Jan Gossaert

Around 1508 a Flemish painter named Jan Gossaert travelled to Rome in the company of a Burgundian prince, and he came home changed. Gossaert, also called Mabuse after his hometown, filled sketchbooks with ancient statues and Roman ruins, and he became one of the first artists of the Low Countries to build his pictures around the classical nude and pagan mythology rather than only Christian subjects.

Back north he painted gods and lovers with a hard, gleaming Flemish finish, Neptune and his sea-wife standing nude in a temple, or Danae receiving a shower of gold, muscular southern bodies rendered with northern precision down to every hair and jewel.

He kept a busy portrait practice besides, working mainly for aristocratic patrons. Gossaert died in 1532, by then a favourite of the Netherlandish nobility, who hung his pagan gods and goddesses in the private rooms of their houses.