Focus on this artwork and explore the Image interpretation.
Differentiating from the medieval use of the monkey motif to indicate rascality or instinctuality, the primacy is shown here as a thinker who explores a skeleton. Lost in thought, the monkey's gaze turns slightly cross-eyed on the skeleton, which as a vanitas symbol indicates its own transience. It can be recognized as the object and result of research that is now next to the labeled sheet of evolution. The author of the documents shown remains uncertain.
Comparable to a monkey in front of a skeleton, color fidelity and attention to detail are decisive elements in most of his monkey paintings, which suggest naturalness and testify to the artist's recourse to living as well as prepared animals as study models. From 1870 the painter kept a group of monkeys in his own household, which he observed and studied. Detailed descriptions of their behavior, their cognitive progress and illnesses emerged. Many animals died due to the weather conditions in Munich, with the artist nailing some of the dead animals to wood to use as models for his paintings. Dissections too were carried out by him and then recorded in drawings. Some of the monkeys were given names such as his favorites Paly and Puk, who at times also wore clothes and ate at the same table. However, the artist did not travel to non-European countries, as he noted in his notebook from 1908: "I never got beyond Europe's cultural savages."Despite the artist's concern to reproduce the nature of the monkeys realistically, as evidenced by the fine color transitions and accents of light, the painting Monkey in front of a skeleton looks a bit glossed over. This suggests the high rank and influence of history painting at the time . However, the monkey was no longer portrayed as an actor in the role of man, as was the case with the clothed monkeys of the Singerien, for example was common, but perceived as living beings with abilities that are hardly or not at all preserved in the human disposition. The boundaries between humans and animals are explored in more detail, whereby it is now also important to grasp the essence and thus the truthfulness of the monkey. Nevertheless, the reality shown is constructed in the painting, whereby the symbolic content of the primate persists in a modified form.
As a collector and intellectual, Gabriel von Max combined art with science in order to address issues of human ancestry and further development. Shortly before, the German sculptor Hugo Rheinhold followed a similar approach, who set similar thematic priorities (bronze sculpture of a monkey with a skull, 1892).
Gabriel von Max