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Tues-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat & Sun 10am-1pm; ?2.50. Metro: Bourse . Much of the northern side of the Grand-Place is taken up by the late nineteenth-century Maison du Roi , a fairly faithful reconstruction of the palatial Gothic structure commissioned by Charles V in 1515. The emperor had a point to make: the Hotel de Ville was an assertion of municipal independence and Charles wanted to emphasize imperial power by erecting his own building directly opposite. With its angular lines, spiky pinnacles and lacy stonework, the original Maison du Roi was an impressive building, but although its replacement, which was completed in the 1890s, is still fairly grand, the arcaded galleries - which were an addition - interrupt the flow of the design. Charles spared no expense in the earlier construction. When it turned out that the ground was too marshy to support the edifice, the architects began again, sinking piles deep into the ground and stretching cattle hides between them to keep the stagnant water at bay. Despite its name, no sovereign has ever taken up residence in the Maison du Roi, though this was where the Habsburgs sometimes stayed when they visited the city. They also installed their tax men and law courts here, and used it to hold their more important prisoners - the counts of Egmont and Hoorn spent their last night in the Maison du Roi before being beheaded outside in the Grand-Place. The building was also used as a sort of royal changing room: the future Philip II donned his armour here before joining a joust held in the Grand-Place, and the Archdukes Albert and Isabella dressed up inside before appearing on the balcony to shoot down a symbolic target that made them honorary members of the guild of crossbowmen. The building now holds the Musee de la Ville de Bruxelles , a wide-ranging but patchy collection whose best sections feature medieval fine and applied art - not that you'll glean much from the scanty (French and Flemish) labelling. To the left of the entrance , there's a room full of Gothic sculpture retrieved from various city buildings. Pride of place goes to the eight prophets, complete with heavy beards and eccentric headgear, who once decorated the porch of the Hotel de Ville. Two rooms further on you'll find a small but charming sample of eighteenth-century glazed earthenware, for which the city was once internationally famous. The finest work is by Philippe Mombaers (1724-54), whose workshop, on rue de Laeken, is credited with developing table decorations in the form of vegetables or animals - hence the splendid turkey, cod-fish, duck and cabbage soup tureens and casserole dishes. The first of the rooms to the right of the entrance boasts superb altarpieces - or retables - the intricacy of which was a Brussels speciality, with the city producing hundreds of them from the end of the fourteenth century until the economic slump of the 1640s. Their manufacture was similar to a production line with panel- and cabinet-makers, wood carvers, painters and goldsmiths (for the gilding) working on several altarpieces at any one time. The standard format was to create a series of mini-tableaux illustrating Biblical scenes, with the characters wearing medieval gear in a medieval landscape. It's the extraordinary detail that impresses: look closely at the niche carvings on the whopping Saluzzo altarpiece ( The Life of the Virgin and the Infant Christ ) of 1505 and you'll spy the candle-sticks, embroidered pillowcase and carefully draped coverlet of Mary's bedroom in the Annunciation scene, while the adjacent Nativity panel comes complete with a set of cute little angels. Up above, in a swirling, phantasmagorical landscape (of what look like climbing toadstools), is the Shepherds Hear the Good News . Also in this room is Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Wedding Procession , a good-natured scene with country folk walking to church to the accompaniment of bagpipes. The second room to the right is devoted to four large-scale tapestries from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The earliest of the four - from 1516 - relates the legend of Notre Dame du Sablon , the tedious tale of the transfer of a much revered statue of the Virgin from Antwerp to Brussels - though fortunately the tapestry is much better than the story. A second tapestry, dating from 1580, tells the Arthurian legend of Tristan and Isolde, but easily the most striking is the Solemn Funeral of the Roman Consul Decius Mus , based on drawings by Rubens. Decius was a heroic figure who had won a decisive victory against the Samnites, thus securing Roman control of Italy in the third century BC. In this extraordinary painting, he is shown laid out on a chaise-longue and surrounded by classical figures of muscular men and fleshy women. Even inanimate objects join in the general mourning - with the lion head of the chaise-longue, for instance, glancing sorrowfully at the onlooker. The museum's upper floors are less diverting. The first floor has scale models of the city and various sections on aspects of its development, and the second continues in the same vein. On the second floor also is a goodly sample of the Manneken Pis's vast wardrobe - around one hundred sickeningly saccharine costumes ranging from Mickey Mouse to a maharajah, all of them gifts from various visiting dignitaries
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