The Three Kings are here, the Holy Family is here, and almost nobody in the picture notices. Bruegel set the Epiphany in a Flemish village in a heavy snowfall, and the miracle is the easiest thing in it to miss.

A man sleeps under a pear tree, his friends eat bread and porridge, and the wheat stands taller than the people who cut it. Bruegel's The Harvesters of 1565 is one of the first paintings to make ordinary work in a landscape its whole subject.

In 1566 Pieter Bruegel the Elder set the Roman census of the Nativity in a snowbound Flemish village at sundown. Mary and Joseph are easy to miss.

A crowd scene is a painting built from many small stories at once. Dutch and Flemish masters such as Bruegel, Teniers and Jan Steen composed them so the eye always finds a path.