|
In a large, open, barn-like structure, which serves as a guardroom, groups of monkeys wearing soldiers' uniforms are grouped around tables playing cards and back-gammon.
Pictures of monkeys had been popular from the sixteenth-century and it was Teniers who developed the theme in the seventeenth-century. The primary role of the monkey in visual and literary sources of the sixteenth-century was to represent the irrational and foolish side of man's nature, but monkeys also were symbols of sinfulness and seen as devils.
|
