing the apple that is the sign of Original Sin, yet their very prurience
is contradicted by their sacral identities. The gulf between sinful, mortal
mankind and both Christ and the Virgin is exemplified by the fact that
we fallen viewers of such images cannot avoid our own culpable associ-
ations of such interactions with erotic indulgence. Yet by definition, these
holy figures transcend such fallibility, which is common to all other
humans, including Adam and Eve and the gods of ancient myths. They
stand distinct from fallen mankind just as surely as the Man of Sorrows
in Gossaert's print (fig. 11) remains separate in His beauty from the
grotesque ugliness of his tormentors.
28

IV. Style and Meaning
What, then, does this Gossaert representation by means of Italianate
forms tell us about his self-conscious utilization of classical nudes and
architectural spaces? Derived from both first-hand experience of antiquity
and the Renaissance in Rome (later supplemented by Italian prints, es-
pecially by Marcantonio) as well as from assimilation of the Northern
creations of Durer and de' Barbari, virtually all of Gossaert's Italianism
appeared in the wake of his direct contact with the Italian expatriot, de'
Barbari, at Souburg. Thus, we can assume that such assimilation of a
Renaissance aesthetic was at once essential and comprehending.
We must remember, in assessing the Italian trip and the Italianizing forms"
of Gossaert, how utterly 'foreign' and exotic such Roman contacts must
have appeared in the Netherlands prior to the advent of a Dutch pope,
Adrian VI (1522—23). Possibly, Gossaert was even one of the first wit-
nesses of the uncompleted Sistine Ceiling by Michelangelo; certainly, he
seems to have held a deep interest in Michelangelo's model of ideal,
heroic, muscular male nudes, even if he derived them second-hand from
copies or prints. Like Michelangelo, Gossaert made the human figure the
center of his art, and he focused on the Fall of Man theme with particular
attention to its sensual aspects in the manner of the Sistine Ceiling fresco
of the same subject. That man as observer can misjudge such beauty or
tarnish it with his own carnality was well-known to Michelangelo him-
self:
This Idea (of beauty) lifts my eyes to those high visions which I set myself to paint and
carve here below. If men of rash and foolish judgment drag sense-ward (al sense) the
beauty which moves and transports every right intelligence to Heaven, it is because weak
and wavering eyes, and even eyes fixed steadily on things above, cannot pass from the
mortal to the divine, for without grace it is a vain thought that one may rise thither. 89
Michelangelo even went on late in his career to explore this contrast
between a sensual and an intellectual attraction to beauty in his pendant
drawings for Tommaso Cavalieri: the Punishment of Tityus and the Rape
of Ganymede. 90 And if Michelangelo was uncomfortable with the un-
bridgeable gap between physical beauty and its transcendent ideal, how
much more so would be the Northerner, Gossaert, inheritor of tradi-
tional Christian, ascetic fears of physical passion going back to Original
Sin. Gossaert's native land lacked the local traditions of antique remains
and revivals prior to his own trip to Rome. Of course, it was precisely
this combination of the imported and foreign forms of the Renaissance
along with a sense of the carnal, implicit in the physical, that informed
Gossaert's beautiful and massive, yet unbalanced or discomfited heroic
figures: Adam, Hercules, or Venus. Their huge bodies are both 'heavy
and mortal' - even the perfect but broken body of the Man of Sorrows
in Gossaert's etching (fig. 12) and paintings (fig. 46) shares these qualities,
as it stands above grotesque tormentors. 91
As previously discussed at length in this Jaarboek, Gossaert's colleague,
Lucas van Leyden, shared much of this same ambivalence toward Ital-
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ianate forms in his own late graphic works. 92 Van Mander informs us
that Gossaert and Lucas met and travelled together when Lucas was
around 33 years old, some six years before his death (in 1533), i.e. in
1526—27. 93 Lucas's art corroborates the influence of Gossaert from as
early as 1524, although Gossaert's prints may well have preceded their
direct personal contact. 94 A particularly striking example is the massive
figural canon and leaning postures of Lucas's Fall of Man drawing (ca.
1528; Hamburg), where even the curly hair and fuzzy beard of Adam are
anomalies in Lucas's oeuvre but staples of Gossaert. 95 We have already
seen how Lucas's mythology of Mars, Venus, and Cupid (fig. 30) emulated
Gossaert's own suspicion of sensuality through the forms of beautiful,
yet adulterous figures. Like Gossaert, Lucas utilized Durer prints and,
later, Italian prints as veritable dictionaries of classicizing figures and
poses. He willingly incorporated heroic nudes into images of the adult
Christ, as in the impressive chalk Resurrection, ca. 1530, recently acquired
bv the Rijksmuseum, or the immortal souls of ordinary mankind in the
huge 1526—27 Leyden Last Judgment Triptych. 96 That Lucas in his Leyden
altarpiece can employ the same classicizing vocabulary for both the saved
souls and the damned indicates that for him these strong and beautiful
nudes denote spiritual importance but not a pure spiritual sanctity. Their
dignity and majesty, like that of the First Parents, can be tainted by
Original Sin, a favorite theme for Lucas as well as Gossaert. 97 Indeed,
the physical fulness of Lucas's figures implies, like Gossaert's, their
greater potential for sexuality and sinfulness, unless they are exempted
by religious grace.
Unlike Lucas, however, Gossaert specifically developed fully Italianate
surroundings for his large, heroic nude figures. Here, the essential
strangeness of the imported architectural forms serves to distance such
depicted worlds from both the everyday world of the viewer and the
heritage of Flemish paintings. Thus, whether we take the classicizing
niche of the Prado Madonna and Child in a Niche (fig. 43) to be part of a
temple or a palace, it still offers a pointedly 'otherworldly' space to a
Flemish viewer. Even a presumed temple precinct, such as the Vienna
St. Luke, hovers, like its holy principals, between an earthly and a
heavenly location. In the mythologies, archeologically informed use of
antique models combines with the artifice of appropriate classical orders
to accord with the subjects depicted and to reinforce their own ideality.
Throughout this essay, we have argued by implication, derived from the
unequivocal importance of these religious and mythic figures themselves,
that Gossaert's physical nudes and architectural forms were intended to
provide an 'elevated' style, especially in contrast to the prevailing natu-
ralism of the earlier Netherlandish heritage. This is an argument about
the style itself rather than the cultural matrix or specific patrons and
commissions underlying Gossaert's artistic directions. In particular, the
role of Philip of Burgundy, as discussed by Sterk, could be supplemented
by considerations of the broader Dutch and Flemish support for Italian-
ate forms, e.g. by the House of Nassau-Breda, later so supportive of Jan
30

van Scorel, or by Margaret of Austria in Mechelen.
Yet even within the arena of style itself, our analysis must remain indi-
rect. Neither Gossaert nor his predecessors nor his contemporaries in the
Netherlands ever expressed a visual theory akin to that developed in
Italy. 98 Even in contemporary Germany only a few scattered lines from
Durer survive to suggest an analogue to Gossaert. We shall have to
depend upon them in the absence of better evidence to sketch for Gos-
saert a rhetorical theory of art production that encompasses the 'high
style' of such Italianizing.
Humanist eulogists of Durer utilized the parallel of rhetorical address to
praise the painter for his elevated style. 99 Following the model of rhetoric
established by Cicero and Quintilian, these learned German authors dis-
tinguish between literary modes of discourse: high, medium, and low.
Specifically, Philip Melanchthon in his treatise on rhetoric, Elementa rhet-
orices (1531), compares the art of painters Durer, Matthias (Grunewald),
and Lucas Cranach to these three levels of discourse, and he puts Durer's
art at the summit:
It is also very useful, in forming a judgment, to distinguish the various styles of speaking,
for the variation in personal talents has given rise, in speaking as in many other arts, to
various-types of works. And yet certain gradations, so to speak, have been distinguished,
within which these types are contained: there is the Simple style, and its opposite the
Grand... These differences may be readily discerned in paintings. For example, Durer
painted everything in the Grand manner, variegated with innumerable lines ... 100
In similar fashion, Joachim Camerarius's preface to the Latin translation
(1532) of Durer's Four Books of Human Proportion extols the artist for the
grandeur of his works:
Albrecht, therefore, we most justly admire as an earnest guardian of piety and modesty,
and as one who showed, by the grandness of his pictures, that he was conscious of his
own powers. 101
Elevated subjects, therefore, call for elevated style (granditate pictuarum),
and the model of Durer must have exemplified the grand manner for
Gossaert and other artists of his day. 102 Camerarius even credits Durer
with personal handsomeness akin to his depicted figures: 'Nature be-
stowed on him a body remarkable in build and stature and worthy of the
noble mind it contained'. 103
Durer's own words underscore his adoption of this humanist viewpoint,
namely that the Renaissance canon of beauty is the only fit idiom for
rendering the most serious (usually, the holiest) of subjects:
Just as they (Greek and Roman artists) attributed the most beautiful human shape to
their false god, Apollo, so will we use the same proportions for Christ Our Lord, who
was the most beautiful man in the universe. And just as they employed Venus as the
most beautiful woman, so will we chastely present the same lovely figure as the most
pure Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. Hercules will we transform into Samson, and
with all others we will do likewise. 104
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Durer also states in his theoretical treatise his opinions concerning beau-
ty: 'True artists perceive at once which work is a powerful one, and
therefrom arises a great love in the mind of him that understands'. 105
Fitting appropriate forms to the level of a subject accords with a classical
doctrine, derived from Horace (Ars poetica, esp. 11. 153-78): decorum. 106
According to this concept, each figure should receive the appropriate
physique, gesture, and expression. For the mature Gossaert, presumably
an appropriate classical space was also de rigeur for such elevated figural
subjects.
It should come as little surprise that Gossaert's religious figures are en-
visioned as ideal types and an elevated style, but the Italianizing forms
may still need justification for a Northern painter. In the absence of
documentation, we can point to a turn toward Italy in one other realm
of visual production of the early sixteenth century: typography. For ex-
ample, in France Geoffrey Tory (1480—1533) developed a new humanist
type on the Italian model to replace the gothic font of fifteenth-century
French books. 107 His 1529 Champfleury has a full title that outlines this
new program:
Champfleury, in which is contained the art and science of" the proper and true proportion
of Attic Letters, which one also calls Antique Letters or vulgarly Roman Letters, pro-
portioned according to the human body and face.
Durer himself had included in his 1525 treatise on geometry a portion
at the end of Book Three on the geometrical construction of Roman
letters. 108 Such 'humanistic' type was intended to be printed for Latin
classics, much as Gossaert's mythologies required a classicizing figural
type. Indeed this contrast between Latin and the vernacular makes vivid
the distinction between thematic material for printers of the Netherlands.
It was chiefly for Erasmus and the other authors of classical Latin works
that printers in the Netherlands employed Roman letters, even as they
continued to publish Dutch texts in Black Letter type for several dec-
ades. 109 Erasmus specifically declared his preference for Roman letters,
based on a 'handwriting that is elegant, clear, and distinct representing
Latin words by Latin elements'.' 10 Thus, the importation of Roman and
italic types by printers in the North was tied to humanists' projects,
especially the editing of Latin classics, and of the most serious and ele-
vated books, eventually including ecclesiastical texts as well. This visual
distinction in type corresponds exactly to the importation and the 'rhe-
torical' elevation of a 'classical' style by Gossaert in his nudes and set-
tings.
Despite the fallibility of his heroic nudes, who after all remain subject to
the Christian view of Original Sin, Gossaert's figures conform fully to
this notion, derived from both Durer and Renaissance Italy (especially
Michelangelo), of a visual 'high style' for epic religious and mythic sub-
jects. The long-term influence of his viewpoint led succeeding genera-
tions of artists from the Netherlands on an obligatory trip to Rome. One
of them, Maerten van Heemskerck, spent a full three years in Rome,
32

eginning in the year of Gossaert's death (1532). A measure of the in-
fluence and success of Gossaert's new formulations can be gauged by the
remarks that Heemskerck allegedly made upon his return to his native
Haarlem from that visit to Rome. Van Mander reports that Heemskerck
was said to declare of his entire output of previous works (already Ital-
ianizing) in Haarlem, 'My son, at that time I knew not what I was
doing'. 111
33