Jan Gossaert's art of imitation: Fashioning identity at the Burgundian Court (The Netherlands)

The paintings and drawings Philip of Burgundy (1465--1524) commissioned from Jan Gossaert (ca. 1478--1532) to depict for himself and his associates at court demonstrate the crucial complimentary roles the patron and artist played in weaving classical artistic style and ancient themes into Netherlandish culture. My dissertation, "Jan Gossaert's Art of Imitation: Fashioning Identity at the Burgundian Court," examines the artist's work and its reception in relation to humanist patronage, placing his imitative responses to Netherlandish and Italianate art within its original cultural matrix. To study how Gossaert appropriated and reworked his sources, I focus on a representative group of paintings and drawings he executed between 1508 and 1524. By analyzing rhetorical theories of imitation, historical texts, inventory records, diplomatic instructions, humanist letters, and court literature and poetry, I reconstruct the environment in which Gossaert's works originally functioned.; Each chapter of my dissertation studies how Burgundian court patrons utilized Gossaert's imitative style to shape various aspects of their identities. In the first chapter, I demonstrate how Gossaert's painted and drawn portraits, following the stylistic conventions of the previous Burgundian court artist, Jan van Eyck, were central to the display, construction, and exercise of power. My second chapter is a study of Gossaert's drawings made after ancient sculpture and monuments during Philip of Burgundy's diplomatic mission to the papal court. Gossaert's drawings executed in Rome convey a hybridization of classical and Netherlandish styles that relate to Philip's appeals for Burgundian independence from papal authority. In my final chapter I discuss the paintings of mythological nudes Philip commissioned from Gossaert to depict while he served as admiral of the Burgundian fleet and bishop of Utrecht. As a comparative analysis with Philip's biography reveals, these paintings function as visual expressions of Philip's eroticized sense of self, demonstrating his military prowess and vehement opposition to clerical celibacy. By examining Gossaert's imitative style in conjunction with the social, political, and religious pursuits of his patrons, my dissertation better characterizes the multiple balances Gossaert struck between the Netherlandish and Italianate styles.