The European cultural heritage from the early modern era is full of colonial content. For instance, “exotic” animals, trafficked to Europe from the colonies, often appear as motifs in paintings and sculptures. This is the case in the oil painting Two Chained Monkeys by Bruegel the Elder from 1562. Through the centuries, the two monkeys in the painting have been interpreted in different ways: as material proof of the owner’s worldwide power, as religious symbols of the debased human, or as political metaphors for human warfare and imprisonment. With her ekphrastic poem “Bruegel’s Two Monkeys” (1957), the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska breaks this trend of “symptomatic interpretation” and reads the monkeys as monkeys. As I argue in the chapter, Szymborska hereby makes the type of critical “surface reading” for which the academic field of human-animal studies generally aims. Szymborska’s poem, furthermore, creatively rearranges the painting’s scenery, thereby effectively blocking the anthropocentric-colonial gaze and creating new space for the monkeys’ agency. Principally, the chapter argues that artistic and academic endeavors may have mutually supportive functions in their acts of critically revisiting and rereading the cultural heritage from the colonial era.