MABUSE, JAN GOSSAERT detto. — Dutch, born between 1470 and 1480. He came to Rome in 1508.
A record of his stay in Italy remains in Guicciardini, who considered him the first to bring from Italy to Flanders “the art of painting histories and poetry with nude figures.” Returning to his homeland after 1509, he lived 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 developed under the influence of Dürer, Jean Van Eyck, G. David, and U. van der Goes (the diptych in the Doria Gallery in Rome, the triptych in the Pinacoteca of Palermo, Adorazione dei Magi e Cristo nell'oliveto della Galleria nazionale di Londra). In the Crocijissione, formerly in the Hermitage in Leningrad, in the panel in Prague Cathedral (1515), and in the Madonna e s. Luca in the State Gallery of Vienna (around 1520), he employed Renaissance elements with a late Gothic taste, attempting the monumental in mythological and also religious themes (as in the Adamo ed Eva at Hampton Court and in the Berlin Museums), characterized, among other things, by an almost brutal anatomical investigation.
His religious subjects won him wide popularity and were reproduced or imitated on many occasions, especially the groups of the Madonna con il Bambino preserved in London, New York, Berlin, Brussels, Detroit, Paris, and Copenhagen, in which the grace of the images is combined with 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. The master is also responsible for numerous splendid portraits, drawings, engravings, and woodcuts.