In this era of blockbuster shows, the permanent collections of the Metropolitan frequently become what we walk past on the way out of the latest event, so it’s good to be reminded of how remarkable those collections are. Happily, the Met periodically organizes scholarly exhibitions that spotlight the richness and depth of the museum’s own holdings. The current in-house showcase, “From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” may be the most spectacular and thoughtful to date. For cognoscenti and novices alike, for lovers of Netherlandish painting, and even for the undecided, the show is an unalloyed delight, a celebration of the abilities of early northern artists and an education in the field’s latest scholarship (including the most recent attributions).[1] If the exhibition were anywhere else, New York art lovers would be planning trips so as not to miss it.

It’s a show that takes effort, full of contemplative, often devotional works made slowly with meticulous attention to nuance and detail, and meant to be studied over a long period of time. They are pictures that dwell equally on the particulars of observable reality and the intangibles of faith. (Whether any of this can be seen—literally or metaphorically—in a crowded gallery is another story.) There’s none of the stabilizing geometry of Italian Renaissance painting in Flemish art of the same period, none of the measured harmony that implies an ideal Platonic order underlying the randomness of ordinary experience. Instead, we are