Knight, Death and girl

The mounted man inside a moral image

Three parties are named in the title, and only one of them is a rider. That arrangement belongs to a class of images in which the horse is not doing any of the jobs this register usually catalogues — no battle, hunt, race, ceremony or work — but is functioning as an attribute. A man on a horse reads as armed, mobile and in some sense powerful, and an image that wants to set power against something else can use the mounted figure as shorthand and let the other figures do the argument. The animal is a term in the composition rather than a participant in an event.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1505 as the date of creation, which places this among only eleven works in this register dated before 1600. The location is the Louvre in Paris and the dimensions are 35.5 x 29.6 cm, which is small for a subject of this weight. Northern Renaissance is the recorded style and German the nationality attached to the painter. The categories include landscape and forest headings alongside Animal Art > Horse and a mythology heading, and the measured colour family of the image is brown.

A field this register ignores

The catalogue's period column assigns this work to the seventeenth century, which its own date of creation contradicts by a hundred years. That column is unreliable across this register and is never cited here.