EATEN BY DUCKS

Oh great. A banana. How original.

Just a quick, silly sketch of monkeys in medieval style. I recently learnt on the excellent gotmedieval.blogspot that there is a good reason for monkeys to feature on the margins of medieval books so often. They may look like humans, and imitate human in their behaviour, but never achieve human status -with the christian morality that comes with it, of course. Nonetheless, I can imagine that monks (and also nuns, because they drew illuminations too - but hey, women artists are still often overlooked) had lots of fun with them. It looks quite cartoony. What's also interesting to me, is the fact that the monkeys don't quite look like real monkeys - their noses are too low, like goats', and their furs often have strange frills, a stylisation you never get to see elsewhere.