Prospect recommends: Art

  Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance National Gallery, 23rd February-30th May

The Flemish painter Jan Gossaert is an abiding curiosity. His sinuous mythological nudes, precise fantastical architecture and startlingly vivid portraits hold a fascination far greater than the relative obscurity of his name would suggest. The National Gallery has one of the world’s best collections of his paintings, including the magnificent The Adoration of the Kings (1510-15) and now seek to repair 45 years of neglect with a six-room blockbuster exhibition.

Gossaert is a pivotal figure in the history of the northern Renaissance. He was born at around 1472, at a time when Flemish art flourished under the patronage of the Dukes of Burgundy. His predecessors, Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, had pioneered a distinctive northern Gothic tradition, combining tender realism with delicate stylisation of draperies and landscapes. In 1477, however, Flanders became one more jewel in the expanded Hapsburg Empire, with links of wealth and power extending across Europe and beyond. When, in 1508, Gossaert’s patron, Admiral Philip of Burgundy, was sent on a diplomatic mission to Pope Julius II in Rome, the artist went too—the first recorded Netherlandish artist to study ancient art. The impact of Italian art on painting in northern Europe is well known, but Gossaert’s own distinctive contribution, his weird marbled eroticism and exhilarating play with space, is only now receiving the reappraisal it deserves.