In Latin, the word monstrum is a portent, an omen. It can be both a dire warning and a divine revelation. The monstrum is the essence of what Edmund Burke characterized as the sublime in his 1757 essay, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”. The sublime was, for Burke, both a glorious thing to behold and a paralyzing horror. The sublime is awe-inspiring, in the truest sense; the awesome is not always pleasurable, it is also dreadful. A monstrum is apocalyptic. Apocalypse is a revelation. Though the word apocalypse now has a colloquial association with world-ending events, the word apocalypse originates from the Greek apokalyptein, which is to reveal, to disclose, to show what has been hidden. Apocalypse brings light to the shadows, turns over the rocks that hide ugly swarms of dark insects living in the mud. The sex scandals of celebrities, blackmailed politicians, police fabricating evidence, are among the things we find captured in the searchlight of apocalypse. The moon turning a blood-red color, a calf born with three eyes, the Thames River in London running dry, a rocket failing to launch on June 6th in 2026, are all events that could be monstrums in the world, depending on how predisposed we are to interpret them poetically.
In the Middle Ages, abnormal births, or what I think are better described as prodigies, such as children with tails or animals with misshapen horns, were taken to be omens from God. The medieval explanation for children born with deformities or other natural anomalies can be found in the penitentials, books of rules related to sexual conduct. The penitentials equated irregular childbirth to menstruation or sex during menstruation, citing a passage from 2 Esdras, in the Bible, stating, “women in their uncleanness will bear abominations.” The Augustinian perspective on these births seems to contradict this at the same time. In City of God, Saint Augustine writes, “For how is that contrary to nature which happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing? A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature.” By this reasoning, the prodigies were ushered from the realm of sinful abomination into the category of monstrum, or portent.
The Ravenna Monster.” From 'The Doome, warning all men to the Judgement,' 1581
A 1512 description: “It had a horn on its head, straight up like a sword, and instead of arms it had two wings like a bat’s, and at the height of the breasts it had a fio [Y-shaped mark] on one side and a cross on the other, and lower down at the waist, two serpents. It was a hermaphrodite, and on the right knee it had an eye, and its left foot was like an eagle’s.”
Perhaps in accord with this Augustinian interpretation of monstrosity, the aberrant creatures that were the subject of curiosity during the Middle Ages shifted from rare specimens of unknown species to one-of-a-kind miracles. As authors Lorraine Daston and Katrherine Park write in their book, “Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750”, “The character of these newly proximate marvels changed, furthermore, as they began to move inward. The archetypal medieval wonder was the Blemmy or basilisk, member of an exotic race or species, whereas late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers increasingly privileged individual monsters like Brant’s two-headed baby or the apparently inexhaustible supply of human-animal hybrids and conjoined twins that graced popular broadsides as well as learned books.” With the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the one-sided announcement posters known as broadsides, spread news of prodigies far and wide. It should come as no surprise that the monstrum and the Protestant Reformation intersect in the art of the broadside, since both were forces of disruption.
Alexander encounters the headless men, miniature from “Historia de proelis” in the Talbot Shrewsbury Book, circa 1444 and circa 1445.
“Various species of mythical headless men were rumored, in antiquity and later, to inhabit remote parts of the world. They are variously known as akephaloi or Blemmyes and described as lacking a head, with their facial features on their chest. These were at first described as inhabitants of ancient Libya or the Nile system (Aethiopia). Later traditions confined their habitat to a particular island in the Brisone River, or shifted it to India.”
A pamphlet from 1523, printed in the studio of Lucas Cranach the Elder, contains an interpretation of two monstrous births by Martin Luther and Phillipp Melanchthon. The “Pope-ass” and the “monk-calf” were taken by Luther and Melanchthon to be direct warnings about the state of the church sculpted in the form of aberrant bodies. The Pope-ass was a creature claimed to have been found dead in the Tiber River. It was interpreted as a message from God on the corruption of the Papacy. The monk-calf was alleged to have been born in Freiberg, Germany, with a fleshy cowl over its head like a monk’s hood, resonating again with imagery suggestive of the church’s iniquity.
Lucas Cranach the Elder and Studio, Pope-Ass and Monk-Calf, woodcut. 1523.
Daston and Park write, “...the images of monsters and other prodigies conduced to belief, just as photographs in tabloid newspapers do today, underscoring the authenticity of the report…”. A new artform in medieval Europe, the printed image had an air of Humanist veracity, similar to the technological authority of the camera that appealed to Enlightenment-readied minds in the nineteenth-century and lent an aura of plausibility to the earliest spirit photographs from that era. In the Renaissance mind, the artist was like a supreme tool for authoring reality. The anomalousness of art, the novelty of craft blended with innovation, especially in the exaggerated imaginings of the Mannerist style, became a sort of monstrosity with divine portent itself. By the late Renaissance, art had elevated the monstrum from the fearful and superstition shrouded, to the state of exalted wonder.
Art shares in this dual exchange between the monstrous, or the physically strange, and the monstrum, a divine message. The Enlightenment leapt back from the prospect of an aesthetic that wallowed in strangeness and aberration, seeing the monstrous as a vestige of the church, superstition, and those who would read the broadsides pasted to city walls and ignorantly believe them as though they were true. The monstrosities like the Pope-ass were not real, but the wonder within the hand of the artist who imagined it was. This is why the monster may not exist, but the monstrum is a palpable entity. The monstrum is the message thirsting to be sweated out from nature’s pores; it is the logos in nature calling for us to join it in some physical form. The monstrum yearns to erupt through our bodies, our environment, and our technology.
Alessandro Keegan, “Monstrum”, oil on canvas, 60”x50” (152.4 cm x 127 cm), 2024.