Endnote 2 – Lions, Lilies and Mousetraps

The modern scholar who first ferreted out the disguised symbolic meaning of this and most of the objects in the Merode Altarpiece was the great art historian Erwin Panofsky. See Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953; reissue, New York: 1971).