
The story
If you want Pieter Bruegel the Elder, this is one of the places to come. The Oldmasters Museum, the historic core of Belgium's royal fine-art museums in Brussels, holds several of his paintings, among them the swarming Fall of the Rebel Angels, full of hybrid monsters tumbling out of heaven, and the snow-covered Census at Bethlehem, where the Holy Family is lost in an ordinary Flemish winter crowd.
The collection reaches back before him to the Flemish Primitives, Rogier van der Weyden, Robert Campin and Bosch, and forward through Rubens and Van Dyck into the Baroque.
Its single most famous picture is French and much later: Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat, painted in 1793, showing the murdered revolutionary slumped in his bath. David spent his last years in exile in Brussels, which is how his best-known work came to hang here rather than in Paris.
Collection
32 works
Portrait of Porzia Imperiale and Her DaughterAnthony van Dyck, 1624
Still-Life with Garland of Flowers and Golden TazzaJan Brueghel the Elder, 1618
The assumption of the VirginPeter Paul Rubens, 1615
The body of Saint Mark is taken away by the ChristiansJacopo Tintoretto
The Lamentation of Christ with Saint FrancisPeter Paul Rubens, 1618
The Martyrdom of St. UrsulaPeter Paul Rubens, 1620
Wisdom triumphant over war and discord under the government of James I of EnglandPeter Paul Rubens, 1632