ArtBits: febrero 2014

The OldMasters Museum in Brussels is part of The Royal Museums of Fine Arts, which hosts some of the greatest collections in Europe and other Museums such as The Magritte Museum, The recently opened Fin-de-Siècle Museum with mostly symbolist and art nouveau art and decorative objects and The Modern Museum. It was originally a French Museum founded by Napoleon in 1801, and the collection started during the revolution, but when Belgium had it's independence in 1830 that it became an important institution.

It's collection mainly consists in Paintings from the southern Netherlands school, in the 15th century, like Rogier van der Weyden, Petrus Christus, Dirk Bouts, Hans Memling, Hieronymus Bosch, Lucas Cranach and Gerard David, this school was deeply influenced by the Flemish Baroque painting and Ruben's oeuvre.

There are many paintings from Pieter Bruegel The Elder, one of From the 16th century, including The Fall of The Rebellious Angels (see somewhere below) which has a notorious influence from The Bosch, in its monstrous and somehow magical creatures and demons. It depicts a passage from The book of Revelation in the bible. The paintings is full of tensions between the characters in the fight between the good and the evil, which is a recurrent topic in his paintings. It can take hours to stare at a Brueghel or a Bosch painting, going through the entirely crowded canvas, between miniatures and other universes, mixing different moments in time together. This works must have been extremely shakening back in the day, when the flemish renaissance was the leading school for painters.

There where so many incredible paintings, that when looked in detail, into its little figures between the horror vacui, one could start putting the story together, specially in the religious paintings from the 15th century such as in The Last Judgement , where completely hieratic and elongated figures quietly stare at a man being decapitated, and then his head is being handed over to the king, or in The Master of the legend of saint Lucy where if you look close enough you'll see parts of her dodo spread around the painting being held by her followers, there's one of her breasts held by a pair of tweezers or her eyes on a plate. To cut the long story short, St Lucy was a martyr apparently around the 4th century, who lived a holly life and then was sacrificed by eye-gouging. Nice.

I wasn't going to leave The Bosch behind, another great surprise this museum holds is the triptych of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, although it's a replica, its pretty spectacular, it tells the story of the mental and spiritual struggles that Saint Anthony had to go through, he was one of The Desert fathers, who lived in Egypt between the late 3rd century and the early 4th. The original painting hangs in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon. There are many analysis on the Bosch's paintings and all its symbolism and criticism. The wikipedia explanation of the three panels can be found here.

Another painting I had no idea was there is The Death of Marat by Jaques-Louis David, one of the iconic images of the french revolution, It depicts the murder of Jean Paul Marat who was an important leader. He was killed on july 13th, 1973 in the hands of Charlotte Corday, an important political figure who sympathized with the Gerundists, a sort of political party, who was trying to spread the revolution by military power. Marat was one of their counterparts. According to the story, Charlotte, had planned to assassinate him in front of the entire national convention in Paris, but the plans had to change since Marat wasn't attending the meeting due to a skin problem he had, so he had to stay at home having oatmeal baths. So she surprised him right there, she had a kitchen knife with her and she pierced his aorta and part of his lung. Later she was executed in the guillotine for this.

Anyway, a lot more could be said of every single painting in there, needless to say it is totally worth it.
below you can find some of the greatest paintings hanging there in my opinion and interesting details too.