A Foul and Pestilent Congregation

Images of Freaks in Baroque Art

Barry Wind

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138612891
• eBook ISBN: 9780429865138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1998, this volume explores how in the seventeenth century depictions of human oddity, hunchbacks, cripples, dwarfs, appeared regularly in the work of both minor and major artists including Veláquez, Rubens, Van Dyck and Rivera. In this, the first comprehensive study of these images, Barry Wind starts with the topoi for the mentally and physically infirm established in antiquity and traces their development into the Baroque period. A delight in the unusual was consonant with the contemporary collection of other exotica, convoluted shells and strange animals, but human 'freaks' provoked more than curiosity. Their representation ranged from taxonomic fascination to derisive mockery. They were frequently cast as imperfect foils to the fashionable courtiers who sought aggrandizement through juxtaposition. The images were also exploited as metaphors for a favourite theme of the period 'the world turned upside down'. In this synthesis of repulsion and fascination, mockery and dread, the portrayal of these 'others' reveals a dark underside of Baroque culture that has never been thoroughly investigated or understood. With the support of 75 reproductions of works from Italy, Spain and Northern Europe, Barry Wind examines representations of human deformity throughout the baroque period. He pursues his account into the eighteenth century and the expression of a new sympathetic understanding and compassion. His study, written with great clarity, makes available hitherto obscure and inaccessible material gathered from diverse sources such as medical treatises, literary texts, popular ballads and court documents to set these images in their context and explain this obsession with difference.

1

‘Unlike Form Oft Blended Be / Into One Hideous Deformity’

In his turbulent play of monarchical treachery, Richard III, Shakespeare presents a paradigm of the early modern view of deformity. In Act I, scene i, the misshapen Richard triumphantly proclaims his evil as a consequence of his disfigurement.

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks

Nor made to court the amorous looking glass...

I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them-...

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity

And therefore...

I am determined to prove a villain...

Richard’s loathsome ‘persona’ provokes revulsion. Lady Anne, in Act I, scene ii, compares him to ‘adders, spiders, toads’ and decries this ‘lump of foul deformity’. But Shakespeare reveals many other aspects of Richard, ranging from sinister fascination with his strangeness to a perception of Richard as a jocular court fool. At ‘two hours old, ’ we are told in Act II, iv, Richard could gnaw a crust, thus demonstrating an astonishing deviation from the norm.¹ In playful bantering with the young Duke of York, (Act III, i), Richard is likened to a clown who bears an ape on his shoulder. Additionally, he is capable of reversing the normative order of things, turning the world upside down through words and actions. He suggests in Act I, scene iv that he is a saint, but he reveals himself as a devil. He viciously twists words, compromising their meaning.

Thus like the formal vice Iniquity

I moralize two meanings in one word (III, i)

And in Act I, scene iii he gleefully disguises his misshapen body with the product of ‘some score or two of tailors’.

Shakespeare’s vision of deformity, ranging from taxonomic curiosity and evil omen to derision and revulsion, is conditioned by a set of received views stemming from antiquity and the Middle Ages. But it is not only Shakespeare who reveals these attitudes. Indeed, it is an attitude with wide cultural resonance in the early modern period, informing not only literary texts, popular ballads and medical treatises, but also seventeenth-century depictions of the deformed, mentally infirm and physically bizarre. In the following survey we will trace the foundation and embellishment of these conceits to see how these topoi are established and codified.

In the Generation of Animals and the Problemata, Aristotle, in his characteristically thorough way, discussed the problem of ‘terata’, the Greek term for the deviant and the malformed. Aberrant births resulting in freakish deformities were merely the result of the confusion of semen or an arbitrary deviation from Nature.² These anomalies could be celebrated and sought after. In a long encomium to human diversity in Book VII of the Natural History, Pliny stated: ‘the power and majesty of the nature of the universe at every turn lacks credence if one’s mind embraces parts of it only, and not the whole’.³ In the next chapter he discussed the panoply of diversity, ranging from androgynes to umbrella-footed tribesmen, from bearded women to dwarfs.⁴

The desire for the unusual in the ancient world resulted in the avid collection of human oddities. As Horace noted: ‘the abnormal and unusual capture and transfix the eyes’.⁵ The emperor Domitian attended public entertainment accompanied by a boy clad in flaming scarlet, whose head was abnormally small.⁶ And among the oddities favoured by the Romans were dwarfs. Julia, the granddaughter of Augustus, kept as ‘a pet’ the dwarf Canopas.⁷ Tiberius had a pet dwarf who accompanied his buffoons at the dinner table.⁸ Longinus recorded that dwarfs were deliberately kept in cages to stunt their growth further, and thus satisfy the great interest in distortion.⁹ In his Controversiae, Seneca elaborated on the practice of using the deliberately deformed to satisfy the appetite for oddities. Children were intentionally maimed: ‘Finding a different savagery for each, this bone breaker cuts off the arms of one, slices the sinews of another: one he twists, another he castrates.’¹⁰ Idiocy was also cultivated. A pithy epigram by Martial underscores the fascination with the non-normative and the keen disappointment when intelligence instead of cretenism was discovered. ‘He has been described as an idiot. I bought him for twenty thousand sesterces. Give me back my money Gargialianus: he has his wits.’¹¹

The entertainment potential of human oddity, in fact, was a commonplace in antiquity. Hermaphrodites were used as ‘entertainments’, and Pompey the Great devoted theatrical decorations to various human oddities.¹² The clownish, humpbacked Maccus was pressed into service as a character on the Roman stage.¹³ In the Carousal Lucian gave a piquant description of ‘a tough little dwarf who served as a comic performer.

The host ordered the clown to come in and say something funny in order to make his guests still merrier. In came an ugly fellow with his head shaven except for a few hairs that stood straight on his crown. First he danced doubling himself up and twisting himself about to cut a more ridiculous figure.¹⁴

And Tacitus recorded how the deformed Vatinius, ‘among the foulest prodigies of that court’, not only entertained Nero with his scurrilous wit, but also was the target of mockery.¹⁵ Accordingly, like many of the misshapen pets at court, Vatinius embodied both subservience and familiarity.

The interest in the unusual aroused sentiments which went beyond diversion or taxonomic curiosity. Plutarch moralized against

a sort of people at Rome who, being unaffected with anything that is beautiful and pretty either in the works of art or nature, despise the most curious pieces in painting or sculpture and the fairest boys and girls that are exposed for sale, as not worth their money: therefore they much frequent the monster-market, looking after people of distorted limbs and preternatural shapes, of three eyes and pointed heads

Where kinds of unlike form oft blended be

Into one hideous deformity.

All of which are sights so loathsome, that they themselves would abhor them were they compelled often to behold them.¹⁶

With the interest in uglification also came derision. Plautus acutely remarked: ‘No one is curious who is not malevolent.’¹⁷ Indeed, a number of Roman writers suggested that deformity provoked laughter. In his analysis of the risible, Cicero claimed that ‘loud laughter’ is ‘levelled against ugliness or some physical defect’, thus allowing for cruel humour at the expense of the deformity of others.¹⁸ Juvenal mockingly recorded the derisive sobriquet of the giant Atlas for a dwarf or the burlesque nickname of Europa, the fair beloved of Jupiter, for a deformed woman.¹⁹ Statius described a knot of battling dwarfs in mock-heroic combat which provoked the laughter of ‘Mars and bloodstained Valour’.²⁰ And Seneca discussed the grim intentional disfigurement of a child in terms of the potential to excite laughter. ‘In yet another, he stunts the shoulder blades, beating them into an ugly hump, looking for a laugh for his intentional cruelty.’²¹

This sinister side of the fascination with deformity is echoed in another response to terata in anti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Unlike Form Oft Blended Be / Into One Hideous Deformity’
• 2 The Court and its cruel pleasures: ‘freaks’ in Italy
• 3 ‘Great wonders of nature’: Ribera and deformity
• 4 Spain and the ‘hombre de placer’
• 5 Courtiers and Burghers
• 6 Enlightened attitudes: the eighteenth century and beyond
• Excursus: two clowns at the Spanish Court
• Bibliography
• Index of names
• Subject index