A feature of past recessions has been a retreat from the contemporary to traditional markets, where good purchases hold value, and there are indications of this now.

This trend, if it develops, might counteract the resistance that many British collectors seem to show to medieval works of art, especially from Northern Europe. Virtually all English medieval painting was destroyed or exported after the Dissolution of the Monasteries or in the Civil War period, along with stone and alabaster statuary and glass. Much of the 20th century then reacted against the Victorian enthusiasm for the Middle Ages.

England and Scotland were not alone in attacking their artistic heritage during the 16th century. The same Bildersturm swept Switzerland, the Netherlands and much of the Holy Roman Empire, and in an echo of our renewed 17th-century destruction, the French Revolution wreaked more damage, in Belgium and the Netherlands as well as France.

However, on the Continent more works of art were looted and laicised as it were, remaining in the community, than in Britain.

This is an area with great opportunities for collectors, particularly, perhaps, in Britain. In London there are two great dealers, Sam Fogg, of Clifford Street, W1, and Daniel Katz, around the corner in Bond Street, and there are regular auctions with good things, but knowledge is not so widespread in the trade — or even nowadays in museums — as elsewhere.

Furthermore, without even considering recent idiocies in the contemporary market, by comparison with other fields prices are reasonable.

At the Brussels Antiques and Fine Art fair (Brafa), which continues until February 1, several specialist dealers offer quite extraordinary pieces.

In a class of its own is a German retable, or altar backing, (see picture one, right) dateable to about 1500 and attributed to the master carver Niklaus Weckmann of Ulm. Although a victim of the Bildersturm it is in excellent condition. The Gothic canopied frame and figures of the Virgin and Child, SS John and Peter, retain much original colour and gilding.

This is a superb, extremely rare, piece, and the price of around €1.1 million hardly excessive when one thinks of Warhol or routine Picasso.

At a lower level, De Backker of Hoogstraten has an alabaster carving of the Temptation of St Anthony (see picture two, right) at €18,000. Although it is now worn and fragmentary, I have never seen a better and more moving depiction of this oft-painted subject.