Okay, so picture me — Ally, yes that Ally — standing in the Louvre, which is huge and echoey and smells faintly of old paper and people who care about art in a way I care about men (a complicated spectrum). I’m caught in a room where every painting looks like the world has tilted, and everyone’s invited to laugh at the tilt. They call it 'Figures of the Fool' and I swear my inner monologue started tap-dancing before I even bought the catalog.
First: medieval margins. Tiny monks with huge imaginations filled the edges of prayer books with monsters and nonsense. These little marginalia are like the notes you write in the margins of a breakup letter — private, naughty, a little rebellious. The fool sits squarely in those margins — hood, bells, marotte — sometimes donkey ears, sometimes a cross-shaped tonsure, sometimes a bagpipe head full of wind. I think of my head. Is it bagpipe-y? Sometimes, probably.
Back then, 'fool' wasn’t just insult; it was theology and theater and medicine all stuffed into one costume. Psalm 52 gets the fool a starring role: 'The fool says in his heart, there is no God.' Oof. That’s heavy. So the fool is at once a moral warning, a symbol of lust, a carnival star, and sometimes a wise fool who speaks truth by acting absurd. It’s like when someone blurts out the horrible truth at dinner and everyone pretends they didn’t hear it. Classic.
And love — obviously love. Courtly love turns people into lunatics (literally, lunatics — moon imagery everywhere). Think Tristan and Iseult and Lancelot — love as a fever that makes you cut off your perfect life to wander in the forest like a very dramatic wild man. The fool appears in gardens of love, as if lust and lunacy hold hands and skip through a hedge maze. Someone please tell Richard to stop quoting medieval poets at me; I’d rather he be straightforwardly imperfect.
Then there's the court fool. Oh my God, the court fools. There are 'natural fools' — the ones born different, sometimes with disabilities — and 'artificial fools' — hired jesters who are cleverer than the king. They wore bells, quartered clothing, sometimes a marotte with a tiny head that’s basically a tiny mirror. They were protected and intimate. They could say the king’s truth because they were wrapped in a costume that allowed them to be dangerous. That is a power move I respect. It makes me think of being a lawyer — you’re allowed to speak certain truths in a courtroom that you’d never say at Thanksgiving without starting a fight and maybe freeing a horse.
There are also charivaris and carnivals — collective moments when society flips itself upside down. For a few days, the rules reset; children play bishop and the world gets hilarious and frightening. I can imagine an entire episode filmed in one of those festivals. Confetti. Donkey ears. Someone loses a tiara. Someone else gets roasted. It’s like New Year’s Eve for an entire village, with less champagne and more theological meaning.
And then you have Brant’s Nef des fous — a ship full of fools sailing toward Narragonie — an early rap on hypocrisy and excess. It’s satire with woodcuts and bright hand-colored panic. Erasmus writes the Praise of Folly and basically says, 'hey, maybe some madness is wisdom.' That’s the kind of intellectual backflip that would make John Cage smile and make my therapist raise an eyebrow. The funny thing is: the fool is a mirror. Artists like Bosch and Bruegel actually hold up this mirror and make us see our own ridiculousness. We look and we giggle and then we notice our own faces in the glass and the giggle gets stuck somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
There’s a quiet, creepy shift after the Renaissance. The fool drifts out of royal tents and into taverns, fairs, and the dirt of everyday life. The Enlightenment and Cartesian clarity push away the carnival clamor and suddenly, the fool’s role narrows into pathologies that doctors try to categorize with fancy labels — melancholia, monomania, idiocy. Pinel unshackles patients in 1792 and psychiatry is born. And suddenly the madman becomes clinical, cataloged, measured. Portraits of patients turn into case studies. It feels less like a costume and more like an X-ray. I thought of the times I’ve been labeled — anxious, dramatic, idealistic — and how quickly a label can become a sentence.
Romantics, though, loved the fool again. They saw madness as a doorway to passion and truth. Géricault painted madmen in ways that felt like portraits and confessions. Courbet dresses himself in fool’s costume and looks like a man pleading to be seen honestly. It’s like those nights when you’re raw and you sing into your shower and it’s the truest version of you, even if every neighbor would call it crazy.
There are also small, cutting historical snapshots that make my lawyer brain twinge: fools used in political satire or to attack enemies. Famous pamphlets labeled Luther a fool. Fools were used as weapons in print, a pre-social-media cancel culture but with woodcuts and Latin slogans. It’s amazing and terrifying how art becomes a political scalpel.
The catalog does this brilliant thing: essays and then a photographic corpus. So you read, then you stare at the work, then you connect dots your head wasn’t expecting to connect. There are 327 works detailed at the end like little confessions in the footnotes. It feels like a legal brief that sings.
Walking out I felt lighter and stranger. The fool wasn’t just a joke. He’s a cultural Swiss Army knife — scapegoat, mirror, prophet, victim, jester, lover. He reveals how societies negotiate what’s normal and what’s other. He can make kings look silly and saints look small. He can be weaponized by pamphleteers or protected by princes. He can be put in a museum or put under a physician’s lamp. Mostly, he reminds me — Ally McBeal, girl in a blazer — that we are all part clown and part wise, that our edges are where honesty and absurdity meet.
So, if you ever find yourself in the Louvre with a sudden urge to giggle at a painting, or if you want a legal argument wrapped in a bellcap, go see the show. See the fool. He’ll make you uncomfortable, amused, thoughtful, and strangely seen. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll give you the courage to wear whatever metaphorical marotte you’ve been hiding and say the truth in a room full of people who are trying very hard not to hear it.