that the unhappy Counts of Egmont and Horn were brutally done to death,
to glut the sinister tyranny of Spanish Philip, on June 5, 1568.
Also, in addition to these two superlative antiquities, two modern
buildings in Brussels, though for widely different reasons, can hardly
be passed over under plea of lack of space. Crowning the highest point
of the city, and towering itself towards heaven in a stupendous pile of
masonry, is the enormous new Palais de Justice, probably the most
imposing law courts in the world. English Law undoubtedly is housed
with much greater modesty, though not without due magnificence, in the
altogether humbler levels of the Strand. Also in the High Town--which
is the modern quarter of Brussels, in contrast with the mediaeval Low
Town, which lies in the flat below--is the Royal Museum of Ancient
Paintings, which probably divides honours with the Picture Gallery at
Antwerp as the finest and most representative collection of pictures of
the Netherlandish school in the world. Here you may revel by the hour
in a candlelight effect by Gerard Dow; in the poultry of Melchior
d'Hondecoeter; in a pigsty of Paul Potter's; in landscapes by Meindert
Hobbema; in a moonlight landscape of Van der Neer's; in a village scene
by Jan Steen; in the gallant world of Teniers; and in the weird
imaginings of Pieter Brueghel the younger. The greatest pictures in the
whole collection, I suppose, are those by Rubens, though he has nothing
here that is comparable for a moment with those in the Picture Gallery
and Cathedral at Antwerp. Very magnificent, however, is the "Woman
taken in Adultery," the "Adoration of the Magi," the "Interceder
Interceded" (the Virgin, at the prayer of St. Francis d'Assisi,
restrains the angry Saviour from destroying a wicked world), and the
"Martyrdom of St. Livinius." This last, however--like the "Crucifixion"
in the Antwerp Gallery; like Van Dyck's picture in this collection of
the drunken Silenus supported by a fawn; and like Rubens' own
disgusting Silenus in our National Gallery at home--illustrates
unpleasantly the painful Flemish facility to condescend to details, or
even whole conceptions, the realism of which is unnecessarily
deliberate and coarse. Here, in this death of St. Livinius, the
executioner is shown in the act of presenting to a dog with pincers the
bleeding tongue that he has just cut out of the mouth of the dying
priest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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