Stand in the nave of almost any large Flemish church and look up at the tall windows. Saints in blue and gold, donors kneeling at the bottom, borders of painted foliage, everything glowing the way you were told medieval glass is supposed to glow. Then check the date. In a lot of cases it is somewhere between 1840 and 1900, and the building around it is the only genuinely old thing in your field of view.

I took this on 8 May 2014, at about twenty to two in the afternoon. It is the large studio in the Rubens House in Antwerp, the room where Rubens and his assistants turned out the enormous canvases that went to Madrid and Paris and London. I had a very wide lens on the camera that day, which is why the ceiling looks like it belongs to a cathedral. It doesn’t.