Are These Monkeys Us? The Mysterious Masterpiece No One Can Solve

This painting is a mystery. For almost 500 years people have been arguing about what it means, but they still cannot decide how to solve it. Everyone agrees, for example, that these two birds are soaring so deliberately effortlessly in the sky for a reason. The contrast is just too obvious, two free birds and two captive monkeys. They have completely different fates, even though initially they are not that different from each other, since both are living creatures who were born at some point and essentially did nothing to make their lives turn out this way instead of another. What we do know for sure is exactly which window they are sitting in. Outside we can see the recognisable features of Antwerp, a prosperous Dutch trading city with its characteristic houses and ships. And right across from it is a military fort. The monkeys are sitting on the windowsill of this military fort, meaning they are chained by the military right across from a city of endless choices and opportunities. Well, that sounds a lot like the residents of the prosperous Netherlands themselves. During the time of the author of this painting, the famous Dutch artist Peter Bruegel the Elder, they were under the rule of the Spanish monarchy and the Spanish king Philip II. The Flemish and the Dutch also found themselves chained to a foreign power, its taxes and its religion. At the time this painting was created, there were only four years left before a full-scale rebellion and the subsequent Eighty Years' War. The monkeys will just have enough time to finish eating the nuts whose shells are scattered across the windowsill, get tired of looking at the free birds and try to break their chains. Or maybe the monkeys are actually upset about the nuts themselves. There are no actual nuts visible in the painting anymore, just the scattered shells. And the sad face of this monkey here seems to be upset exactly about this. Thinking is that really it. I swear we just had plenty. If there are any nuts left, they only belong to this second monkey since it has its back turned and could very well be holding onto a saved nut or maybe even a few of them. And if that is the case, the sad face of the first monkey is also mourning the unfairness of existence where some get as much as they want while normal folks are left with nothing but empty shells. We will get back to the hidden meaning behind the nuts shortly, but for now, let us look at how the monkeys are positioned. They are sitting back to back and if we imagine that this is not a chain but, say, a children's merry-go-round, then the monkeys would just spin around the axis forever without ever actually seeing each other. They would take turns looking at us, then at the vastness of Antwerp, then at us, then at Antwerp. So, to understand the metaphor, we need to find a pair of things that are identical yet completely opposite and turned with their backs to each other. The monkeys in the painting are not just any monkeys, they are a very specific breed known as the collared mangabey. They originally come from Africa and, for a trading hub like Antwerp, which was constantly flooded with all sorts of exotic wonders, they were a common sight. Bruegel would have seen these animals quite often. Take a look at his painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, which was created in the exact same year as our painting. Right here in the right corner, plunging from the heavens to the earth, is the exact same monkey of the exact same breed. And here is another painting by Bruegel, done three years before ours, called The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. Here, a poor couple is begging for alms. The woman points at her husband as if saying he lost his legs. We are starving, we cannot take it anymore. A man walking out of the church is just about to reach for his money, but behind the woman in her basket, there is strangely not a child, but once again the exact same monkey of the exact same breed. Do not be surprised by the sheer number of monkeys here, because if you look closely at medieval or renaissance paintings, you will find quite a lot of them, way more than you might initially expect. Here is the famous Madonna with a Monkey by Albrecht Dürer. In this one, things are more or less clear. The Madonna is reading a book, which is of course the Holy Scripture. Next to her, the baby Jesus is holding a bird on his hand, which represents a saved human soul. But right down here, on the exact same chain as in our painting, is the exact same monkey. So what is it doing here? Because Dürer was so popular at the time and this specific piece was widely known, we actually know that there was not much debate about how to interpret this metaphor. His contemporaries understood it unequivocally that the monkey next to the Madonna is a symbol of sin. The Son of God is born, the human soul is saved, and sin is now sitting on a chain, unable to just roam around wherever it wants, which means we will all now live without sin and according to the Scripture. Behind the back of the woman in the fight between Carnival and Lent is also a sin. She did something bad, something she does not want to talk about. Sin is carried on the back like a heavy burden hiding in a basket away from people's eyes, and only occasionally, like right now, it peeks out. It does this because the woman is sinning at this very moment by deceiving the man who is leaving the church and is already prepared to take out his money and give it to this dishonest woman. This entire family is just bunch of liars and scammers and the monkey as the embodiment of sin clearly points that out. When Lucifer led the rebellion of the angels against God and God sent Michael to cast them down into the underworld, all sorts of bizarre creatures rained down from the sky. These were yesterday's beautiful angels who are currently plummeting into hell and transforming into demons, taking on their new demonic forms. Here is a half-butterfly-half-plant hybrid, and over here is something completely unidentifiable with fins. And right there is our sinful collared mangabey flying down to hell, along with the rest of them. But if monkeys represent demons or sins, then why are they not alone here like in Dura's work but instead come as a pair? Moreover, why are they not looking at each other, meaning if they started spinning, they would never actually see one another, yet they remain permanently chained to the exact same ring. Maybe this monkey right here represents envy. It has already eaten its nuts and is now just sitting there, envying the second one who still has some left. In that case, the second monkey, if we are looking for a contrasting sin, would be indifference, or maybe even a mix of indifference and vanity. The monkey is absolutely thrilled with its nut and could not care less about those who do not have one. An even better fit would be hoarding and greed, because if we assume it is clutching a hard-saved nut in its paws, then it clearly turned its back specifically so it would not have to share with the other disappointed monkey. And if so, the other disappointed monkey represents wastefulness or squandering having blown through all its nuts before Bruegel even managed to finish painting his canvas. Right outside the window is one of the main entrepreneurial centers of the world, absolutely teeming with all these sins, so the fact that the monkeys are sitting on a windowsill overlooking it makes perfect sense. Today, every now and then, the monkeys pop up on Facebook and other social media whenever some relevant issue comes along. Sometimes something happens, like the recent quarantine, and people say, yeah, this painting is about freedom. It is about the chains of the state and society. But then something else happens, like a long period of peace and prosperity, and they say, oh, this is actually about psychological issues. It is about the chains we put on ourselves. Paired sins or paired demons, the Dutch under Spanish rule, or Protestants chained by Catholics, us in quarantine, or trapped by psychological issues. Society as a prison or the state as a military fort. All these endless explanations actually have their own explanation. It is highly likely that Bruegel was not just painting one of the versions I just mentioned, but all of them at once. In fact, this might have been the direct request of the client to depict not a single specific metaphor, but rather to create a puzzle painting with an infinite number of solutions, all of which would be correct. During Bruegel's time, there was a popular phenomenon known as chambers of rhetoric. Rhetoric implies exercises in eloquence, and a chamber just means a room or a club. People would gather in these clubs to philosophize, show off their wit, and share paradoxes or unexpected opinions. And in the absence of television and the internet, paintings were the perfect medium for this. In Bruegel's time, there were as many as three such intellectual clubs in Antwerp, and naturally one of them could very well have commissioned a puzzle painting from a trendy artist. This could also explain the small, downright tiny format of this painting, which is just 23 by 20 centimeters, making it incredibly easy to pass from hand to hand while sitting around a large round table and debating. So what might they have discussed back then? For instance, they could talk about how the monkeys are clearly not having a good time. They do not want to look at each other, yet they have nowhere to escape from one another because they are bound by the same ring. We also happen to know that this painting was created in 1562, and in 1563 Bruegel got married. So this painting might just be a premonition and a realization of the joys of married life that awaited the artist and most of the people looking at the monkeys right now. The techniques Bruegel used are still being used today, for example in modern movies and TV shows. Five hundred years ago and today, artists' search for answers to the exact same questions often arrive at similar conclusions and inevitably use similar techniques. If Bruegel's paintings evoke emotions for you, then my Patreon is exactly for you. Over there, I upload an exclusive part two for every single YouTube video. Every time we take a look at the Bruegel painting from the latest YouTube review, and side by side we pull up a cult movie or TV show, then analyze it frame by frame, finding those shared techniques and emotions. We compare whether the conclusions and approaches of artists have really changed that much over 500 years. And sometimes, to truly understand Bruegel, it helps to look at him through the lens of a modern movie or TV show. Not to mention that after conversations like these, we start looking at modern movies and TV shows a little differently. In the description under every video, there is a link to my Patreon. Click the link in the description and I will see you there. The video on Bruegel's The Harvesters and Mr Bean is already filmed and available to watch. The videos on Hunters in the Snow and Tarantino and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and the White Lotus, as well as The Parable of the Sour and Kevin Spacey are already filmed and will be up soon. And this video on Two Monkeys will be posted right there as well. If you have any questions or want to share your thoughts about this painting, please let me know in the comments. Thanks for your time.