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Africa is always producing some novelty (Pliny. Natural History) (Page 1956-63:8.17.42)

In Peter Paul Rubens’ and Jan Brueghel the Elder’s brilliant collaborative work The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man (c1617), there are two main illuminated scenes simultanously attracting the viewer’s eye: Eve’s calm, graceful plucking of the fruit on the left, and the rough brawl between a leopard and a tiger on the right. The leopard’s raised paw, uncannily mimicking Eve’s elegant pose, harks back to a theme frequently recurring in Renaissance art: the idea of the Fall unleashing a series of unnatural events disrupting prelapsarian harmony. What Milton in Paradise Lost styles: “Earth felt the wound, and Nature […] / Sigh[ed] through all her Works” (Ricks 1989:9.782-83), artists such as Jost Amman (c1539-91) depict as a virtual storm uprooting the animal kingdom, sowing strife between bull and lion, or between leopard and bear (Schmidt 1962: Fig.188). Though somewhat more contained than Amman’s vibrant etching (1583, 1589), Rubens’ and Brueghel’s Fall constructs a similar suspense between the serene, composed Adam and Eve, and the assembly of highly disturbed animals surrounding them, whose anxiety belies the self-possessed air of the Edenic couple about to commit their fatal transgression. Crucially, Ruben’s collected human figures are not contrasted with any randomly chosen creatures, but with a pair of felines dyed in the notorious patterns of the spotted and the striped, two patterns whose allegorical meaning closely ties in with the notion of gendering

‘unnatural’ hybrids.

Although the iconographic roots of the large cats in the Brueghel/Rubens Fall have been thoroughly established, their foregrounding has traditionally been shrugged off as insignificant: they are commonly regarded as ‘distracting’ from the biblical theme they ‘embellish’. Klaus Ertz, the foremost authority on Brueghel, repeatedly frowns on the ‘artificial pose’ adopted by these feline

“actors” (1979:240), which are present in all except one of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s celebrated Edenic landscapes (1613 to 1618).¹ Commenting on the earliest of these works, The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark (1613), Ertz finds the leopard and tiger ‘usurping’ the place of more traditional species typical of this genre.² However, in his rash dismissal of the feline “actors” (1979:240), Ertz fails to recognise the true significance of the evidence he himself furnishes on the origin of the motif. The belligerent leopard is in fact not only Brueghel’s, who is known to have been responsible for the

1 See Ertz 1979:Figs. 307, 308, 311, 311a, 314, 315, 316, one of which (Fig.316) is thought to be an imitation by Jan Brueghel the Younger (Ertz 1979:245).

2 “Die Tiere rechts vom Baum haben keinen direkten Bezug zum biblischen Geschehen, sie stehen einfach nur da. Ihre Haltung ist gekünstelt und nicht aus dem Bildzusammenhang verstehbar, besonders bei den Löwen, den Leoparden oder dem Pferd, die ‚wörtlich’ von andern Malern übernommen wurden. [...]. Mit dem Verschwinden [anderer Tiermotive] und dem Ersetzen durch die ‚Hofschauspieler’ Löwenpaar, Lerma-Pferd, balgende Leoparden, die deutlich zum Betrachter gewandt posieren, geht ein Stück Selbstverständlichkeit verloren” (Ertz and Nitze-Ertz 1997:168).

landscape and the animals. Rather, the spotted feline is also intimately related to Rubens’ work, since it is based on a similar cat which appears in a replicate of a lost Rubens, C.N. Varin’s Leopards, Satyrs and Nymphs (c. 1611) (Ertz 1979: Fig.313). This source also provides a plausible motive as to why the leopard in the Mauritshuis should imitate Eve’s gesture. In the lost Rubens, the leopard mimics the plucking of a bunch of grapes by a Satyr, i.e. a semi-human, semi-bestial hybrid. There is a strong suggestion, therefore, that the leopard must be somehow linked to the idea of an unnatural, monstrous union, a theme this chapter will further develop and explore.

Employing the leopard as a symbol for unnatural hybridity is of course neither typically Rubens nor Flemish, but based on a medieval iconography which traditionally associates multicoloured felines with the Fall. Medieval manuscript illustrations and frontispieces in 15^th century French Bibles often place a leopard at Eve’s feet (Jeffrey 1992: ”leopard”), and this topos is continued in versions of the Fall by Albrecht Dürer (c. 1504), by Joannes Saenredan (1597) and other contemporaries (Frye 1978a: Figs.164,207). In Hieronymus Bosch’s mystifying Garden of Delights (c.

1500) (Fig. 9), too, the Archangel Gabriel interrupts his exhortations to Adam and Eve in order to eye the speckled cat strutting up and down in front of the forbidden tree. The cat’s role as an ill-omened

Figure 9. From Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights (c1500).

(Belting 2002:72)

harbinger of the imminent Fall is further accentuated by the presence of other unwholesome creatures tinted in dark colours. Magpies, spotted fowls and black moles all foreshadow the ultimate cause of the human Fall, that is magpie-like greed and unbridled desire, and its corollary, the staining of prelapsarian perfection. What Bosch’s Garden of Delights explicitly foregrounds is only tentatively suggested in other versions of the Fall. In the Dresden Fall by Cornelis Cornelisz (1562-1638), the infamous cat surreptitiously recoils from Eve’s sight, taking cover in the shade of a tree (Ehrenstein 1923:Fig.125). And in an anonymous work by the Regensburg School, the feline tempter has been reduced to a mere ephemeral shadow furtively stealing through the dark (Kirchner 1903:Fig.76).

Figure 10. Albrecht Dürer. The Fall of the Rosenwald Collection (National Gallery, Washington) (Frye 1978a:Fig. 164)

These striped and spotted felines appear all the more significant if read in relation to the serpent, which remains conspicuously absent in the versions of the Fall by Bosch, by Cornelisz, and by the Regensburg School. Where it does appear, as in the Brueghel/Rubens collaboration reproduced here, it is often outshone by a larger, a more prominently positioned or a more brightly illuminated cat.

The serpent’s displacement by the feline is further underscored by the cat’s tail, which is usually either

placed between Eve’s legs or shown pointing towards her body.³ The frequent visual parallels between the leopard’s twisted tail, the serpent’s coils and Eve’s locks, as in the Fall by Dürer reprinted above, not only build on the traditional reading of the Fall as female transgression, an interpretation mainly shaped by Augustinian doctrine,⁴ but, just as importantly, on the portrayal of original sin as resulting from the plotting of a hybrid, ‘humanised’ snake endowed with the power of speech, whose very act of transgressing the boundary separating beasts from humans becomes its most powerful weapon in duping Eve.⁵ In Western iconography, this dual identity is customarily expressed by representing the snake as a semi-anthropomorphic creature possessing a human face, with female features and a hairstyle resembling Eve’s, or, as Thomas Browne in his discussion of the topos notes, “with a Virgin[’]s head” (Robbins 1981:5.4.375).⁶ Likewise, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the allegorical figure of Error is imagined as an “ugly monster plaine, / Halfe like a serpent […] / but th’other halfe did womans shape retaine” (Abrams 1993: 1.1.14.123-125). In works in which the serpent is displaced by a multicoloured cat, this notion of temptation breeding hybridity is by no means abandoned, but merely transferred onto an animal whose coat is also viewed as indicative of an unnatural, corrupted origin.

As a substitute for the ‘feminised’ snake, then, the leopard first and foremost embodies the staining of Eve’s body and mind. In the Brueghel/Rubens Fall, the analogy between the beast and Eve is powerfully driven home by the leopard’s unusually bright belly, which – by outshining Eve’s complexion – foreshadows the staining of humanity’s primordial womb. Rubens’ main iconographic reference to the staining and stained Eve in the Mauritshuis Fall may be seen in his mesmerising Head of the Medusa (1618), a gruesome depiction of Medusa’s lopped-off head, whose glassy eyes unbelievably stare at the serpentine hair and at the worms creeping out of her bowels (Fig. 11). As the classical counterpart to the feminised serpent and snake-like Eve of Genesis, this serpentine Medusa

3 An early example of this topos occurs in the so-called Bernwardstür (c. 1100) of the cathedral of Hildesheim, where a winged cat places her thick tail, resembling the branches of the tree, between Eve’s ankles (reprinted in Phillips 1987:66).

4 By far the most detailed analysis of Augustine’s reading of Genesis is provided by Neil Forsyth (1987:419-40), who perceives Augustine’s condemnation of Eve not so much as a deliberately mysogynist design but as an attempt to eliminate the concept of Manichaean cosmic evil by re-locating it in God’s creation. A concise summary of Augustine’s teaching on scholastic readings of Genesis is offered by Alcuin Blamires (1997:113-119), who also positions the Church Father’s reading of Eve in medieval mysogynistic discourse at large (1992:77-82). See also John Phillips’ Eve: The History of an Idea (1987), which speculates on a common philological root of ‘Eve’ and ‘snake’ (1987:49), and refers to apocryphal and oriental legends describing Eve as being made out of Adam’s former snake-like tail, or of the serpent’s former feet (1987:50-51).

5 As Milton emphasises, Eve is utterly amazed at hearing the “Language of Man pronounc’t / By Tongue of Brute” in Paradise Lost (9.553-54).

6 See the late 13^th c. manuscript illumination in MS 11639 at the British Library (Frye 1978:Fig.161), the Psalter of Louis IX and Blanche of Castile (early 13^th c.) (Ehrenstein 1923:Fig.52), Masolino da Panicale’s Original Sin (1424) in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence (Lorenzi 1997:75, also Frye 1978:Fig.185), Jacopo della Quercia’s Temptation at the main portal of San Petronio, Bologna (1425-38) (Phillips 1987:73), an illustration to the Grimani Breviary (c1500) (Frye 1978:Fig.162), the woodcut illustration to Jodocus Badius Ascensius’ Ship of [Female] Fools, Paris 1500 (Hartl 2001:1.30), an illustration to the Heures de Chantilly by the Limbourg brothers (early 15th c.) (Ehrenstein 1923:Fig.73), the Fall in Hieronymus Bosch’s left-hand panel of his triptych The Hay-wagon at the Prado, Madrid (Phillips 1987:72), Raphael’s Falls in the Camera della Segnatura (Frye 1978:Fig.198) and in the Loggia of the Vatican (Ehrenstein 1903:Fig.58), Crostoforo Solario’s sculpture of Eve at Milan Cathedral (Frye 1978:Fig.200), Herri met de Bles’ Fall (early 16th c.) at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna (Ehrenstein 1923:Fig.102, also Frye 1978:Fig.186), Joannes Saenredan’s Fall (1597) (Frye 1978:Fig. 207) or Cornelius Cornelisz’ Adam and Eve in Paradise at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (Frye 1978:Fig.167). By the mid-17^th century, this topos of a feminised snake, however, wanes and is no longer understood, as Thomas Browne’s arguments against this medieval “conceit” indicate (Robbins 1981:5.4.375).

represents the female body metamorphosed into a mere receptacle of the ‘snake within’. Just like the Mauritshuis Fall, Ruben’s Head of the Medusa operates with contrasts of colour and movement.

Similarly to the agitated animals in the Brueghel/Rubens collaboration, Medusa’s pallid frozen head is also infested with a plethora of violently agitated reptiles, amphibians and insects. And once more, the destructive energy consuming Medusa’s body emanates from particoloured animals, from striped adders and spotted salamanders, whose unwholesome colouring symbolises the shattering of female purity, a topos which is not limited to Rubens’ work, but resurfaces throughout Renaissance art.

Figure 11. Peter Paul Rubens. Head of the Medusa (1618) (Bodart 1990:Fig.40)

As pointed out in the previous discussion of Michel Pastoureau’s (1995) work, Western iconography systematically reads a variegated surface as the attribute of those trespassing social norms and moral conventions. This applies particularly to socially marginalised groups like Muslims or Jews, to biblical characters like Cain or Judas,⁷ and to evil spirits, to demons, and to the fallen angel Satan himself. In the Klosterneuburger Altar (c. 1181), for instance, Christ the ‘new Adam’ rescues the ‘old’

Adam from the clutches of semi-humanoid and semi-bestial Satan whose body is marked with dark, highly prominent spots (Schmitt 1937:165). The Klosterneuburger Altar and many other contemporary works obviously understand spotted and striped patterns as an abstraction for physical hybridity in a wider sense. In Western depictions of Satan and demons, it is often a monstrous combination of humanoid and bestial body parts which is regarded as tempting and frightening.⁸ Analogous to the

7 See Abel slain by a spotted Cain in an English Psalter (c. 1270-80) (Mellinkoff 1993:3.13), and the betrayal of Jesus by a spotted Judas in the French Speculum humanae salvationis (late 14th c.) (Mellinkoff 1993:3.29).

8 See for example the spotted, horned, semi-humanoid demons in the Manuscript from Silos (c. 1109) (Mellinkoff 1993: Fig.

2.1), the spotted devils in Christ’s temptation in the Winchester Psalter (c. 1150) (Link 1997:Fig.50), the multicoloured, satyr-like Satan in the Psalter of Amesbury Abbey, England (c. 1250-55) (Mellinkoff 1993: Fig. 4.13), the spotted Lucifer in the stained glass window Christ and Satan (c.1225) at the Victoria and Albert Museum London (Frye 1978:Fig.232), or the

tempting of Eve through a humanoid snake, Matthias Grünewald’s celebrated Temptation of St Anthony (c1512-16) it the Isenheim altarpiece (c. 1512-16) shows a white-haired, bearded St Anthony tortured by a motley crew of gaudily-coloured, hybrid monstrosities collating reptile, amphibian, fish- and birdlike characteristics (Fig. 19).⁹ As will be documented further below, this frightening hybridity is also a key association coming to the fore in the context of mingling European and African bodies.

Such a link between hybridity and interethnic unions is for example suggested in Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s version of The Temptation of Anthony (c. 1616), in which the assembly of monstrous females tempting the saint includes not only semi-bestial, semi-anthropomorphic creatures, but also a half-naked female African (Figs. 12).

Figure 12. Excerpt from The Temptation of Anthony (c. 1616) by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (Ertz 2000:E445).

In Pieter Brueghel’s version of The Temptation of Anthony, the encroachment of a dark, female presence upon the immaculate saint refers to a new kind of hybridity which is continuously problematised in the anglophone tradition. This equation of (interethnic) hybridity with evil on the one

spotted devil in Melchior Müller’s Sterbebild mit Heilstreppe (1590) at Wettingen monastery, Switzerland (Jetzler 1994:Fig.54).

9 A similar version of Anthony being tortured by hybrid monsters appears in an engraving by Martin Schongauer (c. 1470) (Frye 1978:Fig.255).

hand replicates conceptualisations of the monstrous as we find them in Herodotus, Pliny or Mandeville, yet it is also linked to Western representations of the figure of Satan as a hybrid creature.

From the twelfth century onwards, Satan is overwhelmingly cast as a Satyr, with hooves, a tail, pointed ears, horns and a hairy body (Erich 1931:63-73).¹⁰ This blending of human and bestial elements, which signifies a rejection of uniformity and purity, uncannily resembles the interpretation of Satan’s fall in the Early Church. As Luther Link points out in his succinct summary of Neil Forsyth’s authoritative study on the Old Enemy (1987), the most influential Church authorities and cultural icons from Augustine to John Milton see the cause of the rebel Angels’ fall in their pride, their haughtiness and their non-compliance with God’s just laws.¹¹ The Church fathers predating Augustine, however, offer a radically different interpretation, which harks back to a definition of evil as hybridity.

Justin Martyr (c. 100-65), Athenagoras (2^nd c.), Clemens of Alexandria (d215), Tertullian (155-220) and others assume that the angels’ fall consisted in the seeking of illicit intercourse with female humans, thereby giving birth to evil demons perturbing the world. This long-forgotten interpretation is nothing but a literal reading of Genesis 6, which describes the sinful times pre-dating the flood as a period when “the sonnes of God” took wives among “the daughters of men” (Gen 6:2).

This pre-Augustinian reading of the angels’ sinning is also supported by the Book of Enoch (19:2), which contains a similar episode of male angels engendering evil demons by taking human wives (Forsyth 1987:181). However, following the ban on the Book of Enoch at the Council of Chalkedon (401 AD), on account of its supposed affinity to Manichaean thought, this reading of worldly evil as emanating from angelic lust and unnatural hybridity was systematically silenced by an Augustinian doctrine branding such a literal reading as heresy. In the City of God, Augustine emphasises that

certainly I could by no means believe that God's holy angels could at that time have so fallen, nor can I think that it is of them the Apostle Peter [speaks] […]. I think he rather speaks of these [humans] who first apostatized from God, along with their chief the devil, who enviously deceived the first man under the form of a serpent. (Sanford and McAllen Green 1965:15:23)

Augustine’s transformation of the “sons of God” into human sinners, becomes unequivocal standard teaching in the medieval Church, and English Renaissance Bible translations, too, speak of unions of

“the daughters of the wicked” with the “godly” (rather than with genuinely divine) creatures, thereby obscuring the earliest encoding of evil as hybridity in biblical text.¹²

Interestingly, even though Augustine vehemently rejects the notion that lust can spring from angelic perfection, he does not abandon the concept of sin as a hybrid state. Quite the contrary, Augustine in fact uses the topos of hybrid bodies as a perfect vehicle for attacking Greco-Roman pagan cults. In a lengthy digression in his analysis of Genesis 6 in the City of God, he at one point

10 For typical examples of a Satyr-like Satan, see Johannes Brantzius’ The Devil and the Invention of Gunpowder (1604) (Frye 1978:Fig.14) or Rubens’ Michael and the Expulsion of the Rebel Angels (Frye 1978:Fig.17),

11 Link (1997:32-35). See Augustine’s City of God (Sanford and McAllen Green 1965:14.11) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (Ricks 1989:1.36-44).

12 The quote is taken from the marginal gloss to the Bishop’s Bible (1568). A concise summary of the Catholic dismissal of the pre-Augustinian reading of Genesis 6:2 espoused by “Tertullian […] and divers more otherwise good authors” is offered by the Douai Bible (marginal gloss to Genesis 6:4).

interrupts the debate on the origin of evil and starts telling tales of “sylvans and fauns, who […] often ma[k]e wicked assaults upon women, and satisf[y] their lust upon them” (City of God 15:23).

Augustine’s identification of evil with pagan myths foreshadows the later, medieval iconographic convention of representing the figure of Satan with the figure of Satyr. As a slightly bewildered Percy Bysshe Shelley points out in his Essay on the Devil and Devils (1819-20),

[I]t is inexplicable why men assigned him [Satan] these addition [horns, hooves, tail, ears] as circumstances of terror and deformity. The Sylvans and Fauns, with their leader the great Pan, were most poetical personages, and were connected […]

with all that could enliven and delight. (1965:103)

To Shelley, the motives for the early medieval refashioning of Satan as a classical Satyr, Sylvan or Faun were far from obvious. Most historians, however, have quite convincingly explained this blending of stereotypes as an attempt by the Church to eradicate the last remnants of heathen faith by identifying non-Christian deities with the ungodly and evil (Link 1997:54-55).

Furthermore, this radical reinterpretation of pagan statues also testifies to the onset of a problematising of hybrid states which is arguably more prominent in the Judeo-Christian tradition than in classical pagan thought. As Mary Douglas convincingly argues in her classic study on Purity and Danger (1966), Judeo-Christian thought primarily constructs the binary distinction between purity and impurity on the dichotomy of wholeness or uniformity, and on the absence of such homogeneity: “To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the individual and of the kind” (1966:54). Douglas sees the equation of ‘holiness’ with ‘wholeness’, its etymological cognate in Germanic languages,¹³ as an intercultural phenomenon which is also borne out in the dietary rules of Leviticus. Levitical law prohibits the touching of certain animal species on the basis of their alleged hybrid status. Interestingly, though, the species declared impure are not classified as such on considerations of hygiene, as is popularly believed, but because they do not fit squarely with a literal reading of the creation as described in Genesis. Starting from the assumption that sky, water and earth must represent the sole natural habitat for winged fowls, fish with fins and four-legged animals, respectively, “[a]ny class of creatures which is not equipped for the right kind of locomotion in its element” (1966:55) is considered an aberration. Therefore, fish lacking fins, birds unable to fly, two-legged animals using their front ‘hands’ as feet (such as weasels), or terrestrial creatures moving in a

‘fish-like manner’ (like worms or snakes), not to mention amphibians or chameleons, are like all

“[h]ybrids and other confusions […] abominated” (1966:53). This principle is expanded to encompass all aspects of life, be it tending animals and crops, or dressing appropriately, as Leviticus 19:19 states:

“Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee” (Douglas 1966:53).

13 The etymological ties linking holy and whole, both derivatives of Old English hal- and Proto-Germanic *hailo-, are still visible in the close affinities in High German between heilig (‘sacred’), heil (‘complete’) and heilen (‘to heal’) (OED “holy”,

13 The etymological ties linking holy and whole, both derivatives of Old English hal- and Proto-Germanic *hailo-, are still visible in the close affinities in High German between heilig (‘sacred’), heil (‘complete’) and heilen (‘to heal’) (OED “holy”,