Monkey in the Middle: Pre-Darwinian Evolutionary Thought and Artistic Creation (1986)

MONKEY IN THE MIDDLE: PRE-DARWINIAN EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT AND ARTISTIC CREATION ELLEN K. LEVY* and DAVID E. LEVY A close look at images of monkeys in paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows that many of them anticipate Darwinian scientific thinking regarding evolution. These images, simultaneously provocative and comical, reflect then-current philosophic speculations and preview evolutionary themes. Brueghel, Teniers, and Chardin, leading artists who excelled in this genre, transformed monkeys into men by a metamorphosis of paint. In their visions, chimpanzees engage in flower trading, gibbons don soldier's armor, and baboons paint from Roman statutes. Like humorists disguising profound truths with disarming wit, the painters of the singeries could intimate common origins between men and monkeys in an artistic manner denied to their scientist peers, who were expected to be responsive to both Church and scientific convention. Although the pre-Darwinian theories these artists suggested do not represent a fully modern concept of evolution based on the mutability of organic species and natural selection, the writings do contain critical passages of thought that made a true evolutionary theory possible. Guided by our own interests in painting and science, this essay re-creates some of the scientific theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the context of Darwinian developments to come and explores the visual expression of evolutionary concerns in singerie or monkey paintings. In the eighteenth century, the physical world was subjected to vast speculative claims and conjectures, two of which enjoyed wide exposure and were particularly capable of artistic expression. "The Great Chain of The authors thank Gail Levin, Greta Berman, Sonya Mirsky, Mae Kaplan, and Miriam Levin for their suggestions and encouragement.»Address: 40 East 19th Street (3d floor), New York, New York 10003.© 1986 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1-5982/87/300 1-0505$0 1 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 30, 1 ¦ Autumn 1986 \ 95 Being" was an assumption that all possible forms in nature must exist as a graded continuum of intermediate shapes [1, p. 118] and differed from the later dynamic concept of "Transformism," which conjectured that a species develops out of something else [1, pp. 114-143]. The Great Chain of Being originated with Leibniz's (1646-1716) reformulation of Aristotle's theory, while Transformism is attributed to Diderot (1713-1784). In addition to Leibniz and Diderot, many other precursors of Darwin speculated about linking forms and their possible origins; these included Linnaeus, Buffon, La Mettrie, Robinet, and Maupertuis. Some surprisingly prophetic artworks of this time appear to crystallize those thoughts then "in the air" about man's origins. However coincidental , the fact that artists could visualize such concepts touches directly on the mysterious power of images to give life to ideas. The Great Chain of Being has a visual parallel in some of the art works of Brueghel and Teniers, while Transformism takes on a visual and metaphorical expression in the monkey paintings of Chardin. All of these paintings, well crafted and hypnotic because of their weirdly metamorphic subjects, show images that display links between man and monkeys. The visual effect of these works is to depict a world that is part man and part monkey both in physical features and in the range of roles and activities in which both engage. Perhaps the first well-known works to show monkeys as men are the paintings ofJan Brueghel II (1602-1678). "Allegorie Tulpen" (fig. 1) by Brueghel is small but nevertheless captures in paint an entire society of monkeys behaving as trading merchants. Brueghel depicted monkeys as men engaged in the wild speculation that became known as tulipmania in seventeenth-century Holland. At that time, highly prized tulip bulbs were introduced into Europe from Japan and Continental Asia, and Brueghel captured the feverish pitch of this trade in his canvas. One frequent explanation of the emergence of monkey paintings is, in fact, to view them as European responses to Oriental influences [2, pp. 28— 31] in addition to reflecting general conern for the outside world. In this respect, Brueghel's rendering of tulipmania may reflect an interest in the Orient. The interest in tulipmania, however, does not really explain why Brueghel presented...