BRUSSELS.- Shaped by the sustained circulation of artists, objects, and collections, and by the institutional structures that have governed their display and interpretation, Brussels occupies a particular position within the European artistic landscape. Colnaghi returns to BRAFA Art Fair for a second consecutive year, presenting a selection of works spanning antiquity to the early twentieth century, reflecting Colnaghi’s longstanding engagement with sculpture, painting, and works on paper across periods and traditions. The presentation includes a Roman marble Head of a Young Man from the Imperial period shown alongside an Anatolian schematic idol of the Kusura type dating to the Early Bronze Age. Painting is represented by works such as Gillis Neyts’s Winter Cityscape of Antwerp, an accomplished example of seventeenth-century Flemish landscape painting, and Peter van Boucle’s Still Life with a Boar’s Head, a forceful composition characteristic of his mature work in Paris. Later works include Wilhelm Leibl’s Study of a Skull, an uncompromising exercise in realism, and a Nordic landscape by Per Tellander, whose reduced forms and muted palette reflect early twentieth-century symbolic approaches to nature.

A major highlight of our presentation is Diogenes Reading (c. 1650) by Michaelina Wautier (Mons 1604–c.1689 Brussels), a painter whose career complicates received narratives of seventeenth-century artistic hierarchy in the Southern Netherlands. Active in Brussels from around 1640, Wautier worked fluently across portraiture, genre, religious, and history painting, domains from which women were largely excluded, and achieved contemporary recognition before falling into prolonged historiographical neglect. Her rediscovery, initiated by the Rubenshuis exhibition in Antwerp in 2018 and consolidated by the 2025 retrospective at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (travelling to the Royal Academy, London), has re-established her as a figure of exceptional intellectual ambition and technical authority.

Painted in oil on canvas, Diogenes Reading depicts the Cynic philosopher seated half-length, absorbed in reading, with an unlit lantern placed behind him, an iconographic deviation from the more common motif of Diogenes actively searching for an honest man. This suppression of narrative action in favour of interior concentration aligns the work with Wautier’s sustained interest in reading as a psychological state rather than a symbolic attribute. The figure is conceived from life: unidealised features, deeply set eyes, weathered flesh, and a forcefully foreshortened hand articulated with dirt beneath the nails attest to Wautier’s uncompromising realism. Stylistically and conceptually, the work is closely related to Saint Joachim Reading (Kunsthistorisches Museum), one of four paintings by Wautier recorded in the 1659 inventory of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (the only works by a female artist included in that collection) and may be dated to the early-to-mid 1650s, when Wautier had reached full artistic maturity.

If Wautier’s Diogenes articulates a model of knowledge grounded in introspection and moral philosophy, the work that follows belongs to a culture of empirical scrutiny and collecting. Study for a Tulip (c. 1640s) by Pieter Holsteyn II (Haarlem 1614–1673) exemplifies the visual cultures that emerged from this empirical and collecting impulse in the Dutch Republic. Executed in gouache, watercolour, and pencil on paper, the drawing belongs to the specialised genre of single-specimen botanical studies produced for collectors’ albums and so-called tulip books in the decades surrounding the phenomenon of tulipomania.

Holsteyn, trained within the Haarlem family workshop and active across media including engraving and stained glass, was particularly celebrated for these refined watercolours, which continue a tradition established by artists such as Joris Hoefnagel, Hans Bol, and Jacques de Gheyn II. The present study depicts a single tulip rising on a taut, centrally aligned stem, its petals marked by the distinctive red striations caused by a viral infection in the bulb, an irregularity that paradoxically increased the flower’s desirability and market worth. Closely related examples are preserved in major institutional collections, including the Norton Simon Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Harvard Art Museums, and the sheet most likely formed part of a loose-leaf album of the type increasingly recognised as central to seventeenth-century Dutch practices of collecting, exchange, and visual knowledge production.

A Mesopotamian Spectacle Idol, dating to the Middle Uruk period (c. 3000 B.C.), offers a radically earlier articulation of abstraction and symbolic presence. Carved in marble and standing 10 cm high, the idol belongs to a group of rare objects associated with the more numerous “eye idols” produced in Mesopotamia during the fourth and third millennia B.C. Such figures are most famously linked to temple contexts, particularly the so-called Eye Temple at Tell Brak, where hundreds of votive idols were embedded into the fabric of the sanctuary itself. Characterised by a simplified, weight-like body surmounted by paired circular eyes, spectacle idols are widely understood as votive objects, possibly representing worshippers or abstracted divinities at a time when gods were seldom depicted in human form.

The exaggerated openness of the eyes has been interpreted as a sign of perpetual attentiveness or devotion, underscoring the centrality of vision within early Near Eastern religious practice. Excavated primarily from cultic sites, these objects attest to the role of visual form in mediating between human and divine realms, functioning not as representations in the modern sense but as material conduits of presence, belief, and ritual action. Situated within the trade networks of northern Syria, an important nexus linking Mesopotamia with Anatolia, even at this early date, the spectacle idol also speaks to the circulation of materials, forms, and symbolic systems across regions. In its radical abstraction and emphasis on the act of seeing, the idol provides a striking counterpoint to later traditions of representation, while foregrounding the deep historical roots of objects made to be looked at, collected, and invested with meaning.