Real Museo de Bellas Artes de Amberes

For eleven years the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp was shut. It closed in 2011 for what was meant to be a briefer overhaul and did not reopen until 2022, after architects had hollowed out the old courtyards and dropped tall white galleries into the middle of the 1890s building without touching its grand exterior.

What it guards is Flemish painting across six centuries, from the gold-ground panels of the early masters Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling to the big Baroque altarpieces of Peter Paul Rubens, Antwerp's own painter, who ran a busy workshop a short walk away. The old and the new galleries are joined by a wing given over to James Ensor, the strange painter from Ostend whose crowds of carnival masks and skeletons the museum holds in greater number than anywhere else.

The white rooms carved into the roof are lit from above and hung with modern Belgian work, so a visitor climbs from Memling's quiet Madonnas in the old halls up into daylight and Ensor's grinning masks, all inside one building that spent a decade turned inside out.