This essay considers the unusual variety of ways in which Rogier van der Weyden conceived text as a lively agent of pictorial meaning. It represents a new approach not only to the prob­lem of interpreting this artist's work (which has most often been analyzed for matters of style, attribution, and patronage), but also to fundamental dynamics of text and image in fifteenth-century panel painting. Among these exceptionally pliable manipulations of text both in form and content, which are compared selectively to Eyckian counterparts, there emerges a distinctive impulse toward cultivating an observer's role in the creation of meaning.