SIMIA is a research project based on the representation of monkeys in medieval European art and literature. In particular, this project investigates how the monkey became a symbol for art and the artisan. The archive below includes images and textual fragments related to this trope, and is intended to be an open space for audiences to explore.
(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
“[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.
