Trip in Belgium-Day 1

The people here In Belgium are just amazing. They will actually ask which language I would prefer to speak in then then give me half a dozen options. I feel a bit stupid for only being able to pick one of those.
I got up early because, well, I had things to do, old things to see, and beer to drink.
My first stop of the day was the Groeninge Museum. This holds mostly Flemish masters. They also gave me a free audio guide and that always makes me happy. Most of what I saw are referred to as Flemish Primitives. They are considered primitive because of the inaccurate way that the human body is portrayed. The fabrics, furniture and plants would be in perfect detail. However, human anatomy wasn’t really understood and artists were expected to used classical ideas of how the body looked. This didn’t really change until di Vinci came along, and then took some time to filter up to Flanders. A perfect example of this was Gerard David’s 1498 Justice of Cambyses. Cambyses was a corrupt judge who was skinned alive, this is what the painting depicts. The pain on his face looks quite real, but the exposed mussels and veins are not quite right.


There was also a good collection of Jan van Eych’s here. There should be though, he was from here. It is claimed that he invented oil painting but this isn’t quite true. He just mastered it with a skill no one had had before.