The story
For a small brick museum on a quiet Bruges canal, the Groeningemuseum holds an astonishing thing. In one room hangs Jan van Eyck's Madonna with Canon van der Paele, finished in 1436, a painting so sharp you can read the reflections in a suit of armour and the stubble on the kneeling canon's chin. Van Eyck worked here in Bruges when the town was one of the richest in Europe, and this is oil paint pushed about as far as anyone had ever taken it.
The collection grew out of pictures rescued from Bruges churches and monasteries when they were closed down, and it stayed local. Around van Eyck hang Hans Memling, Hugo van der Goes and Gerard David, the painters who made 15th-century Bruges the art capital of northern Europe.
Do not miss David's Judgment of Cambyses, ordered by the city in 1498 for the town hall as a warning to corrupt officials. It shows a crooked judge being flayed alive, painted in calm, exact detail, so aldermen would think twice at their desks.
