Laughter Embodied

Abstract

If the laughter of the late medieval fools, Ulenspieghel and the characters of the jestbooks can never be heard again, its visualization is less mysterious. From around 1500 several portraits of individual jesters were painted in the Low Countries, in which the fool laughs at the beholder of the picture. Sometimes he looks through his fingers, which is a Dutch wordplay meaning that he is winking at something. In general he makes foolish gestures and is surrounded by symbols of folly.¹ All this confirms that the fool’s open-mouthed laughter is of a special kind and is, indeed, his chief distinguishing feature. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries laughing jesters remained a familiar item in Netherlandish art although, of course, the content and meaning of the pictures shifted. Moreover, in Netherlandish genre painting of these centuries laughing faces were omnipresent. This chapter is concerned with the contours of these laughing mouths, rather than the moral which they were supposed to convey.² It is after all remarkable that such loud laughter has found autonomous expression in renaissance and baroque art, whereas previous centuries had only seen sedate smiles or grotesque laughter in specific contexts. In what follows the main sources for this significant change in the representation of laughter will be identified.