St. Luke's Attic

The other day I was texting back and forth with a couple of guys I work with. It was a group text and I didn’t even mind. In fact, a lot of the texts were funny. So you heard it here first, Local Man Enjoys Being in on Group Text. But as these things often go, the “conversation” started to drift and I made the comment stating that I had always wondered about the monkeys in my former professor’s drawings and prints. They were often chained to the floor. I always thought it was weird and I remember him being cagey about answering questions about his work when I was in college.

Robert Rivers detail “A New Standard for God”

Well, either he didn’t like talking to undergraduates or he’s mellowed with age because he responded to my text immediately with “Bruegel symbol for marriage” and included the picture below.

Two Monkeys (Zwei Aften): Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562, oil on oak panel, 23 x 20 cm (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin)

That struck me. My immediate response was probably the same as almost everyone else’s. Something like, “That’s a pretty cynical take on marriage. Chained monkeys.” And I immediately thought of all the sitcom steotypes about miserable marriages. I thought of the old cliche of the ball and chain. Then I remembered Bruegel lived a long time before TV and he lived in a time that didn’t universally deride marriage. I also started remembering my art history (always a good idea). I remembered that apes were often a stand-in for humans and that they were always seen as being at least off. They were representative of baser human inclinations: drunkenness, violence, lust, etc. In a sense they “aped” us. But only the bad parts of us.

How does this fit in with marriage? Are we all hairless apes in bondage behaving like jerks (bound baboons behaving badly)? Is that the metaphor for marriage? Was Bruegel a cynic? I don’t think so. Among other things, Bruegel was fascinated with alchemy. Alchemy is about a LOT of stuff, but at the risk of oversimplifying, it is at least about change. Specifically, it is about the change of a base material into a higher, more precious one (e.g. lead to gold). Monkeys, for him, were base material that were in need of change. And in this metaphor the chains are the agent of change. (Allow me to go off point here and quote the great song, Corduroy “Everything has chains, absolutley nothing’s changed.” It doesn’t really fit here, but what a song… Amirite?)

Marriage is the chain – the bond if you will – that restrains and redirects base passions. In this case, lust. Marriage changes those passions into love. It is not immediate, it is not always easy or comfortable, but it can change them. And love is infinitely better than lust just as gold is manifestly better than lead. Bruegel’s monkeys are in the process of being changed from beasts who obey their passions to men who have the ability to love.

The Virgin and Child with the Monkey circa 1498 engraving