12
The Monstrous
Since the mid-nineteenth century, the interpretation of the monstrous in Romanesque and Gothic art has been significantly influenced by a single text: St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia composed in 1125 for Abbot William of St Thierry. After a broader critique of religious art, Bernard asks:
[I]n the cloisters, before the eyes of the brothers while they read – what is that ridiculous monstrosity doing, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity? What are the filthy apes doing there? The fierce lions? The monstrous centaurs? The creatures part man part beast?… You may see many bodies under one head, and conversely many heads on one body. On one side the tail of a serpent is seen on a quadruped, on the other side, the head of a quadruped is on the body of a fish. Over there an animal has a horse for the front half and a goat for the back; here a creature which is horned in front is equine behind. In short, everywhere so plentiful and astonishing a variety of contradictory forms is seen that one would rather read in the marble than in books, and spend the whole day wondering at every single one of them than in meditating on the law of God.1
Without describing any particular cloister, Bernard evokes beautifully both the diversity of the monstrous and the complex reactions to it. His account highlights three categories that defined the monstrous for Christian writers since the early Middle Ages, including Augustine and Isidore of Seville: animals made monstrous by the superfluity or absence of parts such as the double-bodied lions joined to a single head; hybrid animals combining different species; and finally, one semi-human hybrid, the centaur. To his representative examples one could add the ubiquitous sirens and the Plinian races inhabiting the margins of the known world; indeed, by the fourteenth century, Sir John Mandeville could define the monster quite simply as “a thing deformed against kind, both of man or of beast or of anything else.”
FIGURE 12-1 Historiated initial “P,” Moralia in Job, made at Cîteaux. Dijon: Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 173, fol. 66. Photo: Bibliothèque Municipale, Dijon.
To broaden our picture of the monstrous it is also necessary to take into account the changing functional contexts of the monstrous. In Romanesque art, monsters are particularly associated with monasticism. Although they are sometimes relegated to the margins – the socle zone of mural painting, the archivolts of doorways, or exterior corbels (modillions) – they are also frequently depicted in more central fields of representation. Thus, a satyr-like creature confronts a goat-headed man within an initial in the early twelfth-century manuscript of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, now in Dijon (fig. 12-1); and a cloister capital from St Michel-de-Cuxa (c.1140) displays at eye-level Bernard’s double-bodied lions (fig. 12-2). In Gothic art, while patronage expands to encompass public and private works for lay elites, there is also a significant displacement of monsters to the margins. Monsters that inhabited historiated initials in Romanesque texts are banished to the margins of Gothic manuscripts such as the Luttrell Psalter (fig. 12-3). Here we also see a greater playfulness: a human-headed hybrid wearing an inverted kettle is combined with a metallic blue body and the webbed feet of an aquatic bird.
As to the meaning and function of the monstrous, Bernard is ambivalent. He is clearly attracted to the sculptures that he criticizes: not only does he accurately describe the creatures that appear in cloisters (fig. 12-2); he also responds with wonder (mira, mirando) to the paradoxical “beautiful deformity” of monsters.2 Bernard’s ambivalence stems from the fact that even though monsters in stone potentially distracted monks from reading or meditation, they could also be meaningful. The term monstrum in medieval Latin refers to that which demonstrates or points to something else, and it is the contradictory form of the monster that makes it a particularly effective sign.3 By the twelfth century, monstrosity was so integral to metaphorical thinking that Bernard could describe himself as a “chimera” of his time in reflecting on his own hybrid social status as contemplative monk and worldly diplomat.4
FIGURE 12-2 Capital with double-bodied lions threatening men, from the Cloister of St Michel-de-Cuxa. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 25.120.855. Photo: author.
Modern scholarly opinion has been divided between those who insist on the essentially decorative role of monsters and those who invest them with meaning, and further between those for whom the monstrous is integral to the dominant religious culture and those who see it as manifesting popular dissent. This chapter begins with an assessment of Bernard’s impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography as a voice against meaning. It then traces the changing interpretation of the monstrous on a thematic basis. Finally, it concludes with a case-study which responds to Bernard’s question concerning the purpose of monsters in monastic art.
St Bernard and the Critique of the Monstrous
As Schapiro and others have observed, the paradox of Bernard’s text is that he so powerfully articulates the essence of the monstrous forms that he condemns.5 It has also been noted that elsewhere in the Apologia, Bernard does support art that is addressed to the laity.6 Since the nineteenth century, however, Bernard’s Apologia has consistently been cited in favor of the assumption that monsters served no religious purpose but represented the fantasy of artists. As Rudolph has shown, the earliest scholarship on Bernard’s Apologia, dating back as far as Mabillon’s 1690 introduction to the text, explained the critique of religious art as a reaction against the dangers of visual curiosity and distraction.7 This notion was repeated by other French commentators in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc who recast Bernard’s text as an attack on monstrous images that were irrational and meaningless. Viollet understood Bernard to be attacking the “most strangely sculpted images” in Cluniac monasteries because they were “contrary to the Christian spirit.”8 He argued that it was largely due to Bernard’s protests that the iconography of sculpture in Gothic cathedrals was “controlled under the supreme authority of bishops.” Banished from cathedral interiors, monsters appeared primarily in exterior sculpture such as gargoyles (fig. 12-4), and these he attributed to the enduring popular taste for ancient monsters kept alive by lay artists.9
FIGURE 12-3 Babewyns in the Luttrell Psalter. London: British Library Add. MS 42130 fol. 182v. Photo reproduced by permission of the British Library.
FIGURE 12-4 Engraving of a Gargoyle, from Ste Chapelle, Paris. Reproduced from Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française, vol. VI, fig. 6. Paris: 1866.
Viollet-le-Duc made a number of questionable, but subsequently influential, arguments. He assumed that Bernard condemned monsters because they represented superstitious belief and had no meaning. As Rudolph has shown, however, Bernard’s primary complaint is that monstrous images will distract the monk from his reading and meditation.10 The association of the monstrous exclusively with the Cluniacs is also misleading, since Bernard was clearly disturbed by the monsters that appeared in earlier Cistercian art itself under Stephen Harding – most notably in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job (fig. 12-1).11 Viollet-le-Duc also drew an untenable distinction between the “superstitious” use of monsters in Romanesque art and the rationalism of Gothic art, ignoring the extensive display of monsters in cathedrals themselves.
Emile Mâle, the leading figure of a second generation of French medievalists, had a more nuanced view of the monstrous in Romanesque and Gothic art. Amplifying the method of Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, the important early developer of systematic iconography, Mâle affirmed that most images in medieval art could be explained by religious texts.12 In his volume on Romanesque art, he interpreted animals both domestic and fantastic on the basis of the moralizations in the bestiary. When it came to more inventive hybrids, however, he cited Bernard’s Apologia as evidence that “hybrid monsters on capitals had no meaning.”13 In his book on Gothic art, Mâle further argued that “grotesques” in gargoyles, misericords, and marginalia in thirteenth-century manuscripts were “of essentially popular origin.”14 He connected the more humorous inventions with the creativity of competitive, young sculptors. His emphasis on artistic license is common to a broader current of late nineteenth-century French scholarship that saw in medieval monsters the origins of the contemporaneous art of caricature. Champfleury, for example, had evoked Bernard’s name in 1872 as proof that monstrous gargoyles were nothing more than “useless caprices” of sculptors.15
Here we see the kernel of an idea that was later articulated in its most influential form by Meyer Schapiro. In his 1947 essay “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art,” Schapiro argued that Bernard was particularly disturbed by monstrous images because they were the product of a profane, “thoroughly unreligious” imagination.16 Schapiro assumed that cloister capitals were carved by lay artists who had free rein to express themselves in one of the most sacred spaces of the monastery. He further argued that the monstrous combat scenes found in Cistercian manuscripts such as the Cîteaux Moralia in Job (fig. 12-1) were “entirely independent of the accompanying text” and “astoundingly modern in their freedom of conception.”
Schapiro applied the same theory to Gothic marginalia.17 Contrary to Mâle’s notion of medieval art being governed by order and piety, Schapiro described the margins as “open to primitive impulses and feelings”; he also stressed again that marginalia manifested the “artist’s liberty, his unconstrained possession of space.” Schapiro’s insistence on the freedom and “modernity” of medieval artists clearly reflects his engagement with the art of his own time.18 His flirtation with Marxist ideology also led him to see the artist in opposition to the Church hierarchy; he thus downplayed the particular historical and religious contexts in which the images were used. Ignoring Bernard’s careful distinctions between monastic and lay viewers, Schapiro ultimately cast monsters both in the monastic cloister and in books for the laity as products of the same profane imagination.
A second response that downplays meaning in the monstrous focuses on ornament. Emile Mâle assimilated the most common, heraldically posed beasts and monsters in Romanesque art to a vast ornamental repertory, ranging from ancient Mesopotamian and Sassanian art to more recent Byzantine textiles, which made their way to France as objects of gift exchange, as imported ornament for liturgical vestments, or as wrappings for relics. The German scholar Richard Bernheimer arrived at similar conclusions, evoking again Bernard of Clairvaux’s critique.19 Paralleling Riegl’s universalizing theories of ornament, Bernheimer argued that monsters in Romanesque sculpture had their origins in Near Eastern art and that the distant cultures were related not so much by shared religious meaning as by the “will to form” (Formwille) of the artist.
A more systematic theory of the formal development of the monstrous in Romanesque and Gothic art was forged during the 1930s by Jurgis Baltrugaitis, a pupil of Henri Focillon. In his first book on the topic, Baltrugaitis argued that Romanesque sculpture entails a dialectic between geometry and nature and that organic forms are distorted or deformed to conform to the surrounding frame and an inner “ornamental” logic.20 He suggested that Romanesque artists created monsters either by combining elements of known species or by transforming an ordinary creature to conform with the internal rhythms of an ornamental vinescroll or the natural geometry of a capital. The impulse towards symmetrical compositions could lead further to the creation of double-bodied creatures joined to a single head, such as those described by St Bernard (fig. 12-2). In a second work focused on Gothic art, Baltrugaitis documented the debt of medieval artists to ancient Greek, Roman, and Mesopotamian sources, as well as Chinese and Japanese motifs. Most convincing are the parallels between the fantastic hybrids found on ancient intaglios and their counterparts in Gothic marginalia known as grylli.21 These creatures, which are particularly common in the margins of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English, French, and Flemish manuscripts, substitute an enlarged head for a body combined with other heads and features of different species (figs. 12-3, 12-4). Baltrugaitis contended that such borrowings would have been facilitated during the thirteenth century by the growing appreciation for ancient intaglios and their magical properties.
Baltrušaitis’ teacher, Henri Focillon, incorporated the monstrous into a more influential, formalist definition of Romanesque art as ornament or decoration. Focillon argued that Romanesque monsters in which the body or head are doubled, coincide with the “ornamental dialectic” between the organic and the logic of the geometric frame. The frame, in turn, constrains the monstrous and “assures the intertwining and interpretation of the parts so well that each ornamental block… is like a little enclosed world… which carries within it its own law.”22 This dialectic play between the monstrous and the frame, he suggested, paralleled the structure of scholastic thought.
No one since Baltrušaitis and Focillon has traced so thoroughly the formal development of the monstrous. It would seem that the moment of formalist analysis of the monstrous had passed by the second half of the twentieth century, when contemporary art itself expanded beyond “decoration” and abstraction to embrace the figural subject again. More recent scholarship, questioning the search for sources as far afield as the ancient Near East and China, has emphasized the influence of indigenous, pre-Christian Celtic, Scandinavian, and Germanic traditions.23
Writing around the middle of the nineteenth century, the Abbé Charles-Auguste Auber was amongst the first commentators to propose an iconography of the monstrous. Auber contended that Bernard disparaged monsters in the cloister only because they constituted an unnecessary expense.24 At the same time, he showed that Bernard was aware of the significance of monsters when he deployed them as metaphors for heretics or associated them with demonic powers.25 On this basis, Auber suggested that the hybrids Bernard described in cloister capitals should be understood as images of heretics.26 In gargoyles (fig. 12-4) Auber found a perfect synthesis of practical and metaphorical function: monsters are placed outside the church, because they represent the expulsion of demons or the possessed from the sanctuary.27 Their monstrous forms and their grimaces represent their evil natures and the convulsions they suffer when exorcized from the church. Anticipating recent explanations of gargoyles as reflections of “popular culture,” Auber suggested that their monstrous forms might have been inspired by the fantastic serpents and dragons carried in urban festivals to celebrate the triumph of Christianity over paganism.28
While Auber provides a useful framework for understanding the monstrous, his interpretations lack the specificity required by Mâle’s iconographic method. Although Mâle dismissed Gothic gargoyles and marginalia as artistic fantasy, he did interpret those monsters mentioned in biblical or bestiary texts and in the great thirteenth-century encyclopedias as negative moral signs or vices.29 His method was also adapted by German-language scholarship in the mid-twentieth century. Herbert Schade, like Mâle, drew largely upon biblical exegesis to suggest that monsters were susceptible to the fourfold interpretation of scriptural texts in terms of historical (literal), allegorical, tropological, and anagogical meanings.30 He also emphasized the connection between monsters and demons.
More recent iconographical studies have expanded the range of textual sources. Lillian Randall’s seminal essays on marginalia in Gothic manuscripts consider monsters as one of many types of marginal motifs which draw not only on the bestiary and monster literature such as the Marvels of the East but also fabliaux and exempla designed to embellish sermons.31 Randall accepts Schapiro’s notion that Bernard’s critique of monsters in the monastery stemmed from their association with “profane imagination,” but she goes on to show how themes from ostensibly secular literature came to be incorporated into ecclesiastical art under the influence of exempla from sermon literature. Randall attributes the inclusion of such motifs in the margins of religious and secular texts to the increasing lay audience for books drawn from an emerging upper middle class in Northern Europe.
While iconography is still a necessary first step in decoding conventional monsters, the more inventive creations such as the marginalia of the Luttrell Psalter (fig. 12-3) defy easy classification. Furthermore, as Leclercq-Marx has shown, in the rare instances in which inscriptions are included, the text is often at odds with the image and serves, at best, to identify a general category of monster.32 The indeterminacy of much monstrous iconography has led Michael Camille to posit an “anti-iconography” based on Walter Ong’s theories of orality.33 Focusing on the ravenous beasts in the Romanesque trumeau of Souillac, Camille proposed a host of oral associations for the monk, ranging from the monastic discipline of ruminatio to vices such as oral gratification of both sexual and culinary appetites, and the monk’s anxieties over being devoured by wild animals in this world or fantastic monsters in hell. The advantage of Camille’s approach is that it recognizes the potential polyvalence of unconventional monsters.
Another “anti-iconography” is proposed by David Williams. Instead of assuming that monsters are negative moral signs, Williams proposes that they are paradoxical signs alluding to the invisible God.34 Citing the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, as translated for the Latin West by John Scottus Eriugena, Williams argues that hybrid monsters reveal the unknowable God by showing that which He is not. It is the negation of form, order, hierarchy, and reason itself that also causes the monstrous to elicit the derision of churchmen such as Bernard.35 Although Williams has been criticized for exaggerating the impact of the Pseudo-Dionysius, his approach is echoed in a number of recent essays. Robert Mills, for example, has suggested that three-headed images of the Christian Trinity cast Christ as hybrid “monster.”36 Beyond representing literally the three persons in one, such images, he suggests, furnished palpable metaphors for the paradoxical admixture of diverse natures in Christ’s body.
Long before Sigmund Freud had published his theories of psychoanalysis, French scholars saw a general psychological basis for representations of monsters. As early as 1884, Elphège Vacandard embraced A. Joly’s view that the monsters in the historiated initials of the Cîteaux Moralia in Job (fig. 12-1) presented “a startling image of the deepest side of our nature, of our brutality, violence.”37 Since the early twentieth century, Freudian psychology has played a pre-eminent role in trying to understand the function of monsters as a kind of cathartic expression of the inner workings of the artist’s unconscious mind. Meyer Schapiro was amongst the first art historians to apply this approach to monsters in Romanesque and Gothic art. In an essay on the sculpture of Souillac, he described the monstrous combats of the trumeau as manifesting a collective respect for, and fear of violence in feudal society which was “sublimated in mythical themes of divine protection.” Schapiro similarly affirmed that Bernard’s monstrous cloister capitals manifested “a world of projected emotions, psychologically significant images of force, play, aggressiveness, anxiety, self-torment and fear.”38
While Schapiro focused on aggression and violence, two scholars of the Vienna School, Ernst Kris and Sir Ernst Gombrich, analyzed the monstrous in relation to caricature and the comic. Following Freud’s theory of laughter, Kris viewed the comic as a mechanism for coping with anxiety. The satyrs, goat demons, cock dancers and comic devils in medieval art and literature thus revealed for him “another more sinister shape once feared and dreaded.” He also argued that grinning Gothic gargoyles (fig. 12-4) simultaneously turned away evil with laughter and terrified the spectator.39
Ernst Gombrich focused on the recuperative aspect of monsters in a larger study of ornament. Gombrich called the margins “zones of license” and he contended that the majority of monsters should be seen as “creations in their own right” and the “dream work” of the artist. Like Schapiro, he understood the monsters described by Bernard as a tool for mastering instinctual urges by “giving them an outlet of an acceptable shape.”40 But he also emphasized a certain ambivalence which upsets our sense of order: understood as real monsters, the images inspire fear of the unknown and demonic, but seen as playful inventions, they elicit laughter. Ultimately, he answered Bernard’s question regarding the purpose of monsters in the cloister by recalling a more universal, apotropaic function.
Gombrich’s apotropaic theory is echoed in much recent scholarship. Peter Dinzelbacher argues that demonic and monstrous creatures were “imprisoned in stone” to assure the faithful that evil powers would be vanquished by the church.41 He also cites concrete evidence for associating gargoyles (fig. 12-4) with exorcism: a German “Hexenbuchlein” (c.1500) records that gargoyles, like magical spells, turn away witches, cats, wolves, and other malevolent creatures. In a broad-ranging study, which considers monstrous hybrids together with disembodied heads or masks, animals, entertainers, and scatological imagery, Ruth Mellinkoff likewise argues that the entire range of “grotesques” and “drolleries” served as talismans.42 By variously evoking laughter or fear, confusion or distraction, monsters both represent demons and avert their attacks.
More specific interpretations are proferred for monstrous images accompanied by texts. For Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo, a capital in the Silos cloister depicting birds attacking harpies and lions’ masks, dramatizes the prayer inscribed on its abacus: text and image evoke Santo Domingo’s power to protect the faithful from harm.43 Focusing on monastic spirituality, Conrad Rudolph has shown how monsters in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job relate to the monk’s own interior “spiritual struggle” outlined in Gregory the Great’s commentary.44 Rudolph interprets semi-hominal hybrids as warning the monks of their potentially irrational or “bestial” behavior. This descent to the bestial is illustrated in the initial heading of Book 28 (fig. 12-1): at the base of the initial a naked man appears on all fours, ridden like a beast of burden, and higher up, the human body is transformed into semi-hominal hybrids including a bull-headed satyr attacking a goat-headed man. Although not all of the hybrid initials can convincingly be related to adjacent texts, Rudolph’s method of psychological interpretation is constructive, because it sets the images concretely within the monastic milieu in which they were used.
While the images in the Cîteaux Moralia can be linked directly to the text’s commentary on monastic life, it is often argued that inventive marginalia in Gothic manuscripts such as the Luttrell Psalter (fig. 12-3) were addressed primarily to the laity. An alternative to dismissing marginalia as the product of the artistic fantasy has gained currency in the past 20 years under the banner of popular culture. The most influential exponent of this approach, the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, saw the carnivalesque and laughter as keys to understanding popular culture as a ritualized release from the official controls of social, sexual, and religious behavior. According to Bakhtin, medieval popular or “folk” culture is manifested in three distinct forms: ritual spectacles such as the Feast of Fools or carnival before Lent; comic verbal compositions, including both oral and written parodies of sacred texts; and various genres of Billingsgate–type curses, oaths, and popular blazons.45 Furthermore, like all forms of “grotesque realism,” the “people’s laughter,” he argued, was a debasement of the higher, literally bringing it down to earth and the “bodily lower stratum.” It was also simultaneously recuperative or reproductive.46
Bakhtin’s work came to the forefront of medieval studies after the appearance of the first English translation in 1968. Yet, it must be noted that many of his sources, including the fabliaux, mystery plays, and medieval festivals, had already been used selectively by literary historians as early as the late eighteenth century. Karl Floegel’s Geschichte des groteskekomischen (1788) held that the “grotesque-comedy,” manifested in medieval mystery plays, secular guild and religious festivals such as the Feast of Fools, met an essential human need shared with other cultures throughout human history to “let off steam” and protest authority. Floegel’s theory was extended to the visual arts in 1865 by Thomas Wright’s history of caricature and the grotesque.47 Wright argued that English caricature in his own day was rooted in medieval drolleries of illuminated manuscripts (fig. 12-3) and entertainments like the mystery plays; both visual images and performances parodied official clerical culture.
Michael Camille was the most influential exponent of popular culture’s role in medieval art. In his 1992 survey of marginalia, Camille drew upon anthropological theory to define the margins as a “liminal” zone bridging the sacred and the profane, high and low, textual and oral; he further explored how popular culture both critiques and sustains the elite and sacred culture it frames.48 Amplifying Leslie Bridaham’s discussion of gargoyles in relationship to “popular” festivals such as the Feast of Fools, Camille interpreted monsters in Gothic sculpture as depicting an “inverted order” of the clergy’s hierarchically structured lives.49 He affirmed that the exterior of a church, like the margins of a page, allowed for a certain amount of free play because it lay at the intersection of sacred and secular space in the city.
In his monograph on the Luttrell Psalter, Camille appealed again to Bakhtin’s notion of popular culture providing an officially sanctioned space for social criticism, parody, and protest.50 He connected the hybrid babewyns such as those on the margins of folio 182v (fig. 12-3), with folk plays performed by peasants from Lincolnshire, where the psalter was made. Their theatrical metamorphosis from one species to another was also understood as alluding to the inversion of social roles. The monsters’ large open mouths and orifices might parody the mouths of the readers reciting psalms, but their prominent display of bottom parts of animals could also evoke the regenerative function of Bakhtin’s “lower bodily stratum.” The human-headed monster at the base of 182v (fig. 12-3) illustrates this quite literally in that a great leaf sprouts like a tail from his behind. Echoing Aaron Gurevich’s critique of Bakhtin,51 Camille saw no contradiction in the representation of “low” or “folk” culture images in the pages of an “elite” knight’s psalter, because the knight was inextricably linked to the land and the people he controlled. In the end, Camille understood the babewyns of the Luttrell Psalter as an unofficial discourse appropriated by official culture for its own ends, manipulated and “kept in place” by logocentric culture.
Katrin Kröll has recently revived Kris’s approach to the monstrous as a manifestation of the comic mode.52 She argues that Bernard was principally concerned that the simultaneously ugly and comic aspects of monsters in the cloister would stimulate the monk in ways that would hinder his spiritual meditations. At the same time, she argues that Church authorities generally considered monstrous images to be acceptable as a “coping mechanism” for the laity within certain boundaries. Monstrous creatures on the margins of sacred images functioned much like the temporary inversions of social order represented within officially sanctioned masking rituals during the Feast of Fools and mystery plays.
While Kröll and Camille see popular culture as integral to elite culture, both challenging and reinforcing its boundaries, Nurith Kenaan-Kedar argues that the monsters and deformed humans sculpted in Romanesque modillions and Gothic gargoyles were created by lay artists in opposition to official clerical culture.53 Because of their functional and supporting roles in the architectural structure, Kenaan-Kedar reasons, modillions and gargoyles naturally encompass “a lower category of art” distinct from the “official” art of façades, portals, and capitals. She also hypothesizes different readings of the sculptures by clerical patrons, lay audiences, and artists: the former would have understood the marginal images as representing the punishment of vice; the artists and lay public, by contrast, would have sympathized with the images of secular society as a form of protest.
What seems difficult to justify is Kenaan-Kedar’s clear distinctions of audience responses to the monstrous. Is it really possible that the clergy who commissioned this sculpture would have been oblivious to the “subversive” messages of some of the images? Kröll’s and Camille’s model is more pragmatic: popular culture can hardly be seen in complete isolation from elite culture when the only textual sources describing it come from elite culture, and the images themselves appear within an ecclesiastical framework.
Reflecting the postmodern era’s preoccupation with alterity and hybridity, medievalists, since the late 1980s, have increasingly associated the representation of monsters with the denigration of deviant or marginal social groups.54 Friedman interprets the depiction of monstrous races on the eastern margins of Mappae Mundi as a medieval example of Edward Said’s “orientalism.”55 Monstrous races were viewed not merely as “wonders” of nature or as moralizations of sinfulness, but also as the means of labeling and distancing disparate social groups and non-Christian religious groups. As such, the monstrous races were more extreme examples of the caricatured bodies that were used more generally to represent non-Christians and heretics within and outside Europe.56 As Debra Strickland has shown, it was particularly during the period of the Crusades, when conflicts were escalated between European Christians and foreign non-Christians, that Saracens, Mongols, black Africans (“Ethiopians”), Muslims, and Jews alike were quite literally transformed in art into monstrous hybrids, befitting their status as “barbarous,” morally debased, and demonic opponents of Christendom.57 Examining the monstrous closer to home, Rhonda Knight has similarly argued that the thirteenth-century manuscripts of Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica cast the Irish as hybrid beasts in need of being civilized by British colonizers and their Welsh surrogates.58
Recent feminist scholarship has affirmed either that women were assimilated to the monstrous or that monstrous images were designed to intimidate them. According to Margaret Miles, medieval clerics cast the female body as quintessentially “grotesque” as a result of Eve’s role in the Fall, and her embodiment of sexuality.59 For this reason, John Mandeville included female prodigies in his Travels, such as the daughter of Hippocrates, who revealed her monstrous nature by transforming herself into a dragon. Because women were viewed as the cause of lust in men, they were also represented with grotesquely enlarged genitals, as in the case of sheela-na-gigs, or as half-human hybrids such as the siren.
Madeline Caviness argues against what she terms the “masculinist” interpretations of monsters in comical terms.60 Focusing on the margins of the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, Caviness interprets monsters here as sexually charged images that terrorized and controlled the behavior of the female viewer. The constant allusion to masculine sexuality in the form of monsters with phallic tails and weapons, engaged in aggressive combat, would have been sufficiently repulsive to draw the female reader back to the words on the page and her devotions. Against this gender-specific interpretation of monsters, however, Lucy Sandler notes that the same kind of monstrous hybrids in combat appear in the margins of books designed for male patrons.61
Vision, Imagination, and Memory
Most recent scholarship assumes that monstrous images are not merely text illustrations, but also palpably affect the eyes and minds of the beholder. It is only since the 1990s that art historians have seriously explored the ramifications of vision for the representation of the monstrous. Michael Camille suggested that staring grylli in the margins of fourteenth-century prayer books such as the Luttrell Psalter (fig. 12-3) both warned against the susceptibility of the eyes to demonic gazes and potentially distracted the reader’s eyes from the sacred, deliberately countering the pious gaze of lay donors depicted in the same manuscripts. 62 Camille also explained the proliferation of hybrid monsters through the mechanics of vision.63 The imagination or phantasia, he noted, was understood by scientists of vision such as Albert the Great as a force that could create new images. As an intermediary between the imagination and memory, phantasia had the capacity to generate images of a man with two heads or a hybrid with a human body, a lion’s head, and the tail of a horse.
As Mary Carruthers has shown, images of monsters held in memory could also be used to stimulate the process of thought.64 The fearful monsters so frequently represented around the margins of Gothic prayer books might serve to generate anxiety as a prelude to meditation.65 Yet they were also potentially amusing and could be used in didactic contexts to stimulate productive thinking. As early as the eleventh century, drawings of hybrid monsters appeared alongside verbal descriptions in pedagogical texts known as the versus rapportati, which were elementary exercises designed to practice cognitive pattern formation. 66 The parts that make up the hybrids provide a visual cue to the “division” of verses into smaller parts which must be recombined in order to make any sense of them. Monstrous exercises thus facilitated the ability to invent or recombine familiar material in new ways.
Sandy Heslop’s essay on the “chimera” capital in the Canterbury Cathedral crypt (c.1100) furnishes a concrete application of comparable theories.67 Citing the writings of the patron of the crypt, St Anselm, Heslop proposes that the sculptor represented the most inventive “chimeras” in a figural capital closest to the altar as an allusion to the creative process and the Divine Creator himself. Anselm had argued that whereas the Creator conceived of all creatures ex nihilo before physically creating them, artists, even when they produced hybrids that never existed, could only combine parts of creatures that already existed in memory. The chimera-hybrid, which had no natural antecedent, was as close as the artist could come to divine invention. This positive view of the imagination, Heslop further argues, was eclipsed in the mid-twelfth century by the authoritative texts of Bernard and others such as John of Salisbury, who saw chimeras either as distractions from spiritual matters, or as the product of dreams, impaired mental or physical health. What Heslop leaves unexplained is the continuing popularity of monsters in monastic art in spite of the protests of Bernard and his adherents.
Although it is now clear that Bernard particularly deplored the visualization of monsters because of their potential to distract the monk, it remains to be understood what purpose monstrous images served for iconophile Benedictine monks. Focusing on the Romanesque cloister of St Michel-de-Cuxa, I propose that the monstrous capitals served both moralizing and cathartic functions.68
The Cuxa cloister offers an unusually wide range of the subjects censured by Bernard: double-bodied lions joined to a single head (fig. 12-2), “filthy apes” seated adjacent naked men, semi-human hybrids such as the siren, and monstrous mouths devouring human torsos (fig. 12-5). Conventional iconographical analysis helps us interpret individual motifs as negative moral signs: the siren may be identified with lust, the apes with the devil and fallen men, the threatening lions with those of Psalm 55; the monstrous mouths evoke the Hell-mouth and its biblical precursors, Leviathan and Behemoth (Job 41: 14; 40: 15–24), and the mouths of Sheol (Num. 16: 30–2; Ps. 106: 17). Taking into account the psychoanalytical perspectives of Kris, Gombrich, and Schapiro, it is also possible to see in these grinning monsters an allusion both to monastic anxieties over diabolical interventions, and a certain comic aspect designed to ward off those same fears. But in order to understand why such negative images would have been represented in cloister sculpture, we need to examine monastic psychology in more concrete terms.
An essential clue to understanding how the monstrous images functioned in the minds of the monks is offered by the juxtaposition of monstrous and human bodies in the Cuxa capitals. In some instances, naked monks squat in the poses of adjacent apes; yet on the same capitals, the center of each face is marked by more athletic figures who stand in erect poses and even attempt to lift their squatting brothers up. In still other examples naked and clothed figures appear threatened by double-bodied monsters (fig. 12-2) or more directly assimilated to monstrous creatures in the form of hybrids. These images suggest a deeper reality within monastic thought in which the body and its verbal and visual representations functioned as an image of the spiritual, inner man and externalized its conflicts and anxieties. William of St Thierry, for example, argued that man was distinguished from beasts principally by the faculty of reason; yet, he could still be influenced by the lower “animal power” of sensations associated with the imagination and thus “put on” a bestial image.69 We see William’s notion of “putting on” a bestial image translated quite literally into the capitals juxtaposing naked men with apes and monstrous beasts.
FIGURE 12-5 Capital with monstrous heads mounted on human arms. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 25.120.849. Photo: author.
Monsters did more than embody theological ideas, though. By the twelfth century, monastic writers insisted that monstrous phantasms were imprinted in the physical fabric of the memory by diabolical intervention, and thus had the potential to influence adversely one’s behavior. Nightmares and visions manifested the monk’s battles with demonic powers, as was graphically illustrated in contemporaneous monastic accounts of dreams such as those found in Peter the Venerable’s De miraculis; they also mirrored the vices that he was trying to purge in his ongoing struggle for spiritual perfection.70 It is not surprising that visual equivalents to the monsters in the imagination are represented in the cloister, for it was here that the monk was tested in his personal, spiritual life as he meditated upon scripture and digested the lessons of such texts as Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job. The visualization of monsters in this text (fig. 12-1), as well as in cloister capitals, exposed the diabolical fantasies of dreams and the imagination so that the monk would be prompted to deal with them and neutralize their power.
Mary Carruthers has suggested a model for this process from memory theory.71 She points out that monastic writers such as St Anselm and St Bernard believed that true conversion to the religious life could be achieved only by first recalling past vices and sins. Since one could never really eradicate sins completely from the memory, it was necessary to seek God’s forgiveness and then change one’s “intention” toward them, transforming them from producers of guilt into agents of conversion. It may be argued that beholding monstrous capitals in the cloister facilitated this process. The monk would have initially been caused to “wonder” over their monstrosity, as Bernard had predicted, but he would also be inspired to contemplate the malevolent spirits which led him to misbehave. Exposed to light, the monks’ inner demons and phantasms might ultimately be neutralized.
Conclusion: A Monstrous Methodology
What this historiographic survey reveals is that monsters are susceptible to, and even require a wide range of interpretive strategies.72 This is not to say that all approaches are equally valid in all cases, but rather that it is necessary to adapt method to particular functional, social, and historical contexts. As pictorial signs that admonish or point to absent beings, monsters are ultimately one of the most significant means by which medieval viewers could explore the boundaries between body and soul, the sensual and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane, the real and the imaginary. More than a distraction, monsters were essential stimuli for thinking.
1 Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem, ed. and trans. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, pp. 282–3. [On Romanesque sculpture in general, see chapters 15 and 16 by Hourihane and Maxwell, respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
2 Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, pp. 117–19.
3 Friedman, Monstrous Races, pp. 108–30.
4 Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, pp. 119–20.
5 Schapiro, “On the Aesthetic Attitude.”
6 See Rudolph, “Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia.”
7 Ibid., p. 92.
8 Viollet-le-Duc, “Cathédrale,” in Dictionnaire raisonné, vol. II, pp. 279–92, esp. p. 300.
9 Idem., “Sculpture,” in Dictionnaire raisonné, vol. VIII, pp. 96–276, esp. 244–5.
10 Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, pp. 104–24, esp. 120–2.
11 Ibid., pp. 1–14, 161–71.
12 See Bober’s introduction to Mâle, Religious Art in France, pp. xiii–xx.
13 Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle, pp. 341ff.
14 Mâle, The Gothic Image, pp. 58–63.
15 Champfleury, Histoire de la caricature, pp. 10–11.
16 Schapiro, Romanesque Art, pp. 1–27, esp. 6–7. [On marginalia, see chapter 13 by Kendrick in this volume (ed.).]
17 Schapiro, “Marginal Images,” pp. 196–8.
18 Camille, “How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art.”
19 Bernheimer, Romanische Tierplastik.
20 Baltrušaitis, La Stylistique ornementale, esp. pp. 95–162 and 273–97.
21 Baltrušaitis, Le Moyen-Age fantastique.
22 Focillon, L’Art d’occident, pp. 104–5.
23 E.g., Henderson, Early Medieval; Zarnecki, “Germanic Animal Motifs.”
24 Auber, Histoire et théorie, vol. 2, pp. 588–605.
25 Ibid., pp. 2, 604.
26 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 344–5.
27 Ibid., pp. 377, 384.
28 Ibid., p. 259.
29 Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle, pp. 333–4.
30 Schade, Dämonen und Monstren.
31 Randall, Images in the Margins.
32 Leclercq-Marx “Les Oeuvres romanes.”
33 Camille, “Mouths and Meanings”.
34 Williams, Deformed Discourse.
35 Ibid., p. 77.
36 Mills, “Jesus as Monster.”
37 Vacandard, “Saint-Bernard”; cited by Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life, p. 11.
38 Schapiro, “On the Aesthetic Attitude,” p. 10.
39 Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations, pp. 204–16, esp. 213–14.
40 Gombrich, Sense of Order, p. 276.
41 Dinzelbacher, “Monster und Dämonen am Kirchenbau,” pp. 117–19.
42 Mellinkoff, Averting Demons, vol. 1, pp. 41–51.
43 Valdez del Alamo, “The Saint’s Capital.”
44 Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life.
45 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 5.
46 Ibid., p. 21.
47 Wright, A History of Caricature, pp. 200ff.
48 Camille, Image on the Edge.
49 Ibid., pp. 92–3.
50 Camille, Mirror in the Parchment, pp. 232–75.
51 Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, ch. 6.
52 Kröll, “Die Komik des grotesken Körpers,” pp. 11–105.
53 Kenaan-Kedar, Marginal Sculpture, pp. 1–8, 30, 53–4, 70–3, 134–57.
54 Cf. Freedman, “The Medieval Other.”
55 Friedman, Monstrous Races, pp. 64–95.
56 See Mellinkoff, Outcasts.
57 Strickland, Saracens, Demons, Jews.
58 Knight, “Werewolves, Monsters, and Miracles.”
59 Miles, Carnal Knowing, pp. 145–68.
60 Caviness, “Patron or Matron?”
61 Sandler, “Study of Marginal Imagery,” p. 33.
62 Camille, Image on the Edge, pp. 37–42.
63 Camille, “Before the Gaze,” esp. 212–14.
64 Carruthers, Craft of Thought.
65 Ibid., pp. 164–5.
66 Ibid., pp. 140–2; cf. Heslop, “Contemplating Chimera,” pp. 153–4.
67 Heslop, “Contemplating Chimera.”
68 The following summarizes Dale, “Monsters, Corporeal Deformities and Phantasms.”
69 De natura corporis et animae, ed. PL 180: 695–726.
70 Peter the Venerable, De miraculis libri duo, ed. Denise Bouthillier in Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio medievalis, vol. 83 (Turnhout, 1988).
71 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, pp. 272–6.
72 Varela, “Leer o contemplar,” esp. pp. 358–9; Camille, Image on the Edge, p. 9; Dinzelbacher, “Monster und Dämonen am Kirchenbau.”
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