Madonna of the Rose Bower

The idea behind this garden is very old. In the Song of Songs the bridegroom calls his beloved a garden enclosed, and medieval preachers read that line as a picture of the Virgin Mary, pure and set apart. Painters in the Low Countries turned the phrase into a real place, a patch of lawn shut in by a wall or a hedge of roses, and that is the setting Memling chose here in Bruges in the 1480s. Angels sit around Mary and her child and make music for them, and one offers the boy an apple, which he takes willingly. The museum reads the gesture as a pointer to the sacrifice to come, since the apple recalls the fruit of the Fall that Christ's death was meant to undo. The panel is only about 43 centimetres tall, painted on oak. It reached Munich in 1799 from the picture gallery of the dukes of Zweibrücken.