Note 14 — Chapter III · ULM AND NUREMBERG
Reading edition
In church architecture, and in early book ornamentation, which reflects so well the ideas and customs of the time, the fool did not make his appearance before the middle of the fifteenth century. Wright, in his History of Caricature, mentions as early instances some sculptures of this date in churches of Cornwall, and it was about the same time that this personage is first seen in manuscript decoration.
The idea, however, was much older, springing from that taste for the grotesque which characterised the Middle Ages, and the relics of which are seen in so many artistic remains of the period. From the tenth century and even earlier, companies of fools existed in all large towns, and on certain occasions Mother Folly and the Lord of Misrule reigned supreme. The cult of the ass, whose ears were to become later part of the fool’s insignia, was another outcome of this love of the burlesque.
In printed books, the first engraving we are acquainted with of a fool is in the border to the Liber Biblie Moralis of 1475. In initial letters, as far as we have been able to ascertain, this subject was not used before 1480, when it is to be found in specimens both of Augsburg and of Strasburg. A remarkable portrait of a fool is contained in an O in Schott’s Plenarium, printed, as is stated in the colophon, at ‘Strospurg,’ in 1481. Knoblochtzer’s large S, for the Dyalogus Solomonis et Marcolfi, gives a fool with another personage at full length, and at last the typical fool, with a marotte and all other accoutrements, is met with in initials of different Psalters, being well seen in that of Fürter of Basle.
Henceforth, with a face characterised by leering cunning, the type is to remain unchanged, and Brandt, Erasmus, and Holbein only add to its popularity, without modifying the general conception. There is a little pictorial initial by Quentell, in which the usual expression is replaced by one of extreme finesse, but coarser cunning is the rule, and it is under this aspect that the fool is depicted by Holbein in the R of the alphabet of Death.