Bruegel’s Two Monkeys: One of art’s most enduring puzzles?

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder transformed observations of daily existence into complex visual parables. As a new exhibition of his work opens in Vienna, Kelly Grovier explores the elusive symbolism of one of the artist’s more deceptively straightforward paintings.


▼ It is one of the most riddling paintings in all of art history: a pair of white-collared monkeys is chained to a metal hasp under a darkening archway in the extreme foreground of a small oak panel. Behind the hapless creatures, a veil of luminous mist rises from the harbour below, blurring to a hazy dream the spire-pronged skyline of the Flemish port city, Antwerp. One of the red-capped mangabey monkeys gawps at us with eyes as wide as saucers and an impish grin. The other, half-turned, crouches despondently, as if admonished by our stare. Shards of an empty nutshell litter the cramped alcove that is the pair’s prison cell – a transitory, threshold space that at once bridges and separates the world we inhabit, outside the picture, and the idealised realm that beckons in the distance.
The panel is one of 28 paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (only 40 by his hand are known to survive) on display in a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition at the  Kunsthistorisches Museum in  Vienna. Marking the 450th anniversary of the death of the Renaissance artist, it features some 90 works in total, including drawings and prints – the most ambitious show devoted to the Early Netherlandish master ever organised.
Two Monkeys (1592) may be one of the smallest and seemingly most straightforward paintings by Bruegel, an artist whose reputation was built on large and elaborate tableaus teeming with peasants engaged in allegorical action. Yet decrypting Two Monkey’s symbolic meaning, if it indeed it is loaded with one, has proved an enduring puzzle for both art historians and casual admirers of the artist.
It may be tempting, at first glance, to dismiss the evocative vignette as nothing more than the record of an actual, if exceptional, observation by the artist amid the hubbub of a bustling port town – an incidental portrait of a brace of woeful beasts torn from their native habitat by heartless traders from the western coast of Africa. After all, as the accompanying catalogue to the exhibition argues, the very presence of such exotic creatures in Antwerp in the middle of the 16th Century would surely have struck any contemporary as an oddity worth memorialising.
Earlier paintings helped establish Bruegel as a master of narratively-intricate and allegorically-rich Wimmelbilder, or ‘busy pictures’
But Bruegel was not just any contemporary artist or any ordinary chronicler of Flemish life. By 1562, the year he painted Two Monkeys, he had already introduced himself as an artist adept at transforming observations of daily existence into complex visual parables and painterly proverbs. Earlier paintings that will also feature in the exhibition, such as The Battle between Carnival and Lent (1559) (which pits the pursuits of pleasure against rituals of piety) and Children’s Games (1560) (which imagines a world overrun by the diversions of toddlers and adolescents), helped establish Bruegel as a master of narratively-intricate and allegorically-rich Wimmelbilder, or ‘busy pictures’.
In the four-and-a-half centuries since Bruegel created his enigmatic double portrait, scholars, convinced there must be an underlying message to the panel, have busied themselves trying to decode its elusive symbolism. “The traditional negative connotations of monkeys in art,” according to one of the exhibition’s four curators, Manfred Sellink, whose analysis of the painting appears in the comprehensive catalogue, “have prompted moralistic and sometimes incompatible interpretations, such as desire and lechery, greed and miserliness, or evil of every sort”.
Monkey mystery (▪ ▪ ▪)

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