Jan Gossart has long been overdue a thorough modern reassessment. A decisive figure in the transformation of South Netherlandish art in the 1510s and 1520s, famous since his day for bringing knowledge of Antiquity and the rendering of mythological nudes from Italy to the Netherlands, Gossart—the spelling of his name here rightly restored to the way he signed it—is far less well-known today than his position and achievement deserve. The last comprehensive exhibition of his work was held forty-six years ago in Rotterdam and Bruges, and he has never been the subject of a U.S. exhibition.

For this daunting task one could not find a better-suited scholar than Maryan Ainsworth, or a better team of collaborators than those assembled here. This book, however, is more than an exhibition catalogue. Like Alejandro Vergara’s catalogue-book on Joachim Patinir (Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue, Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2007), it seizes the opportunity of a major exhibition to review all the artist’s work, consider new attributions, and inaugurate research and conservation in order to reassess and reconfigure the artist’s complete oeuvre. For Gossart, the resulting corpus is larger than in (most) earlier studies, by nearly a half. Its roughly 120 paintings, drawings, and prints represent a relatively large corpus by the standards of his Flemish peers, though nothing like Albrecht Dürer’s contemporary output in Germany.

In the principal of her two essays, Ainsworth, the leading expert on Gerard David, convincingly makes the case for one of her great discoveries: that several early works (cats. 6–8) are the result of “prestige collaboration” between Gossart and David. She also presents a new reading of the sculptural aspects of Gossart’s painting conception and execution, persuasively linking them to his friendship with the sculptor Conrad Meit. Ainsworth clarifies Gossart’s impact on the younger artist Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen, as well as Dirk Vellert and the Master of the Lille Adoration, and suggests directions for future research.

Before Gossart’s life-changing trip to Rome in 1508–09 in the employ of Philip of Burgundy—the first Netherlandish artist to travel there for artistic purposes—his early Antwerp career looked both conventional and exceptional. He established a workshop unusually quickly by immediately taking on two apprentices and publicizing his drawing skill by signing his designs (cats. 69, 91). This may be what brought him to the attention of Philip, illegitimate son of Philip the Good. By contrast, after Rome the itinerant Gossart seems not to have established a traditional workshop, Ainsworth shows. This is unusual, though less so for a court artist, which Gossart was for most of the rest of his life.

Ainsworth’s other essay—geared to her particular forte—discusses a host of findings about Gossart’s working methods uncovered during the exhibition research. These include new discoveries about the artist’s panels, ground, priming, and underdrawing; his use of cartoons and tracings; his perspective constructions (used expressively, as in the 1527 Danae, where the orthogonals converge midway between Danae’s exposed breast and the lap where Jupiter’s golden shower impregnates her [cat. 35]); and painting materials and working technique.

In her essay on the artist’s Roman drawings, Stephanie Schrader argues that they were created, not for self-study, but to exalt Philip’s knowledge of Antiquity and his stature as a patron, comparable to Alexander the Great and Pope Julius II, the latter being the reason for Philip’s diplomatic trip to Rome. Her other essay is a nuanced reading of the erotic content of three Gossart paintings (cats. 30, 33, 34), which wisely abandons the traditional moralizing interpretation of these pictures and instead situates them, as certain or likely commissions, in the eroticized milieu of Philip’s courtly residences and his own carnal proclivities. Schrader is so adept at these contextual readings that one wishes she had turned her keen lens onto other mythological nudes by the artist, like Danae (cat. 35) or Hercules and Deianira (1517, cat. 31).

Ethan Matt Kavaler analyzes the significance of Gossart’s lifelong obsession with architecture and ornament, mainly imagined though sometimes real. Kavaler views the artist as one of the great designers of theoretical, and therefore ideal, architecture of the period. His ideal structures encompass classical design, reflecting the artist’s study in Italy, but also Late Gothic structures, originating in his early years in Antwerp. Each is offered up by Gossart as an equally valid ideal (sometimes in a single painting: cats. 9, 35). These structures are used to undergird princely power or establish religious emphasis. Invoking the illustrations in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Kavaler locates Italian precedents for Gossart’s eroticized use of classical architecture.

Stijn Alsteens and Nadine Ornenstein contribute essays on the artist’s drawings and prints, respectively. Alsteens presents a greatly enlarged corpus of the artist’s drawings, nearly double the size of most earlier authors, and is especially good at locating information about how much larger yet his original output would have been, since there is evidence of designs for applied work (choir stalls, Philip’s epitaph, a papal portrait medal) and many chalk drawings. Given Alsteens’s suggested expansion of the artist’s drawing oeuvre, it was especially welcome to have the majority of the proposed forty-eight sheets on display in New York.

Orenstein reviews Gossart’s tiny print oeuvre (4–5 works, all designs “for” others). The size of this corpus belies its importance: Gossart and Lucas van Leyden were the first Netherlandish artists to experiment with the new technique of etching. In the remarkable Charles V (ca. 1526, cat. 115), only recognized as a Gossart since 2001, the sitter is represented as a “speaking portrait,” in a pose and attitude probably derived from a Hans Baldung woodcut. Orenstein carefully establishes Gossart’s relationships with other printmakers (Dürer, Van Leyden); and, as in the paintings, influence is evident from sculpture (cat. 112).

In the New York installation of the show, a number of the drawings forcefully conveyed an explicit eroticism, separate from the painted mythological nudes. This was especially true of the astonishing Adam and Eve sheets (cats. 64–68), in which the first couple variously intertwine their bodies, touch one another, caress, gaze wantonly, and (nearly) fondle. This explicitness is comparable to Baldung’s work, as Alsteens emphasizes. Because many paintings were specially cleaned for the exhibit, the polished execution for which Gossart was praised by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers was gorgeously on display. Particularly memorable was the “line-up” of Virgin and Child panels, all done with varying degrees of finish and detail according (one assumes) to the nature of the commission or the production circumstances. The final, grand gallery at the Met was filled with almost twenty portraits, dazzling in their technical sumptuousness. For specialists, a star of the show was the Malvagna Triptych (ca. 1513–15, cat. 6), the artist’s only intact triptych, a work rarely seen outside of its home in Sicily. Shown newly restored, it was brilliant in its trompe-l’oeil frame and double-sided pictorial splendor. Viewing the piece alongside Jan van Eyck’s Virgin at the Fountain (1439; Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) dramatically underscored Gossart’s debt to the Eyckian tradition and his inventive departures from it.

The sheer abundance of contextual material on display in New York, drawn from the riches of the Metropolitan’s collection (Dürer, Vellert, Van Leyden prints, a Renaissance bronze copy of the Spinario) was made possible, no doubt, because of the museum’s resources and stature; the combination of the Van Eyck and Meit’s Virgin and Child (ca. 1531–34), from Brussels Cathedral, amounted to a secondary exhibit in its own right, making comparisons and didactic information particularly vivid.

The Jan Gossart that emerges from the catalogue is more nuanced, dynamic, and multidimensional than previously recognized. Beyond the familiar profile of the Netherlander aping Rome, he turns out to have been deeply involved in Northern court culture. His firsthand knowledge of Antiquity was employed for multiple purposes, and the eroticism of his work was far more central than simply the mythological nudes. The new Gossart is an artist who was attuned to the latest currents (etching), who collaborated with David and perhaps others (Simon Bening?), and for whom the sculptural example of Meit amounted to a tacit collaboration. He was more productive and varied as a draftsman than previously stressed, and a more consummate portraitist than he is usually given credit for—worthy of comparison with Raphael (cat. 56: think La Velata [ca. 1516] Titian [cat. 47]), and Hans Holbein (cats. 45, 48, 51, 58).

The catalogue includes an Appendix with Peter Klein’s dendrochronological results for many of the paintings and copies. Archival documents, originally intended for inclusion, will appear separately in Sytske Weidema and Anna Koopstra, eds., Jan Gossart: The Documentary Evidence (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011).

Ainsworth has earned, not for the first time, the gratitude of all who love this period of art. This is a landmark book of the highest scholarship, which will stand as the authoritative source on the artist for years to come. It has set the bar very high indeed for future scholarship, which one can only hope this sterling contribution will motivate.