Virgin and Child with two angels

The garden is walled. Behind the Virgin a hedge of roses, red and white, closes the space, and the enclosure is the point. This is the hortus conclusus, the shut garden of the Song of Songs, read since the Middle Ages as an image of Mary. One angel holds a lute by its neck and offers the Child an apple, which he is reaching for. The other plays a bowed viol. In the grass at the front are celandine, dandelion, primrose, plantain and wild strawberry, several of them now almost invisible because the paint has worn thin. The museum dates the panel between 1485 and 1490, years when Memling was making a good living in Bruges from small pictures like this one, meant for a room in a house rather than a church. The wood is Baltic oak, shipped into Flanders by sea. The painting reached Madrid in 1894, the gift of a widowed marchioness.