Resumen de Jan Gossaert and Jacopo Ripanda on the Capitoline
On the basis of the only surviving painting that was made for Philip of Burgundy's castle of Suytburg on the island of Wacheren, the Netherlands—a large panel signed by Jan Gossaert depicting a life-size nude Neptune embracing a nude Amphitrite—it is more than tempting to view the iconographic impulse at Suytburg as arising from the Roman example of Jacopo Ripanda. Few of the artists active in Rome during Gossaert's sojourn there have a higher reputation for antiquarian exactitude than Ripanda. The substantial and juxtaposed torsos of Gossaert's figures would seem to be more closely indebted to Ripanda's chunky figures than to Albrecht Dürer's and Jacopo de'Barbari's engravings of Adam and Eve and Mars and Venus, which Gossaert appears to have used mainly as an aid to articulating the pair. That Gossaert did in fact bring to the Netherlands a visual record of Ripanda's fresco is further indicated by his next surviving example of a classicizing couple, a small panel of Hercules and Deianeira.
