MABUSE, Jan GOSSAERT, called. – Dutch, born between 1470 and 1480. He came to Rome in 1508.
Of his stay in Italy, a record remains in the Quicciardini, who considered him the first to bring from Italy to Flanders the art of painting histories and poems with nude figures. Returning 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 initially formed under the influence of Dürer, Jean Van Eyck, G. David, and U. van der Goes (diptych in the Doria Gallery in Rome, triptych in the Pinacoteca of Palermo, Adoration of the Magi and Christ in the Garden of Olives in the National Gallery in London). In the Crucifixion, formerly in the Hermitage in Leningrad, in the panel of the cathedral of Prague (1515), in the Madonna and St. Luke of the State Gallery in Vienna (c. 1520), he avails himself, with a Gothic taste, of Renaissance elements, attempting the monumental in mythological or even religious themes (as in the Adam and Eve of Hampton Court and the museums of Berlin), characterized, among other things, by an almost brutal anatomical search.
His religious subjects gained him wide popularity and were frequently replicated or imitated, especially the groups of the Madonna with 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 Flemish Renaissance. The master also produced numerous splendid portraits, drawings, engravings, and woodcuts.
Eugenio Battisti
MACAO, DIOCESE OF. – A city and diocese in China. It forms a peninsula beside the southeast coast of China, in the midst of the delta formed by the West and Canton rivers. It also includes a small archipelago, composed of the islands of Taipa, Colone (the most important and the only ones fully occupied), Don João (or Macariva), Lapa, and Wang-Kan (or Island of the Mountain).
Over an area of 28 sq. km., it has 374,737 inhabitants, of whom 23,000 are Catholics, distributed in 28 parishes, with 46 diocesan priests and 30 regular clergy, one seminary, 5 male and 5 female religious communities, and 20 educational institutes (1949).
The history of Catholicism in M. is closely connected with that of China (q.v.). After the establishment of Portuguese rule in China by the navigators and merchants of that nation, M. was integrated by the Jesuit missionaries into the historic Portuguese Patronage of the Order, first under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Funchal (Madeira Islands, west of Portugal) and later of Goa (India).
With the bull *Super specula militantis Ecclesiae* of 1576, Pope Gregory XIII, at the request of King Sebastian of Portugal and to meet the needs arising from the progress of Christianity in the Far East, erected the new diocese of M., carved out of that of which it had hitherto been a suffragan. It then included all of China, Japan, the Moluccas, and other neighboring lands and islands.
In 1588, Japan was constituted as a separate bishopric (Funai), and in 1690 China had its own dioceses, Peking and Nanking. In 1903, by decree of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide, the bishop of M. and the apostolic vicar of Canton exchanged their jurisdictions over the island of Hainan and the district of Shiu-Hing, respectively. Recently, in 1940, by the missionary agreement between the Holy See and the Portuguese government, concluded following the signing of the Concordat, Timor was also detached and erected as a separate diocese of Dili (capital).