I didn’t make it to Ghent. All that missed opportunity for mediæval art. I did make a trip to Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België / Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique to gawp at the Bruegel stuff, which I thought was a special exhibition, but is in fact a kind of online / digital project, which nonetheless meant I made a round of The Art — quite a bit of it missing due to water damage (or that was my lazy translation).
I’d photographed the museum pretty heavily two years ago (Musée Oldmasters Museum, Musée Fin-de-Siècle Museum, also the sublime pair of Pieter Bruegel de Oude’s De Aanbiddung der Wijze, and Peter Paul Rubens’ Vier Studies van het Hoofd van een Moor) and didn’t really feel inspired to do the same again to paintings I’d already spent so much time on — the light in the museum is kinda horrific. But I do love Bruegel, and hadn’t basked in the Hieronymous Bosch freakery of his De val der opstandige engelen / La Chute des anges rebelles, which coincidentally is one of the works you can get way too close to on Google Cultural Institute’s Bruegel, Unseen Masterpieces, so I’m replicating some of that purely for my own pleasure. So here we go then, Bruegel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels in all its dog-licking-its-arse (I dunno, that’s what I remember seeing) glory.
