Musée du Louvre, Paris, 16th October 2024–3rd February 2025 

This dizzying, ambitious exhibition revolves around the figure of the fool from the thirteenth to the sixteenth and into the nineteenth century. For many viewers the fool will probably bring to mind a court jester, a comedic entertainer clothed in satin motley. However, by displaying a wide selection of works primarily from northern Europe in a range of media, of which painting is the least important, the curatorial team, led by Élisabeth Antoine-König and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, demonstrate that during this period, the fool wore many faces.[1] 

There are six main thematic sections, presented in chronological order, as well as two smaller sections called ‘Prologue’ and an ‘Interlude’. ‘Prologue’ opens the exhibition with a display of medieval marginalia in works such as stained glass, misericords of choir stalls and manuscripts. It is argued that the bizarre human-animal hybrids they often include represent an antecedent to the fool, whose position on the margins of society matches the liminality of the depictions. The first explicit images of the fool are found in illustrations of Psalm 52:1, ‘The fool said in his heart: There is no God’. In the psalter of Jean, duc de Berry (cat. no.28; Fig.17), the fool is draped in a white cloth. With his left hand he raises a round piece of bread or cheese to his lips, while in his right he wields a club, a precursor of the fool’s baton. The club somewhat resembles a cross and the bare-chested white man with long brown hair recalls contemporary depictions of Christ. Indeed, as Le Pogam explains in the catalogue, ‘Christianity understood that the inversion of values was at the basis of the quest for salvation and that ‘folly’ was therefore not an additional path but a necessary one to attain sanctity’ (p.43). St Francis of Assisi, who rejected worldly values in order to imitate Christ, is the exhibition’s example of what the French call a ‘fou de dieu’. 

The saint’s divinely senseless love finds its profane sequel in the next section, ‘Fools and Love’, which shifts the subject into the fourteenth and fifteenth century. The ox-blood colour of the walls contrast with the celestial blue walls of the first room. Here, a familiar figure begins to emerge: the fool clothed in motley, wearing a hood decorated with horns or donkey’s ears and hung with bells. The fool becomes a victim of women, as in the representation of Aristotle and Phyllis. Among the various depictions of the legend is an aquamanile in metalwork that shows the old philosopher on all fours and the young woman riding on his back (c.1380; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The fool began to be associated with the excesses of courtly life as well as with the potential pitfalls of courtly love. An engraving by Alart du Hameel (c.1490; British Museum, London; no.53) shows a fool crouching like a contortionist beneath a fountain and snaking a hand under the skirt of a woman distracted by her lover’s embrace. 

While the fool started to be depicted in the new medium of print, he was also represented in a wide array of other media, attesting to the pervasiveness of the fool as a companion of everyday life. There were fools on ivory caskets, flags, shop signs and medals. A towel rail attributed to Arnt van Tricht features a woman and a fool embracing; tiny fools emerge from their bodies (no.63; Fig.16). Similarly remarkable is a cast bronze sculpture of a fool, which has nine holes and probably functioned as a hearth-blower (16th century; private collection; no.193). It could be filled with water through one of the holes and placed near the fire. When the water boiled, steam would shoot out of the eight other holes, as though emanating from his orifices, including some in his pelvic region. 

The third section, ‘The Fool at Court’ delves more deeply into the increasingly institutionalised presence of fools in noble households and is followed by ‘The Fool in the City’, which includes representations of carnival, during which people dressed as fools to take part in topsy-turvy revelry. On display in an adjacent round gallery, painted mustard yellow, are a number of objects related to the mauresque, a dynamic form of dance that was supposed to express the foolish behaviour of men competing for a woman’s love. Replicas (1957–58; Stadtmuseum, Munich) of the famous mauresque dancers carved by Erasmus Grasser (c.1480; Stadtmuseum) are intended to convey the vertiginous spirit of the dance. 

The decision to paint each section of the exhibition a different, bold colour, in imitation of the fool’s motley, does succeed in conveying a certain zaniness. Yet this attempt at jollity is made at the expense of the more troubling and ultimately more profound aspects of the figure. The fifth section, ‘The Fool Everywhere’, displays prints and paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Younger and their followers on two forest green walls, which curve towards one another in imitation of the stern of a ship. This is a tribute to Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of fools (1494), the publication of which, the exhibition argues, marked the apogee and the ubiquity of the fool as an allegory of human imbecility. There are well-known works by Bosch in this section, including the Ship of fools (no.264; Fig.18), Extraction of the stone of madness (c.1501–05; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid; no.269) and the pen drawing Man tree (c.1500–10; Albertina Museum, Vienna; no.266), in which a tree with a human face sprouts an egg-like protuberance, the gaping back of which reveals a cargo of rowdy revellers. Such images attest to the shifting locale of folly from artefacts to the imagination of the artist, a change described in Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge Classique (1961), which underpins much of the exhibition’s concept. For Foucault, folly is not the image of an egg bursting with a grimacing choir and a donkey lutist in the copy after Bosch’s Concert in the egg (mid-16th century; Palais des Beaux- Arts, Lille; no.256); rather it is Bosch’s ability to imagine such a thing. 

By this time, however, even the most intrepid exhibition-goer may have difficulty appreciating these marvels. This is a complex, challenging exhibition, which can be best understood if the dense wall texts are read carefully. There are almost three hundred objects, many of small size and each worthy of careful study. And there are further sections: the ‘Interlude’ makes a brief, and consequently undeveloped argument for the dissipation of the fool during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the final section, ‘The Resurgence and Modernity of the Fool’, offers a hasty sketch of the birth of psychiatry and the genius of the Romantic artist. For any visitor who wants to comprehend the exhibition’s concept, the catalogue is essential. Essays by numerous leading scholars complement contributions by Antoine- König and Le Pogam, and each object is discussed in an entry, in which its iconography is thoroughly analysed. 

The tension that runs throughout the exhibition is most clearly exposed in the third section, ‘The Fool at Court’, which examines the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ fools, ubiquitous at European courts in the medieval and Early Modern periods. ‘Artificial fools’ were actors, comics and wits, who pretended to be silly or stupid and who engaged in scathing, humorous exchanges with the princes. ‘Natural fools’ were people with disabilities. This is no longer the terrain of allegory, which makes it difficult for the curators, who are insistent in the wall texts, catalogue and public presentations, that this exhibition does not offer a history of mental illness. It is therefore unclear why Juan de Flandes’s portrait of Jeanne de Castille (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; no.111) is included. The daughter of Isabella I of Castile (d.1504) and Ferdinand II of Aragon (d.1516), Joanna married Philip the Fair (d.1506), with whom she was, according to the label, ‘passionately in love’. On account of her erratic behaviour after Philip’s death – specifically her refusal to allow his body to be buried – she is known as Joanna the Mad. In the portrait, which was probably painted c.1496, well before Philip’s death, as part of their marriage negotiations, the artist depicted her oblong face against a dark green background, which shows her glowing like the fool’s egg, seemingly rich with secrets. Yet Jeanne is not a ‘figure of the fool’. She was a woman with mental difficulties, who wore neither motley, nor bells, nor wielded a baton. The mad love that she expressed for her husband is an example of human behaviour in history that was categorised as foolish by her contemporaries. Even if the curators do not wish to offer a history of the pathological aspects of madness, this is in effect what they are doing, by including the portrait of Jeanne. This reviewer wonders why the curators felt the need to disavow the history of mental illness in the first place. It is a thorny subject, to be sure, but in this otherwise intellectually rigorous exhibition it is a curious omission. On the whole, however, this a remarkable show, which demonstrates that during the late medieval period artists found in the figure of the fool a fertile subject for their creative folly.

[1] Catalogue: Figures du fou: Du Moyen Âge aux Romantiques. Edited by Élisabeth Antoine-König and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, with contributions by Christine Chabod and Vincent Rousseau. 448 pp. incl. 400 col. ills. (Musée du Louvre éditions and Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2024), €45. ISBN 978–2–07–307303–7.