ANTWERP, Belgium — The painting shows a room crowded with paintings: a 17th-century Antwerp collector's cabinet, its walls hung from floor to ceiling with landscapes, portraits and religious scenes. Art historians have long treated it as a kind of inventory.
Over the past decade, researchers in Antwerp set out to find the originals. Thirty-two of the works in the painting could be identified. Nineteen have now been borrowed from collections in six countries and hung, for the first time since the 1640s, in a single room.
The effect is uncanny. Visitors stand before the painting and then turn to find the painted works hanging, at their true size, on the walls around them.
“We are not recreating the room,” said the curator, Lieve Van den Berghe. “We are testing the painting. It turns out to be remarkably honest.”
The exhibition runs through February.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section C, Page 14 of the European edition with the headline: A Collector's Cabinet, Scattered for 400 Years, Comes Back Together.
