This Bruegel Painting Is Stranger Than It Looks

Down in the paint of Bruegel's hell scene there are a few looping marks that curl into the shape of a word. People read that word as Dul, the painter's own hand writing the title into his finished picture. It is the reason this painting is called what it is called, and the one thing about it nobody argued about. Then a laboratory in Brussels spent eighteen months on the panel and turned a machine on those marks. Look closer.

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