Ape
The ape gazes indirectly. Crouching, it puts its left hand to jaw and its right between the knees [Figure One]. The lips pull to a wide smile. Such creatures, writes Topsell, “are very capable of all humane actions” (note 1). Some philosophers have thought them men, a claim Topsell cannot aver because, he reports, they “have no perfect use of Reason, no modesty, no honesty, nor justice of government, and although they speak, yet is their language imperfect; and above all they cannot be men, because they have no Religion” (note 2). And yet, the ape’s body recalls your own: “in their face, nostrils, ears, eye-lids, breasts armes, thumbs, fingers and nails, they agree very much” with the human” (note 3). Topsell finds such likeness—it goes perhaps without saying—indecorous. His ape appears on the treatise’s second page. Behind it, bleeding through from recto, is the antelope, The History’s prime beast, the woodcut headpiece, and between them, the title itself (note 4). The spine and terminal of S, T, O, the bottom half of R’s stem, the right hairline of u, r, F, o, o, t, e, d, B, e, a, s, t, and s tattoo the ape’s left hand, face, neck, left elbow, chest, right arm and back. Leaking through the leaf and into the ape, the text presents in reverse. It appears, that is, as it would were it held to a mirror. The association of ape and mirror would have been familiar enough. The “ape with a mirror or vantias ape,” as Michael Weemans observes, was “at once a metaphor of vanity, the image of the prisoner of self love, and a parody of man in search of his soul” (note 5). Its purpose, Weemans continues, “is to show blind men their own folly through the magnifying glass of caricature.” Topsell’s ape—that “subtill, ironicall, ridiculous ... Beast”—is you before the leaf made looking-glass (note 7).
note 1. Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects (London: Ellen Cotes for George Sawbridge, Thomas Williams, and Thomas Johnson, 1658), 2.
note 2. Topsell, 3.
note 3. Ibid.
note 4. Topsell orders the beasts alphabetically by name, though those thought to be subspecies, as it were, of chief type follow directly. Thus, the munkey, baboun, tartarine, and so forth, appear on the ape’s heels
note 5. Michael Weemans, “Henri met de Bles’s Sleeping Peddler: An Exegetical and Anthropomorphic Landscape,” THe Art Bulletin, 88, no. 3 (2006), 462.
note 6. Ibid, 463.
note 7. Topsell, History, 2.