A Better Mousetrap · Part 7 of 30

Joseph's workshop

Act I: The problem · November 3, 2026

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Card for part 7 of A Better Mousetrap: a detail of the Mérode Altarpiece, a box mousetrap on the sill of Joseph's open shop window, with the town square behind it. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1956 (56.70a–c). Public domain.

Part 6 ended on a guess: about a thousand years after Augustine, his mousetrap may turn up on a carpenter’s bench. Here is the bench.

Three panels

Around 1427, in the workshop of Robert Campin, someone painted a small altarpiece in three hinged panels. It is now called the Mérode Altarpiece.

In the left panel, the couple who paid for it kneel outside a door. In the middle panel, the angel arrives to tell Mary she will have a child. In the right panel, Joseph is at work in his carpenter’s shop.

Two traps

Joseph sits at his bench, boring holes in a small board, with his tools laid out beside him. On the bench, among the tools, is a mousetrap.

There’s another one in the shop’s open window, set out on the sill, facing the street.

The right panel of the Mérode Altarpiece: Joseph at his bench, the town square through the open window behind him. A red ring numbered 1 appears around a small wooden trap on the bench. Then a ring numbered 2 appears around a box trap on the window sill. Below the picture: 1, on the bench; 2, in the window, facing the street.

The devil’s mousetrap

In 1945 the art historian Meyer Schapiro argued that the two traps point to Augustine’s words from part 6: the cross is the devil’s mousetrap. He named his essay with Augustine’s Latin, Muscipula diaboli.

On that reading, the picture is a trap story. In the middle panel the bait is set: God becomes a man, and a man can die. In the right panel, the man who will raise the child has a trap on his bench and another in his window.

The painting tells us something plainer, too. By the 1420s a mousetrap was a thing a painter could put in a picture and expect everyone to know on sight. And both of these, once they caught a mouse, had to be emptied and set again by hand.

The painting hangs at The Met Cloisters in New York.

Next, part 8: No rats, 1284.

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Sources

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece), workshop of Robert Campin, ca. 1427–32, The Cloisters Collection, 1956 (56.70a–c): metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/470304 . Photographs: The Met, Open Access, public domain.
Meyer Schapiro, "Muscipula Diaboli: The Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece," The Art Bulletin 27, no. 3 (1945).