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Tues-Fri 9.30am-5pm, Sat & Sun 10am-5pm; ?3.70 . The Musees royaux d'Art et d'Histoire , on the south side of the south wing of Le Cinquantenaire, is made up of a maddening (and badly labelled) maze of pottery, carvings, furniture, tapestries, glassware and lacework from all over the world. There is almost too much to absorb in even a couple of visits, and your best bet is to pick up the plan and index at reception and select the areas which interest you most. There are enormous galleries of mostly run-of-the-mill Greek, Egyptian and Roman artefacts, complete with mummies of a jackal, crocodile and falcon. Elsewhere, another part of the collection has an assortment of Near and Far Eastern gods, porcelain, jewellery and textiles, and there are pre-Columbian Native American carvings and effigies too. The European decorative arts sections have the most immediacy and these are located on Level 1 (Rooms 45-75) and Level 2 (Rooms 89-105). They are divided into over twenty distinct collections, featuring everything from Delft ceramics, altarpieces, porcelain and silverware through to tapestries, Art Deco and Art Nouveau furnishings. It's all a little bewildering, with little to link one set of artefacts to another, but the sub-section entitled The Middle Ages to Baroque (Level 1, Rooms 53-70) is outstanding and comparatively easy to absorb. This sub-section makes a cracking start in Room 53 with The Triumph of the Virtues , a set of eight Brussels' tapestries dating from the middle of the sixteenth century, the heyday of the city's tapestry industry. Room 56 also contains some fine tapestries, earlier works manufactured in Tournai, in southern Belgium, during the fifteenth century. These are much less languid, depicting scenes of tense and often violent drama as in the Battle of Roncesvalles , in which Christians and Moors slug it out in a fearsome, seething battle scene. The museum prides itself on its collection of medieval altarpieces and Room 57 contains one of the best, the Passion Altarpiece , which is animated with a mass of finely detailed wooden reliefs. This altarpiece was carved in Brussels in the 1470s whereas the Passion Altarpiece in Room 61 was made in Antwerp some fifty years later and is, in consequence, even more extravagant, sporting a veritable doll's house of figures. Room 62 holds several more sixteenth-century Brussels' tapestries, including one depicting The Legend of Notre Dame of Sablon ; Room 66 has some fine alabasters from Mechelen, just north of Brussels; and Room 68 boasts a delightful double bed, a fancy, canopied affair produced for a Swiss burgher in the 1680s. Finally, don't leave without poking your nose round the Art Nouveau sections, especially Room 50 , where the display cases were designed by Victor Horta for a firm of jewellers, and now accommodate the celebrated Mysterious Sphinx , a ceramic bust of archetypal Art Nouveau design. It was the work of Charles van der Stappen in 1897.
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