Simia is a research project investigating the symbolic association between art and the monkey in medieval Europe—an association reflected in the popular adage ars simia naturae (art as the ape of nature). Painted into the margins of illuminated manuscripts and sculpted into the nooks and crannies of cathedrals, monkeys can be found messing with the conventions of pictorial representation and punning on the idea of the artisan as imitator. Monkeys were often paired with artisan-performers in public theater and courtly entertainment. Also underscoring their association with art was the simian’s close affiliation with words denoting visual representation, such as simulacrum (image) and similitudo (likeness, as in a painted portrait).
This project is a field guide to the way medieval artisans and writers thought about art through the monkey figure. What does this subject tell us about medieval theories of art and image-making? What kinds of cultural meanings are wrapped up in the association between art and the monkey? Given that the monkey is the longest-standing personification of art in western tradition, what role has this trope played in ideas that have helped to shape western aesthetics?
The source material for this project spans ancient through contemporary art but focuses on twelfth to fourteenth-century visual and literary culture, when the word simia came to be used commonly as a metaphor for imitation—often in relation to art or the artisan—and when monkeys appeared with increasing frequency in the marginal art of England, France, and Flanders. The main purpose of the essay is to explore a wide variety of visual examples of the monkey’s association with art, but in so doing, I encounter a number of themes, such as the monkey’s relationship to philosophical questions and anxieties about what it means to be human, and the perennial use of the monkey figure in Western European culture as a device for stereotyping women, foreigners, and non-Christians—a practice directly tied to the monkey’s emergence as a personification of art. I also look at how modern historians have described the monkey’s association with art in the Middle Ages and consider what the concept of art as the imitation of nature meant in the medieval imagination. Finally, my essay engages in comparisons with monkey figures from other traditions around the world as a way of highlighting aspects of the trope within western tradition.
