Scoop on Primates

In my last post I talked about primates making art.  Today, I want to talk about primates featured in artwork and how different cultures perceived (and maybe still do) perceive primates. There is no shortage of paintings featuring primates and many come to mind. They tell us about our history.  The painting below by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) depicts Prince Edward of Wales with a monkey.  The monkey is not represented realistically.  It has a striped tail, similar to that of ring-tailed lemurs and ears we often see in mythical creatures found in Gothic art, possibly ears of a dragon.  It was customary for foreign dignitaries to offer exotic animals to European royalty, so it is possible that the prince possessed a monkey at one time. In his book "Henry VIII: the king, his six wives and his court", Nick Ford specifies that the monkey the prince is holding is a guenon "which signifies wealth and exotic taste". Kuntsmuseum collection, Basel, Swit...

When visiting Lascaux and admiring the beautiful rendition of horses, one cannot help wondering how primitive humans became such beautiful artists.  The paintings date back about 17,000 years; yet the people of Lascaux knew what they were doing.  For instance, they deliberately chose to use protruberances in the stone to add relief to the rumps of the creatures they were depicting. Where does art come from?  Do we have an innate ability for it?  Can other creatures make art?  Could our primate cousins create art and deliberately choose to depict what they see or experience on paper? A couple years ago, I visited with "Cheetah", a chimpanzee residing in Southern California and I bought a painting he made.  The strokes are very free and colorful.  Some are strong, others are light - and I must say the composition is not bad for monkey art. In the 1950s and 1960s, when psychologists and primatologists teamed up to teach chimpanzees how to sign or use p...