Exploring the Cary Sheet

firemaiden

(to Le Pendu re: bateleur translation: There is no english word, I think. Not every word in French has an exact equivalent.)

edited to say, Michael, WOW, what fantastic pictures! So the monkey is clearly associated with this bateleur/jester character!
 

le pendu

Michael those a great images!

So.... does it tell us anything about the Cary Sheet? Does that type of iconography cover a large time period? Countries?
 

firemaiden

Is the jester carrying a monkey? It looks almost like a little dog!
 

mjhurst

The identifications I posted are all taken from the description in Studies in Petrarch. Many of the details are pretty obscure in the small image reproduced there, but they all seem quite plausible so I take the description as a better record than the reproduced image. (LOL -- always a dangerous assumption.)
 

firemaiden

You know what I love about the monkey, is that it does in fact look like a dog, which suggest to me that it could have been painted by someone who had never actually seen a monkey -- not uncommon in the medieval era, for the artist to depict things he had heard tell of but not seen, right?
 

le pendu

Found a great image!

65223_2.jpg


a bit late, 1688ish.
http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/briti...subjectidsearch?id=11839&&idx=1&startid=33207
 

mjhurst

Wow -- that is a great one!

Regarding the time period, most of the ready examples seem to be from the second half of the fifteenth century, (excepting the Parisian Tarot card), but I doubt that the notion was limited to that period. Street performers and court jesters used animals routinely. When more exotic animals were unavailable, a dog might just as well be dressed up, as shown in the famous Bosch Conjuror copy.

The Magician
http://www.wga.hu/html/b/bosch/1early/11magici.html

As was probably mentioned earlier in the thread, several of the images at the goochelaar page appear to show monkeys. It is difficult to be sure with the small images, but these three appear to have monkeys.

http://home.tiscali.nl/jannesdegoochelaar/afbeeldingen.html

De goochelaar, voor 1490, tekening, Hyronimus Bosch, Herkomst onbekend

Luna's Kinder, ca. 1466-1470, gravure, Meister des Hausbuches

Luna's Kinder, ca. 1470, houtsnede, Herkomst onbekend

Regarding the question of whether the artists would know what monkeys looked like, consider this comment about a Durer print of the Madonna with Monkey -- seriously!

"The Italian influence is manifest. This species of monkey was a popular pet in the fifteenth century. It appears also, obviously based on the same lost preparatory drawing, in Dürer's painting Christ among the Doctors. The monkey, at the same time, was a symbol of lewdness, greed, and gluttony, commonly associated with the Christian concept of the Synagogue and more especially with Eve. The "Island Abode" in the background is based on a drawing."

The Madonna with the Monkey
http://www.wga.hu/cgi-bin/highlight.cgi?file=html/d/durer/2/13/1/021.html&find=monkey

So it doesn't sound like monkeys were any kind of rarity.
 

firemaiden

Oh wow, Michael, and Le Pendu, what fabulous images. I'm amazed by the varying degrees of success at depicting monkeys. The Dürer monkey (with Madonna) is exquisite, but the Mountebank's monkey has frog legs, and duck feathers... and the Petrach image monkey well, it looks like a doggie to me. The little dog with monkey ears under the table in the Bosch Conjurer is so cute he is to die for. I like that there is this link between dog and monkey.
 

Moonbow

Well this thread has certainly moved on since I went to bed.

Michael it's great to see you here and thanks for the links. Robert, that's a great picture too.

The Minchiate (or earlier Germini deck - 1530) illustrates a few monkeys on the pips, usually looking in mirrors. Unfortunately though there isn't one on the Bateleur/Mountebank, who wears a turban with feather.
 
a question about the chariot TdM reading example for feedback