“There is water infiltration, and as of today, a pigeon has started flying around the room,” Cinquantenaire Museum spokesperson Ann Calluy told RTL Info. “So it is a huge problem, and we are going to start renovation of these roofs very quickly.”

Images of the awkwardly placed buckets have been circulating in local media, with one news anchor noting that some tourists think the pails are part of a performance art piece. The Cinquantenaire Museum has also swaddled some of its objects in plastic wrap to protect them from possible water damage. A similar sight greeted recent visitors to the main building of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Photographs from February 2, taken by Pierre Kluyskens of the blog Quovadisart, show buckets dotting rooms where the museum’s prized Rubenses hang; signs give notice that works by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Jan Gossaert, and others have been temporarily removed, specifically because of “water infiltration.” Such migrations aren’t new: according to La Tribune de l’Art, the museum had to move a collection of Rubens’s sketches to another gallery in September 2014.