I had a city day yesterday, with my excellent writers' group in the evening and a couple of hours at the Metropolitan Museum in the afternoon: I saw a few minutes of a stimulating almost shocking installation called "The Refusal of Time by William Kentridge," along with a couple of the short term exhibits and some time in the newly organized European painting galleries realizing how little I know about the Renaissance in Northern Europe: several Flemish painters who ended up working for Isabella of Castile around 1500, that phenomenal period of time just around and after the great year of 1492. Anyhow, I want more of Gerard David, Juan de Flandres, Bosch, Metsys, Cranach. Great ignorance, great pleasure in these panels with glimpses of another world, all the high foreheaded madonnas holding our their little melon breast for an old-man-faced baby Jesus.

One older altarpiece, not in European paintings, showing the life and murder and miracles of St. Godelieve, patroness (so the blurb says) of Flanders.
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