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Vanity of Vanities: Fool's Cap Map of the World (Ca. 1585)
A mysterious early modern engraving imagining the world imposed on a jester’s face.
A few years later, Jean de Gourmont imposed an “Ortelius projection” — the globe flattened into an oval — onto the visage of a court jester: an imago mundi as feast of fools. You can “laugh” at its absurdities ( deridebat); “weep” over its state ( deflebat); or, as with the maker of this map, “portray” its properties ( deformabat, a word whose etymology perhaps acknowledges how every cartographic depiction is also a deformation). As our eye roams across the other texts, we find quotations that span the poles of stoicism and pessimism: from “know thyself” to a question that conjures the jester’s cap and bells: “Who does not have donkey’s ears?” Below the map, there’s a line from Ecclesiastes numbering the fools in the world as “infinite”; on the staff, there’s a snippet that echoes Psalm 39: “All things are vanity, by every man living”.
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