ARS SIMIA NATURAE

Martin Gerlachs Äffchen

Abstract

ARS SIMIA NATURAE. Martin Gerlach’s Monkey
Established in the late nineteenth century to serve Pforzheim’s globally connected jewelry industry, the collection of teaching materials of the local School of Arts and Crafts was exceptionally focused yet heterogeneous, comprising books, journals, photographs, slides, jewelry, casts, taxidermy, and even living plants and animals. The collection exemplifies a broader shift associated with Art Nouveau: away from historicist quotation and toward nature as a primary source of artistic invention. Martin Gerlach’s widely used pattern books, all held in Pforzheim, seem to endorse this naturalist program. Yet the text argues that their imagery was never simply “direct from nature.” Rather, Gerlach’s compositions were highly mediated, art-historically informed, and symbolically charged. This becomes clear in the analysis of Festons und decorative Gruppen and its striking plate featuring a monkey. Far from being a merely exotic motif, the monkey activates a long iconographic tradition in which it signifies the tension between mechanical copying and imaginative transformation. By linking Gerlach’s imagery to early modern art theory, alchemical notions of ars simia naturae, and the epistemic model of the Kunst- und Wunderkammer, the essay interprets the Pforzheim collection as a modern cabinet of curiosities: a generative “playground” where nature, art, and invention interact.