FIGURE OF A FOOL LOOKING THROUGH HIS FINGERS
Master of 1537, possibly Franz Verbeek, c. 1548,
Oil on panel, 13.5 x 9.5 in.

Tickets

• General Ticket: $10

• Members: $5

Join artist April Gornik for a richly illustrated virtual walk-through of the Figures du Fou (‘Figures of the Fool’) exhibition, which opened October 16, 2024 at the Louvre Museum and closed on February 5, 2025. Figures of the Fool was a show brilliantly curated by Elisabeth Antoine-König and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam. April will share slides of the exhibition and talk about the curators’ intent and introduce her own insights and ideas about the topic. Along the way, April will invite some thoughts and comments from the audience. At the end, there will be a more formal question and answer period.

Figures of the Fool: From the Middle Ages to the Romantics (click on the link for the exhibition’s website) offered a deep dive into the multiple meanings of fools in books, illustrations of the Bible, sainthood, brothels, at court, on the battlefield and elsewhere, in positions of power, and in positions of poverty. Fools had an extraordinary popularity from the 13th through the 16th centuries, with new notions of the fool reignited in the public imagination during the age of Romanticism as well as the beginning of psychology. Fools include hermits, simpletons, saints, sinners mocking courtly love, party animals, buffoons both royal and common, mad kings, seekers and seers, licentious seducers, jugglers, conjurers, and, not least of all, artists. 

The fool’s legacy has endured even into present-day art, politics, and theater. Certain streets in Paris are still referred to as Rues de la Folie, meaning “Streets of Madness,” indicating that they were or had been red-light districts. Playing cards still have jokers. And Van Gogh and his phenomenal popularity can be seen as one of our great Fools for Art. As truth-tellers to kings, fools still bear witness to the folly of human behavior.