Neptune and Amphitrite

Jan Gossaert had travelled to Rome a few years earlier and come back changed, full of the antique statues and architecture he had drawn there. In 1516 he put that to use for his patron Philip of Burgundy, an illegitimate son of a duke who was building a palace at Souburg in Zeeland as a northern outpost of the Renaissance. For its walls Gossaert painted these two life-size nudes, the sea-god Neptune and his wife Amphitrite, standing in a temple of classical columns. Nothing quite like it had been attempted in Netherlandish painting, where nudes on this scale had no precedent. Philip was Admiral of the Sea, and the watery god carried a flattering echo of the man who commissioned him. His name and motto are cut into the stonework at upper right.