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Hobbes’s Hidden Monster: Rediscovering the Frontispiece of

Leviathan

Johan Tralau (Uppsala universitet) & Magnus Kristiansson (Military Academy Karlberg)

Corresponding author: Johan.Tralau@statsvet.uu.se

To be presented at the panel The Politics of Images: History and Change, IPSA, Madrid, July 11, 2012.

The frontispiece in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is, needless to say, the most famous image in the

history of political theory – very often reproduced in textbooks and scholarship, yet not often the

object of systematic interpretation. What is perhaps most striking about the title page is that

despite the fact that Hobbes named his sovereign state for a Biblical sea monster, there appears

to be no trace of monstrosity in the giant sovereign depicted on the frontispiece. In short, the

body of the sovereign seems neither to be a monster at all in the sense of a composite body

consisting of several incompatible animalic and anomalous elements, nor does there appear to be

anything aquatic about it. As we will see, in concurring that this is the case, previous scholarship

does not seem to have been able to account for the purported fact that the Leviathan is not at all

portrayed as a monster. However, in the following we will argue that if we revisit the title page in

the light of the iconographic tradition, we will in fact discover the hidden features of the giant

sovereign – and we will see that these are the traits of a very special kind of sea monster just

barely hidden in the image. Moreover, we are about to discover that the frontispiece depicts a

stage of war and insecurity quite similar to the situation in England just about our philosopher’s

birth in 1588. Through the discovery of these two elements in the image, the monster and the

state of war, what will emerge is thus a novel interpretation of Hobbes and Leviathan, an

interpretation that sheds new light on his politics and philosophy in general. Three things are at

stake here. First, the interpretation of the frontispiece will provide an important clue to the

debates about, firstly, how we are to understand Hobbes’s political philosophy, specifically with

regard to the importance of fear and the use of images in his thought; secondly, about his relation

to the political context of his own epoch, specifically the controversies regarding the obligations

to sovereigns and usurping powers; and thirdly, about the importance of images in political

philosophy and for the history of political thought more generally. While political theorists and

historians of political ideas quite naturally tend to focus on arguments and the application of

       

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normative principles, the interpretation presented below should make us sensitive to the role

played by images and visual representations in political thought.

The argument will be unravelled in x steps. We will begin by discussing previous scholarship on

Hobbes and images, particularly with regard to the physical images in his works. In the second

step, we will argue that the frontispiece depicts a state of war, but that there are some intriguing

details in the picture that remain unexplained in previous interpretations. In the third step, we

argue that in light of the iconographic tradition, but contrary to all other interpretations, we

should see the Leviathan in the frontispiece does indeed have a monstrous body, hidden – or just

barely so. In the fourth step of the argument, we suggest that the state of war and the monstrous

body of the sovereign may carry an allusion to a very specific event in English history, and in the

self-described genesis of Thomas Hobbes and his theory. We conclude by discussing the

implications of this interpretation for the understanding of Hobbes and of political theory. What

will emerge is thus a novel interpretation of Hobbes and Leviathan, an interpretation that sheds

new light on Hobbes, politics, and philosophy.

       

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Hobbes’s Images: Back to the Frontispiece

In recent decades, there has been an upsurge in interest in Thomas Hobbes’s use of images.

Hobbes, once considered the geometrician of political philosophy, scorning and scourging the

use of metaphors and images, is now widely recognised as a creator of images for political

purposes.1 An important impulse to this strand of research was once given by Carl Schmitt, who

pointed out that Hobbes’s use of the image of Leviathan is exceedingly ambiguous, vague, and

enigmatic.2 Most of the work on Hobbes and images has focused on literary tropes such as

metaphors. This is true of studies about Hobbes, poetry, and literary theory.3 More recently,

scholars have paid attention to the rediscovery of rhetoric in Hobbes.4 Studies of individual

metaphors employed by Hobbes have thus become an influential current.5 One branch of this is

interpretations of Hobbes’s use of monster images, notably Leviathan and Behemoth, and the

political and theoretical import of this – decoding it, e.g., from Biblical or classical sources.6

This revival of interest in Hobbes’s images is not a case of some sort of scholarly aestheticism

encroaching on the pure and rigorous field of Hobbesian deductive ’civil science’. Rather, the

importance of images can be developed out of Hobbes’s own account of imagination and images

– a theory that acquires the utmost political importance given Hobbes’s conception of the role of

                                                                                                               1 For Hobbes and political philosophy as geometry, cf. Hobbes’s own account of the genesis of his method in ”T. Hobbes malmesburiensis vita” (the prose version), in Opera philosophica quæ latine scripsit omnia in unum corpus nunc primum collecta, I (London: Bohn, ed. William Molesworth), 1845, pp. xiii-xxi, at p. xiv. 2 Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes. Sinn und Fehlschlag eines politischen Symbols (Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1995), p. 32. 3 Raman Selden, “Hobbes and Late Metaphysical Poetry”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 35:2 (1974), p. 197-210; Elizabeth Cook, “Thomas Hobbes and the ’Far-Fetched’”, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 34 (1981), p. 222-232; Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, The Aesthetic Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Ann Arbor & London: University of Michigan Press, 1940, passim). George Watson, “Hobbes and the Metaphysical Conceit”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 16:4 (1955), p. 558-562; T M Gang, “Hobbes and the Metaphysical Conceit – A Reply”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 17:3 (1956), p. 418-421. 4 David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986; Raia Prokhovnik, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Hobbes’ Leviathan (London & New York: Garland, 1991); Quentin Skinner: Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; 5 See Charles Tarlton, “Levitating Leviathan: Glosses on a Theme in Hobbes”, in Ethics, 88:1 (1977), p. 1-19; George Shulman, “Metaphor and Modernization in the Political Thought of Thomas Hobbes”, in Political Theory, 17:3 (1989), p. 392-416; Terrell Carver, “Hobbes: Materialism, Mechanism, Masculinity”, in Men in Political Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, ch. 9; more recently, Gianluca Briguglia, Il corpo vivente dello stato. Una metafora politica (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), p. 119-154 6 Patricia Springborg, “Hobbes’s Biblical Beasts. Leviathan and Behemoth”, in Political Theory, 23:2 (1995): p. 353-375; Johan Tralau: “Leviathan, the Beast of Myth. Medusa, Dionysos, and the Riddle of Hobbes’s Sovereign Monster”, in Patricia Springborg (ed.): Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 61-81; Malcolm, Noel. 2007. “The Name and Nature of Leviathan: Political Symbolism and Biblical Exegesis”, in Intellectual History Review, 17:1, p. 21-39.

       

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images in shaping the thought and hence behaviour of citizens.7 Images, Hobbes says, ’governe

all the rest of my thoughts’.8 This is, indeed, a very good reason to always keep an eye on what

Hobbes is doing.

It bears noting that much less work has been done on the actual physical images employed by

Hobbes. Of course, attention has been paid to Hobbes’s most famous image, the title page of

Leviathan. There have been debates about the anonymous artist of the drawing – with some

people arguing for Wenceslaus Hollar being the culprit, and Horst Bredekamp more recently for

Abraham Bosse.9 Another discussion has been about who the sovereign on the different versions

of the drawing is supposed to portray – Hobbes, Cromwell, Charles II, or even Christ.10 Yet

another debate has been concerned with the bodies that constitute the sovereign’s body, and the

gaze of the subjects on the one hand and the sovereign on the other hand. Keith Brown has

argued that the hand-drawn image presented by Hobbes to the future king Charles II visualises

Hobbes’s theory better than the version printed in 1651; the former had the citizens that make up

the sovereign body look at the reader, thus merging their gaze and will with that of the sovereign

head.11 Conversely, however, it has been argued that the fact that citizens look at the sovereign in

the printed version – whereas the sovereign looks at the reader – portrays the fundamental lack

of reciprocity between them in Hobbes’s account of political obligation.12 On the other hand, M.

M. Goldsmith has claimed that ’both versions literally depict’ the doctrine.13

Now, a disconcerting problem remains to be solved: why is there nothing monstrous about the

body? Reinhard Brandt has shown that if one follows Polykleitos’ aesthetic rule of proportions

(which was surely well known to Hobbes and the artist through Vitruvius), and according to

which the head of a human figure is to make up 1/8 of the length, then the feet of the human

                                                                                                               7 Cees Leijenhorst, “Sense and Nonsense About Sense: Hobbes and the Aristotelians on Sense Perception and Imagination”, in Patricia Springborg (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 82-108; Patricia Springborg, “Leviathan, Mythic History, and National Historiography”, in Donald R Kelley and David Harris Sacks (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain. History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press/Woodrow Wilson Press, 1997), p. 267-297. 8 Answer 55 KOLLA 9 Brown; Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes Der Leviathan. Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine Gegenbilder 1651 - 2001 (Berlin: Akademie, 2006), pp. 39-52. 10 Margery Corbett & R. W. Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: the Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550-1660, London: Routledge, 1979, p. 218-230, particularly 229f; A P Martinich: The Two Gods of Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 363. Brown, Goldsmith. 11 Keith Brown, ’The Artist of the Leviathan Title Page’, in British Library Journal, 4, 1978, pp. 24-26, at p. 26; also ’Thomas Hobbes and the Title-page of Leviathan’, in Philosophy, 55, 1980, pp. 410-411. 12 Bertozzi, Marco: ’Thomas Hobbes. L’enigma del Leviatano’, Bologna: Pugillaria, 1983; Tralau: “Leviathan, the Beast of Myth”, p. 74. 13 M. M. Goldsmith, ’Picturing Hobbes’s Politics? The Illustrations to Philosophicall Rudiments’, in Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 44, 1981, p. 232-239, at p. 234. Cf. however Noel Malcolm, “The Title Page of Leviathan, Seen In a Curious Perspective”, in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2002), p. 200-229, at p. 201, 225; Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes Der Leviathan, p. 15.

       

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Leviathan rest upon the author’s name on the frontispiece. Hobbes himself is thus portrayed as

the basis of sovereignty and political authority... Of course, the lower body of the Leviathan is

hidden behind the landscape and the curtain on the frontispiece, but according to Brandt’s

reconstruction, the lower body is well-proportioned in accordance with the classical ideal of the

human body.14 But why the monstrous name?15 In his eye-opening contribution, which argues

that structures deriving from architectural theory and music theory abound in the image, Brandt

does not give an answer: in the image, ’Das tierische Ungeheuer läßt sich sicher nicht

entdecken’.16 And in what is arguably the most comprehensive and important contribution to the

field, Horst Bredekamp simply claims that the sovereign has ’keine monströse Form’.17 What we

are looking at here is, Roberto Farneti says, an ’emblem of a well-ordered community in which

the only abnormal characteristics were super-human size and strength’.18 Likewise, Paolo

Pasqualucci claims that the readers find themselves ‘di fronte ad un uomo, non ad un mostro’.19

In short, previous scholarship appears to be unanimous in arguing that the sovereign on the

frontispiece of the Leviathan is in effect not monstrous at all. In the following, we will argue that

a careful interpretation of the image will enable us to rediscover the monster hidden in the

frontispiece and that the frontispiece does not depict a stable and secure society, but a

battleground.

War, and Unidentified Objects Behind the Hills

The impressive frontispiece of Hobbes magnum opus is a copper engraving showing a gigantic

monarch reaching over countryside hills and a valley in which there is an orderly city surrounded

by a defensive wall patrolled by soldiers. This is, evidently, the sovereign – in Hobbes’s words,

                                                                                                               14 Reinhard Brandt, ’Das Titelbild des Leviathan’, in Leviathan, 15, 1, 1987, p. 167-186, at 171. 15 Cf., though not in the context of the frontispiece, Malcolm, Noel. 2007. “The Name and Nature of Leviathan: Political Symbolism and Biblical Exegesis”, in Intellectual History Review, 17:1, p. 21-39; Patricia Springborg, Hobbes and Schmitt on the name and nature of Leviathan revisited’, in Johan Tralau (ed.): Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. The Politics of Order and Myth, London: Routledge, 2011, p. 39-57; also in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, XIII, 2-3, 2010, pp. 297-315. 16 Reinhard Brandt, ’Das Titelblatt des Leviathan’, in Leviathan, 15, 1, 1987, p. 164-186, at 173. 17 Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes Der Leviathan, p. 16. 18 Roberto Farneti, ’The ”Mythical Foundation” of the State: Leviathan in Emblematic Context’, in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 82, 2001, p. 362-382. 19 Paolo Pasqualucci: Commento al Leviathan. La filosofia del diritto e dello stato di Thomas Hobbes, Perugia: Margiacchi Galeno editore, 1999, p. 85.

       

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the ’Governour, whom I compared to Leviathan’.20 In his right hand (to the left in the picture),

Leviathan holds a sword that represents military and political power. The left hand sports a finely

chiselled crosier symbolising religious authority, but in the Protestant fashion, the sovereign

wears a crown on his head, not a mitre. As we have seen, there appears to be scholarly consensus

about the view that there is nothing monstrous and nothing aquatic about this sovereign body –

quite enigmatic, it would seem, for a political symbol named for the Biblical water creature

Leviathan.

The monarch’s body is constituted by human bodies which are linked together – all looking up

toward the face of the sovereign. However, the head and the hands of the sovereign’s body do

not consist of bodies. And there is something interesting about these bodies that make up the

king’s body, for when united in the latter, they look strikingly similar to something else. A key

may be provided in the description of Leviathan in the book of Job:

His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seale. One is so neere to another, that no ayre can come

betweene them. They are ioyned one to another, they sticke together, that they cannot be sundred. Job 41:15-17

The people that make up the sovereign’s body look like scales. Just like a sea monster, then, just

like the Leviathan in the Old Testament text, the sovereign is covered with scales. At this

juncture, however, we should note that when seen on a human torso, the scales should make us

think of a cuirass. In fact, the citizens that make up the body resemble scale armour – it is ’una

mirada di scaglie raffiguranti uomini in miniatura’ (Bertozzi 1983). Now, this may not seem too

strange, for there was nothing eccentric about portraying a king in decorative armour. In the 16th

and 17th centuries, and with the advent of more powerful firearms and artillery, such armour had

of course lost much of its practical value. But as noted by Carolyn Springer, as ‘instruments of

rhetoric’ they had become so much more important.21 (When Francesco I of Medici got married

in 1579 there were cuirasses with painted scales as well as fish-shaped helmets in the wedding

procession.)22 So the bodies of the citizens look like a kind of protective armour for the

sovereign. Whoever the artist is, he would have been skilled enough to engrave the head and

hands of the figure so as to make these parts consist of human bodies too; he did not, and the

bodies are thus arguably represented as armour. We will return to this armour shortly, for it will

                                                                                                               20 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, II, London: Continuum, 2005 (ed. G A J Rogers and Karl Schuhmann), xxviii, p. 166 / 252 (Roman indicates chapter, the first Arabic page number given is for the Head edition, the second for Rogers’ and Schuhmann’s critical edition). 21 Carolyn Springer: Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010, p. 6f. 22 Springer: Armour and Masculinity, p. 27.

       

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prove important.

On the lower part to the right, under the crosier, we can observe five religious symbols – a

chapel, a mitre, the thunderbolt of excommunication, the logical instruments of scholasticism,

and a heresy court or university disputation. On the opposite side, under the sword, there are five

symbols of political power – a fortress from which artillery is fired, a royal crown, a cannon, a

number of rifles and spears and a battle between two units consisting of cavalry and infantry.

This is, needless to say, a perfect illustration of Hobbes’s doctrine of the unity of state and

church, and the parallelity is striking.23 Moreover, we should note how well the parallel between

firearms and logical tools displays Hobbes’s view of the importance of political control of such

dangerous weapons as intellectual conceptions, syllogisms, distinctions, and concepts. In so rich

an image, we may expect a great number of interesting components, the complications of which

should not detain us here. However, the essential part of the interpretation that will be

undertaken here is not about the foreground, but about what the foreground is supposed to

conceal.

We will begin in the open sea behind the hills. It has been noted that when looked at more

closely, the sovereign’s lower body does not appear to be found in the earth beyond the hills, but

in the sea. Brandt suggests that this is in fact the way – the only way, as it were – in which the

image may take up the Biblical connotation: it may be a hint that the sovereign emerges from the

water (1987: 173). Bredekamp has pointed out that in the 1667 Dutch edition of Leviathan, there

is land behind the sovereign in the frontispiece, unambiguously demonstrating that he is to be

considered a land creature – and Bredekamp argues that this affirms the identity of the Dutch as

a sea power as opposed to an island power (20ff)24. But the first edition differs from this: the

frontispiece appears to show a sovereign actually emerging from the sea.

Why is this important? In order to give an answer to that question, we must first look at another

essential detail. There are four ships sailing towards land (Picture 2, labels 2 & 3). Many

reproductions of the frontispiece do not expose this detail: it is indeed very small. But we would

be ill-advised to regard it as insignificant. Previous scholarship has attached no importance to it;

however, we will see that it is important. Label 1 in Picture 1 clearly shows how artillery is fired

(label 1.1) from a military fortress towards the four ships.

                                                                                                               23 Martinich: The Two Gods of Leviathan, p. 365f. 24 However, there is open sea to the right on this picture as well, and it is quite possible that there is a bay or a fiord in front of the rocks behind the Leviathan.

       

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Picture 2.

The cloud looks quite like the gunfire marked as 1 in Picture 3. There is nothing else on the title

page that resembles this cloud more, such as trees or bushes. The fact that they are fired upon

probably indicates that the ships are battleships, for there would seem to be no particular point in

firing at merchant or passenger ships. The ship closest to land even has its broadside turned

against the fortress and is hence prepared to fire. One does not need a magnifying glass to

observe this obvious fact.

Picture 3.

There are further signs in the frontispiece that indictate that there is a war. We can see that no

civilians are present in the streets of the town, apart from two physicians approaching the

cathedral; the only other civilians in the image are those who constitute the scales of Leviathan’s

       

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armour. No farmers are working in the fields, no horses or carriages can be seen in the streets.

Clearly, this indicates a state of emergency. Moreover, the soldiers in the town are all within the

garrison walls but three of them, those who are in movement (Picture X Label 1), seem to be

marching in the direction of the opening of the protective wall. They all carry rifles. We can also

observe a road block (Picture X Label 2) of one street – the one leading straight to the entrance

of the garrison. The street is blocked by some kind of fence, possibly consisting of chevaux de

frise. Furthermore, the only way leading up to the castle in the upper middle left of the picture

seems to be provisionally but heavily barricaded (Picture X Label 3)

Picture X

What are the reasons for barricading castles and streets? Obviously, the road blocks are made to

suppress a present threat; they indicate that an attack is expected. Why are the soldiers in Picture

X label 1 heading for the exit of the garrision? We might find the answer in the attack from the

foreign naval forces that is clearly shown in Picture 1, as well as the coastal artillery counterattack.

What we are witnessing is thus war: the soldiers might be moving towards the fields as a reaction

to the sound of the artillery fired.

The frontispiece presents various military phenomena such as fortresses, artillery, infantry and

cavalry battles. Yet the lack of heraldic naval symbolism in the image, such as anchors or tritons,

is striking. However, there seems to be a naval harbour on the shore of the river in the upper

middle right part of the picture (Picture Y Lable 1). This is surely a military edifice since the walls

surrounding it are of the same kind as those protective walls surrounding the garrison in the

town. Moreover, the flag (Y Label 1.2) seem to be the same kind as the flag of the garrison. The

harbour is guarded by soldiers (Y Label 1.1). Small vessels are moving along the river (Y Labels 2

and 3) which probably ends somewhere close to the four attacking ships (Picture 2 Label 2 and 3.

       

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These vessels can not visually be identified as military boats. However, some of them are moored

to this military construction.

Picture Y

We may safely conclude that there is a war, or at least the beginning of a war, going on in there,

in the image: the ships appear to attempt to invade the country. Hobbes’s great work on the

prerequisite of order is thus illustrated by war, specifically, a foreign invasion. However, what

does this tell us? In order to give an answer to that, we need to have a look at one more

important detail.

The Hidden Monstrous Body

Under the left arm of the sovereign – the ecclesiastical arm, holding the crosier, under which the

set of images relating to spiritual power is to be found – there is a church. There is nothing

strange about that. But on the same spot under the right arm, more specifically, the elbow, there

are some unidentified peaky objects (Picture 4, Labels 1, 2, and 3).

       

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Picture 4.

The lack of crucifixes makes it clear that these items are not church towers – all the churches in

the picture have crucifixes, even the one beyond the horizon (under the Leviathan’s left arm) and

this shows that the crucifixes are perceptible even at this distance and they are all turned in the

same direction. Other possible explanations could be that these items are trees, rocks or towers

of castles. However, there is nothing else in the picture that resembles these items so as to

identify them; no buildings have such towers and no such rocks occur in other parts of the

picture. Corbett and Lightbown state – in passing – that the objects are cypress trees.25 But this is

highly improbable, for the rest of the landscape does not look Mediterranean at all – there are no

other cypresses.26 Moreover, as cypresses the objects would be abnormously enormous and

anomalous in so tidy a landscape, exceeding the fortresses and churches in height. So what are

they? These strange details occur in one more place in the picture – in the depiction of the

artillery fired from the fortress in one of the pannels on the left hand side of the frontispiece,

Picture 3 (Label 2). Even here, the objects seem to be unidentifiable. The fact that the gun is fired

towards them indicate that these unidentified objects are actually something hostile. Another

possibility that has to be taken into consideration would be that the objects could be flames from,

                                                                                                               25 Corbett & Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece, p. 220. 26 One would expect cypresses in a Mediterranean landscape – such as Calypso’s island in the Odyssey, where there was, according to Homer, εὐώδης κυπάρισσος (Odyssey, 5:64).

       

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e.g., gunfire. Yet, when we look at the drawing closely, this is not a plausible hypothesis. If they

were flames, there would be a substantial amount of smoke as well, and they would be

inexplicably thin and tall.

Where does this reasoning take us? We saw that Brandt has made a very good case for the giant

sovereign having a well-proportioned human body emerging from the sea. Moreover, we have

seen that there are unidentified spiky objects behind the hills. Furthermore, we have seen that as

a composite, the human bodies that cover the sovereign’s body look like scale armour. What

should we make of this? Specifically: what should we make of it in the light of the iconographic

tradition that Hobbes and the artist had to relate to? Perhaps the scale armour is a clue. Of

course, ’scale armour’ is derivative: it draws its signification from real, literal, animal scales. And

as we saw, the Biblical sea animal is in fact covered with scales – “His scales are his pride” (Job

41:15). If we take the image and name of Leviathan seriously, maybe we should understand

Leviathan’s torso as covered with scales. This interpretation would make the Leviathan of the

frontispiece more monstrous, and it would allow us to see the torso as composed of or covered

by the citizens and monstrous scales at the same time.

But could it account for the unidentified spiky objects? Again, we need to know what they are,

and we have seen that previous scholarship has paid no attention to this question. Moreover, in

an image like this, we cannot do away with things we do not understand by just saying that they

are mistakes on the part of the artist: not a line is superfluous. If, as we argued, the Leviathan

emerges from the water on the image, then one possibility would be that the objects are immense

water drops. But discovering the people on the torso as scales gives us another possibility. Of

course, the scales on the upper body could not be visible under the right arm. But if, contrary to

Reinhard Brandt, we do not understand the lower body as a well-shaped human form, then the

spiky objects could be part of the lower body. In that case, the model for the Leviathan in the

frontispiece would be a very different kind of man – a man from the seas, or, in Latin, homo

marinus.

       

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This image is from the widely read and reprinted Des Monstres & Prodiges (1573), written by

Ambroise Paré, a French physician and a skeptical spirit disinclined to believe in most archaic

superstitions, yet convinced that there were such creatures. In this influential and important work

in medicine we find a great number of visual representations of monstrous humans, including

several such homines marini, such as this aquatic monk with a fishy lower body covered with

scales.27 On the fins – or arms and legs, if you wish – there are scales or spikes protruding from

the surface.

The real mystery, for Brandt’s and others’ interpretations, would be how to account for the

unidentified peaky objects under discussion. Yet when looked at in the light of the image of the

monster that is half man, half fish, another interpretation forces itself upon us. These items are

not solid parts of the environment – they are parts of the Leviathan’s body. This giant does not

have the shape of a human being even though his torso is that of a man – the lower part of his

body has the shape of a fish or a dragon. The strange objects behind the cliffs are fins or spikes

protruding from the monster’s tail. This is, then, the connection between Hobbes’s sovereign in

the frontispiece and the Biblical sea animal.

Of course, given the appearance of the lower body in the image from Paré, it could be objected

that it would be outlandish – even for an outlandish creature like this – for there to be such

spikes or scales as far from the body of Leviathan in the frontispiece. But this depends on the

position of the Leviathan’s lower body. If the Leviathan bends its tail it would be natural for the

spikes to be visible under the elbow. To be sure, we can find such iconographic models in other

depictions of homines marini.

                                                                                                               27 Ambroise Paré: Des monstres & prodiges, Paris: Oeil d’Or, 2003 (first published in 1573), p. 180.

       

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This picture is older than Paré’s, dating from the late 15th century, and was printed in the famous

Hortus sanitatis (1492). This kind of monster, sporting a human upper body, the tail of a fish,

armour and a helmet, is sometimes called Zitiron. But the creature itself is of course not particular

to Ambroise Paré or the work mentioned above: these are members of more general imagined

species of aquatic humans that feature in the literature on medicine (such as Paré), and natural

history, such as the 16th century scholar Conrad Gesner’s exuberantly influential Historiæ

animalium.28 It may seem strange, of course, but the assumption about the existence of such

monsters had strong scientific credentials in the generally accepted principle expounded to the

revered Pliny, according to whom all land animals have equivalents in the sea and vice versa.29

Given this principle, the existence of sea humans can be derived from the observation that there

are ordinary humans. The most common type of homo marinus seems to be a being with a human

upper body that is fused with the back part of a fish. In a few cases, there are human upper

bodies integrated with a whole fish and in some cases they are complete human bodies riding on

fishes or other sea animals.30 In any case, as we said, relevant scientific works of the 16th and

17th centuries unambiguously acknowledged the existence of such beings. In short, the examples

of homines marini could be multiplied ad infinitum, so the individual example chosen is not the

point; rather, what we need to emphasise here is the fact that the position of the objects in the

image does not form the basis of an argument against them being spikes or scales on the

monstrous sovereign’s body. On the contrary, this kind of monster is often depicted with its tail

bent upwards, and thus the spikes of scales could be (just barely) visible on that level. The lower

body would not necessarily be that of a fish, but could just as well be that of a dragon.

Again, one could raise the objection that this interpretation is unlikely since the objects in the

                                                                                                               28 Conrad Gesner: Historiæ animalium, xxx. 29 Pliny: Naturalis historia xxxx. 30 Sirènes et centaures, xxx.

       

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frontispiece are vertical, unlike the fins or spikes protruding from the Zitiron’s body above. But

depending on the position and direction of the spikes and the tail, this would be compatible with

the Leviathan having such a lower body. A possible point of comparison would be the following

image:

The image is from The Hastings Hours, a collection of portraits of saints from the late 15th century,

made for Lord William of Hastings. The aquatic creature to the left has a dragon’s body, and the

spikes on its tail are very similar to the spikes which appear behind the hills in the frontispiece

(The Hastings Hours 1983: [279] p. 87). If the tail of this creature were bent further toward the

head, as in the image from Hortus sanitatis, the spikes on its tail would be visible above a line like

the hills in the frontispiece of Leviathan. What is more, if the lower were bent upwards and

diagonally in that way, the spikes would be vertical or near-vertical, and the rest of the tail would

not be visible.

The hitherto unidentified objects are thus parts on the Leviathan’s monstrous body, and the

forces defending the country against the forein invasion are consequently firing at the Leviathan.

In accordance with the parallelity of the patterns of religious symbols to the right and political

and military to the left – as well as the military garrison and the church on opposite sides of each

other in the town – the barely visible parts of Leviathan’s monstrous lower body would thus be a

symbol of the physical violence of the state, just as the church is a symbol of the power of the

mind. In a word, it is as if the parts of the monstrous body were part of the armoury of the state.

They symbolise or embody the state’s physical power and violence, and in this case it is the

violence of a foreign, invading, and hostile state.

We have discovered a monster in the image: we have seen that the body, in which previous

       

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interpretations have detected nothing monstrous, is indeed that of a water monster. We have four

very good reasons to believe that this is the case. First, the Biblical Leviathan is unambiguously

an aquatic creature. Second, the Leviathan in the frontispiece emerges from the water. Third, his

torso is covered with scales just like those of a fish. Fourth, the enigmatic objects beyond the hills

can only be accounted for if we grant that the Leviathan has the lower body of a fish or dragon,

scales and all. In the next section we will see that such monsters and the concomitant

iconographic tradition is relevant in Hobbes’s time, life, work – and that the frontispiece may

carry a very special allusion to the politics of Hobbes’s (very early and later) lifetime.

The Monsters of Hobbes’s Time and Life

In this paenultimate section, we will argue for the relevance and importance of monsters in

Hobbes’s time and works, and we will very tentatively suggest that the monster in the

frontispiece carries a very special allusion. It could appear strange to wish to connect Hobbes, the

great champion of the new science, to bestiaries, monsters and superstition. Of course, we do not

have to suppose that Hobbes himself believed anything particular about the existence of such

monsters – what is important here is, as Robert Schuhmann pointed out in a different context,

that of Hobbes and Renaissance hermeticism, what kind of influential, traditional, fashionable

and powerful images Hobbes may have considered useful tools to employ in his writings.31 But

we know that Hobbes’s epoch had not at all done away with such monsters.

First, we should perhaps not underestimate the visual importance of such creatures in the kind of

Romanesque and Gothic architecture surrounding Hobbes in Paris during the composition of

Leviathan – such as the impressive little homo marinus, in French referred to as drac, just inside the

entrance in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.32 This line of research is, to be sure, still an undiscovered

continent in Hobbes studies.

Second, we saw that this was the case in the most influential 16th and 17th century works on

medicine, natural history, and zoology, such as Conrad Gesner and Ambroise Paré. We can take

for granted that a person with a very broad scientific interest, such as Hobbes, was most familiar

with such works – and Hobbes’s images of political ‘malformations’ and ‘diseases’ in Leviathan are                                                                                                                31 Karl Schuhmann: alcuni temi, 32 Reproduced in, e.g., Bestiaire des...

       

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more than reminiscent of teratological works such as Paré’s.33

Third, the language and imagery of monstrosity were widely employed in political debates in

Hobbes’s time, with people accusing each other of being various kinds of monsters or just

monstrous.34 Again, there would have been good reasons for Hobbes to participate in this kind

of language in order to make his prose and visual messages more powerful.

Fourth, the existence of monsters was established in travel accounts and maps, particularly in

relation to the exploration of the New World. Exploring naval officers such as Walter Raleigh,

Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish described contacts with exotic reptiles, dragons, and other

fabulous animals. In Hobbes’s time, then, these monsters were not considered figments of the

imagination, but real. We do not know exactly what Hobbes read in this regard, but we do have

his own words about his early interest in monsters. In Hobbes’ 1672 autobiography in verse, we

hear:

Quoque Dracus filo Neptunum, Candisiusque How Drake and Cavendish a girdle made Cinxerunt medium ; quaeque adiere loca Quite round the world, what climates they survey’d; Atque hominum exiguos, si possem, cernere nidos, And strive to fond the smaller cells of men. Et picta ignotis monstra videre locis. And painted monsters in their unknown den. (Hobbes 1839-45 vol 1: lxxxvii) (Hobbes 1994: lv)

So long after the conception of Leviathan, Hobbes talked about his wish to discern or see (cernere)

”painted monsters” (picta [...] monstra). In short, whether Hobbes believed in such monstrous

creatures or not, we cannot deny his keen interest in them.

We have thus seen Hobbes himself include monsters in his intellectual trajectory. And this may

be important in one more respect. For the same autobiography is also famous because of a

passage in which Hobbes describes his own genesis and, in a way, that of his temper and his

theory.

Fama ferebat enim diffusa per oppida nostra, For through the scattered towns a rumor ran Extremum genti classe venire diem that our peopleʹs last day was coming in a fleet, Atque metum tantum concepit tunc mea mater, and so much fear my mother conceived at that time Ut pareret geminos, meque metumque simul. that she gave birth to twins: myself and Fear. (Hobbes 1839-45 vol. 1: lxxxvi)

These lines relate to the approaching Spanish Armada, the 137 warships sent by Philip II, and it

is indication of how Hobbes wanted – or, rather, wanted his readers – to understand the

psychological sources of his theory. His thinking was based on fear.

                                                                                                               33 Leviathan, xxx. 34 Cf. Charles I: Eikon basilike, xxx; Gangræna, xxx.

       

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Is this at all important for our purposes? Perhaps. For it was Hobbes himself who mythologised

the event in his biography, explicitly linked to the issue of political authority and fear. Therefore,

the conception of fear and war in the work of Hobbes is connected to foreign threats as well as

domestic dangers. And at the beginning of the life of Hobbes himself, there had been a very real

threat. The English navy was not large enough to encounter the force of this gigantic Armada. As

mentioned earlier, this period was only the very beginning of the era of English colonialism; the

Armada carried an invasion force that the English did not stand a chance to resist. The fragile

English naval forces did not manage to sink one single Spanish ship, but weather conditions and

other lucky circumstances led to an English victory.

But is the reference to the Armada relevant in the context of the frontispiece? Can there be an

allusion to it? We have seen that there is a war in the image, and a foreign power attempting to

invade the country. Moreover, we have seen that the Leviathan towering over the landscape can

be interpreted as a foreign sovereign if the objects beyond the hills are parts of his monstrous

body, for the artillery of the domestic forces fire at them. The sovereign represented in the

frontispiece is thus a foreign, usurping power. Furthermore, after 1588 images of the Armada

circulated in England, images in which Philip II was portrayed as the “great dragon”.35 We have

seen that if there is a dragon in the frontispiece, it is the enormous, only half-human, monstrous

sovereign. Curiously, then, there may be an allusion to the Armada, and in that case sovereignty is

exemplified not by a king whose agenda Hobbes could sympathise with, but with an ardent

champion of the Roman Catholicism that he loathed. This would seem outlandish, but in the

final section we will see how this could serve very well as the incorporation of Hobbes’s doctrine

of political authority in the image.

Conclusions and implications

Above, we have tried to argue that there is such a monster concealed in the famous frontispiece

itself. Moreover, we have tried to show that the frontispiece depicts a battle between the armed

forces from the country in the image and those of a foreign power attacking from the sea.

Interestingly, the parts of the sovereign’s lower body that protrude from behind the cliffs appear

to be part of the foreign threat, for artillery is being fired at it from the land. Moreover, we have

tentatively suggested that the representation of the foreign, invading sovereign towering over the

landscape may allude to the attempted invasion by the Armada and Philip II in 1588.

                                                                                                               35 Pasqualucci: Commento al Leviathan, p. 173?.

       

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What are the implications of this? Let us point at two possibilities.

The first is that the monstrous appearance of the Leviathan could serve a very special purpose –

didactic or manipulative, depending on one’s perspective. Why does Hobbes employ monster

images? A clue is given in a 1688 letter: ‘Do Painters, when they Paint the Face of the Earth, leave

a blanck beyond what they know? Do not they fill up the space with strange Rocks, Monsters,

and other Gallantry, to fix their work in the memory of Men by the delight of fancy? So will your

Reader from this poem think honourably of their original, which is a kind of piety.’36 The

purpose is thus ‘piety’, and piety is, of course, an eminently political phenomenon for Hobbes

(and the just barely hidden monster in the frontispiece did serve the purpose of ‘fix[ing]’ the work

of Hobbes and the artist ‘in the memory of Men’ well, for we are all familiar with the title page of

Leviathan). And given the importance of images in Hobbes’s theory, the image of the sovereign

monster can be understood as an arcane or only hinted at source of fear and trembling – that is,

the sea monster serves the purpose of inducing the ‘terror’ that, in Hobbes’s own words, ‘inable[s

the sovereign to conforme the wills of them all’.37 Hobbes’s words about the importance of

‘terror’ show how fundamental fear is to the Leviathanic state. Of course, the relation between

rational insight into the principles of Hobbes’s ‘civil science’ on the hand and the non-rational

sources of obedience to Hobbes’s state has been debated – one example would be Noel

Malcolm, who claims that ‘rational obedience’ and ‘passionate obedience’ are ‘interdependent’ in

Hobbes’s project.38 Our interpretation of the frontispiece would contribute to the understanding

of Hobbes by revealing a hitherto undiscovered source of such ‘passionate’ obedience, deriving

from the passion of fear. We know that images acquire a fundamental role in Hobbes’s theory,

since they condition the thoughts of the subjects and readers.39 In accordance with this insight,

the aquatic monster in the frontispiece could serve as the object of a quasi-subliminal perception

that conditions citizens’ and readers’ minds so as to make them fear the sovereign and obey the

law. For the hidden monstrous tail of the Leviathan in the frontispiece is more terrifying than a

normal human lower body would be.

                                                                                                               36 See Hobbes’s letter to the Hon. Edward Howard, from Chatsworth, 24 October (/3 November) 1668, in Thomas Hobbes: The Correspondence, II, 1660-1679, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 (ed. Noel Malcolm), p. 704-706, here p. 706; according to Malcolm’s commentary, the lines quoted here are not found in the manuscript, but in the version printed in Howard’s The Brittish Princes. 37 Leviathan, xvii, p. 88 / 137. 38 Noel Malcolm: ‘The title page of Leviathan, seen in a curious perspective’, in Aspects of Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 200-229, at p. 228. 39 Leijenhorst: ‘Sense and Nonsense About Sense’; Bredekamp: Thomas Hobbes Der Leviathan, passim; Tralau: ‘Leviathan, the Beast of Myth’, p..

       

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The second possibility is that at a time when legitimacy was primarily conceived of as a dynastic

issue, the battle going on between the land forces on the one hand and the sea forces and the

Leviathan on the other hand can be understood as a perfect embodiment of Hobbes’s theory of

legitimacy. The Leviathan can be a dynastic ruler, a usurping upstart, or a foreign sovereign

invading a country, for dynasties are of no great importance to Hobbes – this is the provocative

truth, and the reproach that Hobbes’s royalist adversaries actually made him after the publication

of Leviathan. So even the foreign king that invades the country in the frontispiece is the legitimate

ruler, provided he succeeds. In an eye-opening book, Jeffrey Collins has argued that the book

Leviathan was a way of showing that Hobbes wished to accommodate himself with Cromwell and

the new régime, and that Hobbes’s monarchist credentials are thus a sham.40 The only thing that

matters for Hobbes is thus de facto sovereignty, whether it be that of Charles I, Cromwell, or even

Philip II. Our interpretation shows that the title page provides the perfect illustration of this

controversial element in Hobbes’s doctrine. If, as we have suggested, the great dragon that comes

from the sea alludes to the envisaged Spanish invasion, then this is an exuberantly provocative

way of showing the implications of Hobbes’s account of political obligation. It is rational to

comply with the rules enacted by the most powerful sovereign, religious rules as well as political

rules, even though the mightiest sovereign could be the king of Spain – an abominable prospect

according to Hobbes himself, yet perfectly compatible with his theory of sovereignty. There

could not be a more provocative way of illustrating this theory.

                                                                                                               40 Jeffrey Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, passim.