Menacing laughter in sixteenth-century pitture ridicole

Abstract

The awareness of laughter’s artistic value is perhaps one of the greatest contributions of the Renaissance to Lachenkultur (the culture of laughter). As Mikhail Bakhtin observed, laughter at that time passed “from an almost elemental condition to a state of artistic awareness and purposefulness.” A similar statement was made by Robert Klein in a seminal essay on folly and irony published in 1963. Klein studied the new “techniques” of comedy that appeared in the Renaissance together with an ever-increasing selfawareness: from the medieval figure of the fool, accepted for his social functions, to the emergence of irony, practiced by humanists and considered the ultimate and most complex form of mirth, able to express critical attitudes toward reality. Following these paths, and Paul Barolsky’s groundbreaking Infinite Jest (1978), I tried to define the specificity of certain forms and processes of laughter in images from the early modern period, which I described as “facetious” (facétieuse). With this term, I meant to refer to the playfulness that developed within a circle of people sharing similar values. To exist, facetious laughter needs a certain connivance since it plays on equivocation and ambiguity and relies largely on the unspoken; it also requires decryption, which is part of its pleasure. My use of the expression “facetious painting” (peinture facétieuse) refers to an “art of jest” that gained a new importance during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in accord with the playfulness that Johan Huizinga recognized as one of the major elements of humanistic