simia | Benjamin Thorpe

Monkeys appear throughout the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts masquerading as priests and nobles, misusing devotional objects, and breaking the fourth wall of pictured space. Artisans, who were referred to in popular culture as simiae naturae (apes of nature), embraced the monkey as an avatar through which to explore the endless possibilities and pitfalls of imitatio (imitation), a central concept in medieval understandings of art. How does this figure reflect ideas about art and image-making? How have additional culturally-based meanings around the monkey influenced its symbolic association with art? THE FOLD is a research project that explores the monkey's association with art in the West. Based primarily on imagery from illuminated manuscripts, the following archive

In the margin of this fourteenth-century book of hours from the city of Maastricht, a monkey sits beneath a tree spinning thread from the decorative extensions of the nearby letter 'A,' which begins the following verse:

Ave tu ki nes pas faiture
mais tote riens ta creature

(Hail you who are not made
but every being is your creature.)

"Faiture" comes from the Latin "facere" (to make), a word often used in medieval books and objects to establish artistic authorship, and from which we get early art historical keywords like “facture” and “artifice.” This verse addresses a creator god, but the monkey, drawing lines from the text, gestures toward the creation and illumination of the book itself. It embodies the act of image-making particular to marginal art and to the integral role that threadlines play in the visual program of this book. "Faiture," moreover, was linked in medieval French to acts of sorcery or deceit. Its association with the monkey in this context is perhaps intended to remind the reader of the subordinate status of images.

British Library MS Stowe 17, Book of Hours (Maastricht, 1st quarter of the 14th cent.), f.259v.

Paris B.N. MS latin 10483, “Belleville Breviary” illum. Jean Pucelle (Paris, 1323-26), f.28v

"The metaphorical use of simia is frequent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. ...

[It] can be applied not only to persons but also to abstractions and artifacts which assume the appearance of being something they are not."

Ernst Robert Curtius, “The Ape as Metaphor,” European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1953), 538-40.

Medieval artists would have been familiar with the etymological connection of "simia" to the words "similitudo" (likeness) and "simulacrum" (image), both of which, alongside words like "pictura," were used to refer to crafted images and portraits.

Image: Morgan MS 919, Hours (Paris, c.1418), f.52v (detail).

Lingua mea calamus scribae: velociter scribentis.

(My tongue is the pen of a writer: that writeth swiftly.)

British Library MS Stowe 17, Book of Hours (Maastricht, 1st quarter of the 14th cent.), f.30v.

The trope of the self-reflexive monkey figure can be traced toward the more familiar Flemish singeries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that feature monkey sculptors and easel-painters. There are no monkey sculptors and painters in medieval manuscripts because painting and sculpture did not yet stand emblematically for Art as they would in the Florentine Renaissance. In medieval representation, monkey-artists are involved in textile, carpentry, performance and rhetorical play with the text or with the trappings of pictured space, reflecting a more fluid conception of art.

Image: "Le Singe Peinture" (The Monkey Painter), by Jean Siméon Chardin (French, c.1740).

This half-page miniature from the ninth-century Stuttgart Psalter depicts the Israelites in the desert confronting two figures representing Egyptian gods - a monkey seated atop a mound and a satyr standing below. The satyr conventionally symbolizes the devil, but all eyes are on the monkey, which is labeled in the singular, feminine declension (simia). Its form is rendered with the contours of its face and back repeated, or doubled like a hologram. This doubling could be read as a sign of "simiolatry," a concept from early western theology that refers to the representation of "false idols" or "graven images." Perhaps the spectral effect conveyed by this form was intended to bring to mind the Apostle Paul’s well-known teaching that “[a]n idol is nothing” (1 Corinthians 8:4), a verse that was referenced often in the writings of Origen and Hrabanus Maurus. The Stuttgart artist here seems to be experimenting with the question of how to represent "nothing" - an illusion, a ghost, a false image.

Stuttgart Landesbibliothek, Cod.bibl.fol.23., The Stuttgart Psalter (Saint-Germaine-des-Pres, c.820-30), folio 93v. Text from Psalms 77:51-54.

A potential reading: In a segment of the lower margin from the eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry is a scene from Phaedrus’ fable, The Monkey and the Lion’s Breath, depicting the moment when the Monkey attempts to persuade the Lion King through excessive flattery not to eat the animals of the kingdom. With one arm raised and the other outstretched, the Monkey also echoes the gesture of the mustached Harold standing directly above in his ship (its sails "vento plenis" - full of wind), about to land on the shores of William the Conqueror’s France and set off a chain of events leading to the Norman Invasion. The formal connection between Harold and the Monkey is significant because it emphasizes the ominous nature of the moment and suggests a parallel between William I and the hungry Lion who will find any excuse to consume animal subjects. This reading of the Monkey-Harold parallel supports claims of the presence of subversive pro-English narratives in the embroidery, not in a way that portrays Harold favorably but by hinting that William I was predisposed to treat Harold’s mistake as justification for a disproportionate retaliation.

The Bayeux Tapestry. Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux. (Kent, England? c.1070)

This “roundel” is somewhat unusual among others of its kind, which tended to have circular, rectangular, or heraldic frames that broke the diagonal pattern of the common window lattice. The frame has an inharmonious relationship to the angles of the tabletop, bench, trestles, and hunched bodies of the apes. These interior shapes are arranged centrifugally around an empty center in contrast to the altar-like structure typical of interior scenes constructed over the checkered floor.

Encountering the piece at the Cloisters, with the courtyard garden visible through the window, one might sense an aura of studio activity in its asymmetrical play of forms. The Cloisters Collection catalogue notes that, “with its serif-like corners, the tabletop resembles the letter ‘I’." It poses the question, "Are the apes in the process of deconstructing an alphabet?”[1]

New York Met Museum Cloisters, Roundel (stained glass) with Three Apes Building a Trestle Table (German, 1480-1500)

1. Mirror of the Medieval World, ed. Wixom, William D. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), 202.

“Inhabiting these pages are odd boundary creatures - simians, cyborgs, and women - all of which have had a destabilizing place in the great Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives. These boundary creatures are, literally, monsters, a word that shares more than its root with the word, to demonstrate. Monsters signify.”

Donna Haraway, "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women" (Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 1991), page 2.

"A beast that was kept as an entertaining toy by jongleurs and as a pet by the nobility, the ape came to signify the dubious status of representation itself, le singe being an anagram for le signe - the sign. The prevalence of apes in marginal art similarly draws attention to the danger of mimesis in God’s created scheme of things."

Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 13.

"In the margins of official inscriptions apes and monkeys run rampant, 'imitating or parodying every conceivable human activity from jousting and hunting to ecclesiastical rites.' Comparable subversive figurations of women also flourish there, engaged in scandalous inversions of ordinary, socially sanctioned sex roles. It is significant, in view of the climactic metamorphosis in "The Monkey," that often in these marginalia 'the animals assume a human appearance' while the human figure 'becomes distorted into the monstrous,' suggesting 'a secret congeniality' between the two. Such iconographies, Verdier suggests, appear 'as the naive exponents of a woman's freedom movement fighting against the definition of her condition by the Church or against the rules edicted by man.' ...

(Continued)...But as challenges to the official discourse, working in the margins of the text but ineluctibly modifying its central significations, they might also be read as iconographical figures of woman's countertextual discourse, written from the margins in another sense and equally ‘critical of the establishment:’ figural counterparts to that mocking feminine double-talk that Irigaray invokes as a subversive 'play with mimesis' ... European traditions of monkeys and women as subversive signifiers coexist with another set of equally compelling intertexts - sources Dinesen implicitly evokes with every reference to the monkey's African origins. As Henry Louis Gates has shown, one of the most widespread mythic figures in African folk narratives was 'the signifying monkey,' a trickster who (in Afro-American interpretations of an African figure) operates outside the bounds, 'ever parodying, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language.' Like Zora Neale Hurston, the 'first author of the [Afro-American] tradition to represent signifying itself as a vehicle of liberation for an oppressed woman, and as a rhetorical strategy in the narration of fiction,' Dinesen found the monkey a peculiarly apt figure for the antihegemonic impulses of feminine subversion."

- Susan Hardy Aikan, Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 140-141.

Here

Bodley MS Canon Liturg. 75, Hours (Paris, early 15th cent), f.50r

"Naughty monkeys frolic in the margins of medieval manuscripts, playing tricks and filching from unwary travelers, apparently participating in that mark of the human, Baudelaire’s satanic mirth. The animal’s cleverness at imitation made it a symbol of representation, the symbol for art itself."

- Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (Random House, 2011), 335.

Monkeys begin to appear most frequently in twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts, tapestries, and cathedrals, especially across England, Northern France, and Flanders.

In the Northumberland Bestiary a monkey turns its gaze directly toward the reader, puncturing the contained space of a scene of Adam naming the animals.

Getty Museum MS 100, Northumberland Bestiary (England, c.1250), f.5v

Monkey figures at this time often deflect the gaze of the viewer, reversing earlier notions of the image as a passive receiver of meaning. The fifth-century theologian, Augustine, viewed apes as a kind of "monstrum" or omen that demonstrates a theological truth, but the apes of later medieval art are quite literally demonstrative; they make faces, expose themselves, and point their bums at other figures or the passer-by. Carved into a twelfth-century capital from Saint Michel de Cuxa Abbey, the lower halves of several squatting monkeys have been reversed so that both their mocking faces and their rounded buttocks point out into the ambulatory.

Image: Saint-Michel de Cuxa Abbey capital (Saint-Michel, France, c.1130-40) Cloisters Collection, New York City.

“[I]n the cloisters, before the eyes of the brothers while they read - what is that ridiculous monstrosity doing, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity? What are the filthy apes doing there? The fierce lions? The monstrous centaurs? The creatures part man part beast? … You may see many bodies under one head, and conversely many heads on one body. On one side the tail of the serpent is seen on a quadruped, on the other side, the head of a quadruped is on the body of a fish. Over there an animal has a horse for the front half and a goat for the back; here a creature which is horned in front is equine behind. In short, everywhere so plentiful and astonishing a variety of contradictory forms is seen that one would rather read in the marble than in books, and spend the whole day wondering at every single one of them than in meditating on the law of God.”

- Quoted in Thomas Dale, “The Monstrous,” A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. by Conrad Rudolph (Chichester: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2010), 253.

This monkey in the bas-de-page of the Luttrell Psalter straddles a stool and gapes at the viewer as its cape unfurls to reveal a textile pattern traditionally worn by nobles.

Image: British Library Add MS 42130, “The Luttrell Psalter” (Lincolnshire, 1325-40), f.189v

Monkeys unfix the familiar rituals and symbols - especially bodily symbols - of devotional life. They are formal machines, manipulating the functions of composition and interpretation through self-conscious gestures and signs.

One monkey in Stowe 17 literalizes eucharistic practice by passing a whole fish (symbol for Christ and the disciples in the early Greek- speaking church and in foundational texts like Ambrose’s "On the Sacraments") into its mouth and out its anus. Or vice-versa?

Image: British Library MS Stowe 17, Book of Hours (Maastricht, 1st quarter of the 14th cent.), f.83v.

In this twelfth-century manuscript, a monkey sits within a cloud that emerges on the mirrored side of a historiated 'D' for 'Dixi' (I said). It reaches for a vase-like form in the top center of the initial but, unlike everything else in this symmetrical schematic, it has no mirror image. It only exists as a simulacrum - a sort of Borgesian “mirror fauna” - the animals that dwell within the world of the mirror and appear to move every now and then in one's peripheral vision.

Image: Bodleian Library MS. Auct. D. 2. 8., Peter Lombard Commentary on the Psalms (Paris, last quarter of 12th cent.), detail of f.88v. Text from Psalm 38 (39).

One of the peculiarities of monkey representation is the way that their bums are drawn, with the crack visible even though we usually see the body from the side. This glyph, consistent across many late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Northern European manuscripts, is unique to the monkey.31 It stands out in a figure that otherwise tends to change constantly, assuming disguises and switching genders. Perhaps it is wrapped up in the aggregate of jokes in European culture around monkey bums. It might also be a visual pun on the open book itself, with its smooth, rounded surfaces that disappear into the binding.

Bodleian Library MS Douce 6, Book of Hours (Ghent, c.1320-30), f.181v.

This monkey situated in the lower margin of a folio from Stowe 17’s Office of the Dead is pointing its pictogrammatic bum skyward in the direction of what seems to be an elaborate personification of thought - a crowned head with wings growing from the temples, out of which a woman rises, blowing a bubble from the end of a strand of hair. The first line of text on this page is an excerpt from Job 7:20: "Quare posuisti me contrarium tibi...?" (Why hast thou set me contrary to thee?) The monkey punctuates the space just outside the narrator’s thoughts, which drift toward a fantasy of disappearance by “falling asleep in the dust” - in pulvere dormio. It seems to play a diminutive messenger of death, recalling the ur-function of art as grave-marker or effigy.

Image: British Library MS Stowe 17, Book of Hours (Maastricht, 1st quarter of the 14th cent.), f.202v. Text from Job 7:20-21.

Because of their apparently crude antics, monkeys have been described by modern historians like H.W. Janson as a moral foil to the sacred center of manuscript pages and ritual objects. They are often labeled categorically as symbols of “sinful nature,” “folly” and “base sexuality.” But the monkeys of books like Stowe 17 show themselves to be less concerned with didactic or moral function than with associative impact and mnemonic value. Most simian imagery, regardless of how sexually provocative it appears, circumvents moral questions entirely in pursuit of interesting or memorable associations. For instance, this monkey in Stowe 17 makes recorder music into the bum of another trumpeting monkey. They are the bottom rungs in a musical ladder of rising pitch, with a human cantor in the historiated initial halfway up the page and a cherubic hybrid figure playing the harp in the upper margin. This arrangement of figures allegorizes the "cantitum novum" (new song), while it also appears to set up the text on the next folio that describes those who have exaltationes "Dei in gutture eorum," (the joyfulness of God in their throats.)

British Library MS Stowe 17, Book of Hours (Maastricht, 1st quarter of the 14th cent.), f.61v. Text from Psalm 149:1 & 6.