Mabuse, Jan Gossaert detto

MABUSE, JAN GOSSAERT detto. - Dutch, b. between 1470 and 1480. He came to Rome in 1508.

Of his stay in Italy there remains a record in Guicciardini, who considered him the first to bring from Italy to Flanders "the art of painting histories and poems with nude figures." Having returned to his homeland after 1509, he resided in Utrecht, in the service of Philip of Burgundy, and from 1516 onward in Brussels, where he also worked for Margaret of Austria, and in Middelburg, where he died shortly after 1533.

He was initially trained under the influence of Dürer, of Jan Van Eyck, of G. David and of U. van der Goes (diptych of the Doria Gallery in Rome, triptych of the Picture Gallery of Palermo, Adoration of the Magi and Christ in the Garden of Olives of the National Gallery of London). In the Crucifixion, formerly at the Hermitage of Leningrad, in the panel of the cathedral of Prague (1515), in the Madonna and St. Luke of the State Gallery of Vienna (ca. 1520) he avails himself, with a late-Gothic taste, of Renaissance elements, attempting the monumental in mythological or even religious themes (as in the Adam and Eve of Hampton Court and of the Museums of Berlin), characterized among other things by an almost brutal anatomical research.

His religious subjects won him wide popularity and were replicated or imitated in many ways, especially the groups of the Madonna with the Child preserved in London, New York, Berlin, Brussels, Detroit, Paris, Copenhagen, in which the grace of the images is joined to a high representational refinement, with a freedom of modeling and a romantic fullness of feeling that place them among the masterpieces of the Flemish Renaissance. To the master are also owed numerous splendid portraits, drawings, engravings and woodcuts.

Eugenio Battisti