Jan Gossaert at the National Gallery, review

Pity poor Jan Gossaert. During the winter of 1509 he became the first Netherlandish artist to visit Rome, epicentre of classical civilisation and wellspring of the Italian Renaissance. Ever since, art historians have banged on about his response to the antique, beginning with Vasari’s claim that Gossaert brought “the true method of representing nude figures and mythologies from Italy to the Netherlands”.

What we learn from the stupendous exhibition of Gossaert’s paintings and drawings that opens at the National Gallery tomorrow is that Vasari’s condescension was utterly misplaced. The Italianate elements in Gossaert’s work are there, certainly, but they aren’t nearly as important as its sheer, exuberant invention.

Gossaert was not some Northern plodder who saw the light when first he beheld the art of Italy. In fact, considering that he spent at least six months in Rome at the height of the Renaissance, there is remarkably little evidence that he paid the slightest attention to what his Italian contemporaries were up to. His patron, Philip of Burgundy, had come to the city on a diplomatic mission to Pope Julius II, so Gossaert must have spent time in the Vatican at the very moment when Michelangelo was at work on the Sistine Ceiling and Raphael on the frescos in the Stanza Della Segnatura.

It is hard to believe he did not see their work, yet to my eye any impact it had on his paintings is barely detectable. The conclusion is unavoidable: he decided that the Italians had nothing to teach him.

One of the first works he completed after returning from Rome, the monumental Adoration of the Magi in the National Gallery, is memorable not so much because it is particularly classical in feel, but because it is an intellectual and technical tour de force. As well as its fantastical architectural caprice and its deliriously over-the-top costumes, what sets the picture apart from all earlier treatments of the subject is its complex design. Gossaert divides the composition horizontally into two equal parts, with dancing angels occupying celestial realms above and the mortals below.

The one-point perspective converges on the tiny figure of a shepherd in the far distance just behind the Virgin – whose head is placed in the exact centre of a composition that is itself circular, with the three kings and their entourages forming a great wheel around the Virgin and Child.

Gossaert delights in rendering sumptuous still-life details such as the miraculously realistic pearls sewn into the red velvet hat of the kneeling King Caspar, or the fabulous golden reliquaries balanced balletically in the hands of the outrageously camp Kings Balthasar and Melchior. Notice, too, naturalistic details such as the wet nose and quivering whiskers of the dog in the right foreground or the wart on the cheek of the kneeling king. All this is rendered in paints applied in layers and then glazed to achieve a jewel-like depth and richness of colour.

Compared with the way the subject was treated by his Netherlandish predecessors, Gossaert’s Adoration of the Magi is light-hearted and filled with fantasy, its mannered elegance surely reflecting the sophistication of patrons such as the fun-loving Margaret of Austria, whose court in Brussels was one of the liveliest in Europe.

For the cultural milieu in which Gossaert was working was anything but solemn. The nudes and mythological subjects he painted for Margaret’s cousin Philip of Burgundy, for example, cater to a Flemish taste for broad and sometimes ribald humour. In his superb Adam and Eve, on loan from the Royal Collection, Gossaert’s dialogue is not with the antique but with the German Albrecht Dürer, whose famous engraving of the same subject hangs in this show. Both Dürer and Gossaert depict full-length nudes, but Dürer’s dainty figures are static, ideal types while Gossaert’s have become heavy, awkward, earthbound human beings who cling together, driven by lust and racked with remorse.

For Gossaert’s picture tells a story that had not been represented in art before. He shows the moment after Adam took his first bite of the apple and it stuck in his throat – his Adam’s apple. Rolling his eyes in panic he puts one finger to his mouth as though trying to gag it out. The source of his misery is the apple, still with his teeth marks, that Eve holds in one hand before taking a bite with her sensuous, greedy mouth. Note how Gossaert pins the blame for man’s downfall on the woman in a way Dürer does not. Entering imaginatively into the story, he humanises these familiar types, giving them individual personalities, like a novelist creating fictional characters.

Gossaert had a side-line supplying pornographic – or at least indecorous – images for his libidinous patron, Philip of Burgundy. What is striking about his paintings and drawings of nude women is how high-spirited and jokey the imagery feels – a complete change of tone from most of the religious images and portraits.

Gossaert’s ability to humanise characters from the Bible and mythology is of a piece with the way he was able to enter imaginatively into the lives of the men, women and children whose portraits he painted. His double portrait of an elderly couple, to take an obvious example, is as harrowing a depiction  of old age as I know in art, in which the artist misses no opportunity to chronicle the indignity of decrepitude.

Gossaert is just as good with small children, as in his delightful portrait of Dorothea of Denmark, and succeeds in capturing elusive qualities such as the innocence in the face of a middle-aged monk.

I love shows about artists I knew little about. This one, first seen at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is full of pictures that should appeal to the British public, if only they can be persuaded to overcome the Italo-centric view of art history they share with Vasari. I suppose you could blame the Grand Tour, but at least since the 18th century, the term “Renaissance” in England always refers to the Italian Renaissance.

For what it is worth, in almost a quarter of a century of exhibition reviewing, this is the first large-scale show I’ve seen devoted to Netherlandish art of the 16th century.

From tomorrow until May 30