Two Horses in a Landscape

This panel is half of something. It was the right wing of a small diptych, and the picture that once faced it, a young woman holding a pink, the flower that stood for love, is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Read as a pair, the two horses are two kinds of lover. The brown one turns its head to the left, towards where she used to be, and carries the sense of loyalty. The white one takes no notice of her and puts its mouth in the water, with a monkey sitting on its back. Worldly allegory of this sort is unusual in Memling, who spent his career in Bruges on altarpieces and portraits. Rotterdam's curators are careful to say the full meaning is no longer recoverable, because only one wing is here to be read.