In 15th-century Flanders, late medieval painters performed miracles that in some ways left their Italian contemporaries far behind, offering microscopically precise views of towns and interiors, discovering the magic of human character in lifelike portraits. So why aren't there crowds in front of Van Eyck's mesmerising Madonna of Chancellor Rolin to match those in front of the Mona Lisa?  This seems especially odd when you consider the work of Jan Gossaert, one of the first Flemish artists to visit Rome and take on the challenge of the classical nude. He started his career at the time Michelangelo was unveiling David, but gave the majestic human body portrayed in stone by the ancients and rediscovered by Italians his own rollicking, saucy finesse in paint. Throughout this exhibition, you see his northern gothic tendencies, his delight in twisting architectural forms and luxurious draperies, intertwine with the Renaissance passion for human proportions, Greek myth and drawing – skills that he learned by travelling to Rome and sketching ancient sculpture there.  The exhibition is called Jan Gossaert's Renaissance, and that title invites us to ponder two questions – what was the Renaissance, and what was it for him? Neither is easy to answer. The Renaissance began as a movement by Italian intellectuals to rediscover the true meaning and value of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation. But, as this show reveals, by the early 1500s the Renaissance was spreading far beyond Italy and changing as it travelled. It includes wonderful works by Albrecht Dürer and Jacopo de' Barbari as well as Gossaert, that reveal how the classical ideal mutated and interbred with more folkish ideas when it crossed the Alps. There is even a hair-raising print by Dürer that uses the new Renaissance convention of the nude to portray a coven of witches, weaving their enchantments while their master the devil grimaces at the door.  Gossaert fixed on the image of Adam and Eve as a way to explore nudity within the intensely Christian cultures of the north, where women still wore wimples and Martin Luther was wrestling with his conscience. Inspired partly by Dürer's astonishing drawings, prints and paintings of Adam and Eve – also on show here – he takes a sophisticated, relaxed pleasure in these Edenic bodies. Gossaert is an incredibly fleshy painter, a consummate sensualist whose greatest talent is to play with the possibilities of the nude form, make skin ripple and tauten. In one of his drawings, Eve offers Adam the apple not in a coy proposal, but in a passionate embrace that is clearly leading them into a sinful experience: the Fall as foreplay. Nor did he confine his eroticism to the Garden of Eden. In small paintings done for his employer, the erotically uninhibited Philip of Burgundy, he delights in the lewdness of pagan Greco-Roman myth. He paints Venus nude except for fine jewels and headgear, the ornaments heightening the profanity.  This show is a cabinet of curiosities. Gossaert is almost Warholian in his fascination with surface, a rich observer of the physical world who hesitates to go beyond. Even his portraits are sensual studies of faces rather than introspective studies of character. These portraits are fascinating in their concentration on the creamy skins, curling facial features and bright eyes of their subjects, as if he were studying them as physiognomic specimens. Even his religious paintings – above all his mighty picture of St Luke, patron saint of artists, and his sumptuous Adoration of the Magi – are opulent feasts of surface effects. His work holds in balance the tensions between visionary revelation and realism, design and colour, painting and sculpture, showing the ambiguities of his world, on the cusp of the middle ages and modernity. In Gossaert's Renaissance, the classical ideal is always playfully involved with a messy life. You feel he would have been good to talk to and meet, a good teacher, someone who enjoyed a glass and a joke – a true Renaissance man.
The National Gallery's major spring exhibition shows a sensuous, uninhibited painter way ahead of his time, argues Jonathan Jones