In the emblem books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monkeys rarely figured, but when they did, they appeared as shameful and disgusting. It was their rear ends that caused so much embarrassment, with the naked red swellings of the females rising and falling with their sexual cycles in an inescapable manner. When seen from below, as when a monkey climbed up higher than the human eye-line, this ‘disfigurement’ was even more conspicuous. This led to an amusing epigram in Jacob Cats’s book of emblems of 1632:

The higher one climbs
The more one shows
One’s shameful parts

These words accompanied an etching showing a captive monkey tethered to a vertical pole. The monkey has clambered to the top of the pole and, below it, startled human figures point in outrage and disbelief at its revolting rump.

Desmond Morris, Monkey (2013)