A Different Madonna

Is there a better way to spend a wet Sunday than finding a museum with an excellent collection of Old Masters? Yes, Ella, says there are countless ways, few of them ending upstairs avoiding the grasp of a red-walled exhibition.

But to be in Antwerp and miss out on, say, Jean Fouquet’s  “Madonna”? Sacrilege! There she is on the second floor at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts. She has an entire landing to herself.

Painted around 1450, the wonderfully weird red seraphim and blue cherubim surround an enthroned Virgin Mary with the Christ Child. What’s Mary doing with that crown? (Okay, it lets us know who the painting was intended for.) And what’s with that popped out breast defying gravity? And Christ with a burry head of hair? Mother and child are so pale, practically albino. Maybe they can get a heavenly blood transfusion from a couple of seraphim.

Up close, a van Eyck touch with the reflection of the artist in the pull-down tassel to the left of the Madonna.

And this was only the first painting in an Old Masters collection that had gem after gem. Another Madonna. Jan van Eyck’s “Madonna by the Fountain.”

Breugel’s “Wedding Dance.”

A Rembrandt portrait that grabs your eye from across the room.

All these old white guys, Ella grumbles, but—whoa—there’s Artemisia Gentileschi’s “David and Goliath.”

Then all of the sudden there’s a Magritte.

Okay, he was Belgian, and masterfully skilled, but how did Dali grab an entire wall?

So each Old Master gets one selection, but we’re in Antwerp and the artist who lived most of his life in Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens, gets to predominate. My favorite in this collection was “Venus Frigida” with Venus and Cupid freezing in the cold as a grinning satyr leans in with a cornucopia of grapes and fruit, i.e., “Without food and wine, love grows cold.”

Or, as sign outside a café I passed advised:

By this time Ella was texting me that she was in a red room where eyes were winking at her. Time to go.