A photograph taken in passing at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Three Flemish paintings on a gray wall: a wide peasant feast crowded with figures at the top, a dark hanging-carcass still life on the lower left, a market scene with a poultry seller on the lower right. One of them — the market scene — is confirmed Pieter Aertsen from the wall label. The others are probably from the same orbit: Aertsen, or Beuckelaer his nephew, or one of the other Antwerp painters working in the same genre tradition in the mid-sixteenth century.

The news hit with that strange, delayed weight that comes when a giant leaves the world — you already felt their presence was larger than a single lifetime, and yet suddenly it’s finite, marked by a date. Looking at the Guggenheim Bilbao today, from this angle where the titanium curves gather the grey sky and the mirrored spheres seem to swallow up fragments of people passing by, you can almost feel Gehry’s mind still working through the metal.