Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK)

The Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent claims to be the oldest museum in Belgium, its collection first opened to the public in 1802. It runs from medieval panels to the early 20th century in a Neoclassical building beside the city park.

Its most argued-over painting is a crowded, jeering Christ Carrying the Cross, a ring of grotesque faces pressing in around Christ and the weeping Veronica. For a long time it was celebrated as a late work by Hieronymus Bosch. Most scholars now doubt that, dating it after his death and giving it to a follower painting in his manner, and the question of whose hand it really is has become part of the picture's pull.

In recent years the museum also housed the long restoration of the van Eyck brothers' Ghent Altarpiece from the nearby cathedral, carried out in a glass-walled studio where visitors could watch conservators uncover the original paint.