In "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden, who are the Old Masters refered to in line 2?

The term "Old Masters" (not a technical term in Art
History) - which appears in the second line of W.H. Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Arts"
- refers to skilled painters of Europe who worked before 1800. The Old Master who was
"never wrong" about suffering is Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525 - September 9, 1569),
a Flemish painter whose painting Landscape with the Fall of
Icarus constitutes the allusion of the second stanza of the poem.
Interestingly, a recent examination of the painting (1996) indicates that the painting,
famously located in the Musee des Beaux Arts in Brussels, is in fact a version of a lost
Bruegel original, a fact Auden would not have been aware of. It is through the Icarus
allusion that Auden articulates the principal  motif of the poem - how art
transforms the response to human suffering. When made the subject of art, suffering
loses its insistent existential thrust and takes on an aesthetic meaning - one that can
be ignored. Subsumed into art suffering no longer elicits an automatic response of
horror or sympathy, but allows detachment. Thus, in the poem "the ploughman" can ignore
the "forsaken cry" of the doomed Icarus, and the sailors, tangentially noticing a "boy
falling out of the sky" can steer the ship "calmly on".