It is Bruegel, magnificence from four centuries ago, but a committed reporter nonetheless, a man registering what happened, how it looked, and how it felt as well as anyone ever has. And this in circumstances that provide both a new, practical advantage to the visitor, as well as a slightly discomforting novelty. But their paintings of other subjects are very good and very interesting, and when a copy is shown side by side with a work by the master, the contrast is fascinatingly eerie. The lighting in the gallery where Bruegel the Elder's work is exposed has been dramatically improved, and it is now possible as well to look at the paintings from a distance of barely a foot away. This would be nice in sort of a pedantic way if it made just any painter's brushstrokes or impasto technique more visible, but in terms of Bruegel it is a magnifying glass on genius.
Details just explode.
Whether the work is ''The Fight Between Carnival and Lent,'' ''The Tower of Babel,'' ''Peasant Dance,'' ''Children's Games,'' or the paintings of illustrating the seasons of the year, the detail is never archival. Instead, it is passionate testimony, Bruegel's telling as much as he can see and know, a committed choice for realism over the devout or allegorical. Even on the highest levels of his ''Tower of Babel,'' his most mystical painting, tiny men are bent in labor at the edge of the sky, swinging picks and mattocks. Their painting is lighter in tone, often brighter in color and seen somehow as less difficult than that of the father, who is frequently described, because of his joyless children and lumpen peasants, as a bit unsettling. Of all the paintings, ''The Attack,'' on loan from the Stockholm University collection, is most easily superimposed on a modern consciousness.