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This book is the first to contribute to the pre-history of camouflage, that is its history before its codification in Evolution Theory in the 1860s and 70s, and military use in World War I. Its history is in fact much older, going back to the zoological writings of Aristotle and observations of mimicry among animals and humans in Homer's Odyssey. Defining camouflage as an adaptive change of appearance or behaviour, this publication starts from the fact that this is a very common phenomenon among humans and animals, based on our common ability to create images. The mask is the point where animal and human camouflage meet. The essays do not only present a major stage in the history of camouflage, but also develop a new history and theory of the mask by reconstructing its origins in animal behaviour.
- First history of camouflage before Darwin, showing connections between image-making by animals and by humans in the arts
- Offers a new way of thinking about the mask and masquerade as a paradigm for image-making
- Major contribution to rethinking animal-human relations
Caroline van Eck is Professor of Art History at Cambridge University. Recent publications include 'Notes on the prehistory of camouflage as a cultural technique', West 86th 30/1 (2023).
Bram Van Oostveldt is a professor in the Department of Art, Music and Theatre Studies at Ghent University. In 2013, he published a monograph on the concept of naturalness in 18th-century theatre. With Stijn Bussels, he co-authored The Sublime in the Visual Culture of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Routledge, 2023).
Zoë Vanderhaeghen is a doctoral researcher at Ghent University, examining the gendered politics of dissimulation and simulation in early modern court culture, focusing on practices of masking and the use of animal symbolism. Before starting her PhD, she worked as a research assistant on the Ghent and Cambridge project Camouflage, Zoomorphism, and the Origins of the Image, where she developed an online catalogue on camouflage inthe arts.