ABSTRACT
Legal, civic, private, academic and promotional texts offer an abundance of direct and oblique evidence concerning mountebank activity, in travel accounts, memoranda and diaries, letters and official documents, tracts written by theatrical or medical practitioners, and economic, historical, religious, political or polemical texts. Literary sources include prose, poems, monologues, commedia dell’arte scenarios, farces and plays, and of central relevance are the surviving handbills, posters and other publicity material of the mountebanks themselves. The iconographic sources, although equally rich and varied, typically play a subordinate or purely decorative role in mountebank studies, with major sources of visual evidence receiving little or no recognition. The written documentation cannot be taken as a literal reflection of their activity. It reflects a wide range of non-representational concerns and has established conventions that are not precisely mirrored in the visual record. As stage fools and their spectators became increasingly identified as paradigms of folly, diverging literary and artistic conventions for the description and depiction of mountebanks developed. A
1 Various aspects of Part II were previously considered, and in some cases pursued in greater detail, in Katritzky, The Art of Commedia; ‘The Mountebank: A case study’; ‘Theatre Iconography in Costume Series’; ‘Marketing Medicine’; ‘Franco Bertelli’s “Carnevale”’; ‘Straub of St Gallen’s Printed Album’; ‘Mountebanks, Mummers and
comparative approach, contextualizing images and written documents within their pictorial and textual traditions, can offer fresh perspectives concerning the contribution of women to mountebank performativity and healing. As well as figuring from at least the twelfth century as stage characters in the play texts of medieval passions, itinerant quacks have been identified on images dating back to the early fifteenth century, such as a painted cassone panel of c.1418. One of the earliest images of a travelling medical salesman not simply using his bench or table to display goods, or seat customers, but a mountebank in the literal sense of having ‘mounted a bank’ for the purpose of entertaining a crowd, features in a painted roundel. Part of Giulio Romano’s decorative scheme of the 1520s for the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, it represents a snake-charming theriac seller, and may be situated within an iconographic tradition spread by a wealth of northern renaissance prints, such as Plate 14.2 By the late sixteenth century, the association of selling and performance in mountebank depictions was routine.
