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Updated: June 4, 2025
'It belongs to the position of the great, says Matarazzo, 'to keep horses, dogs, mules, falcons, and other birds, court-jesters, singers, and foreign animals. The menagerie at Naples, in the time of Ferrante, contained even a giraffe and a zebra, presented, it seems, by the ruler of Baghdad.
It flaunts itself in numberless shapes on the wooden façades of houses, on the stone façades of châteaux, on the marble façades of palaces. From the arts it makes its way into the national manners, and while it stirs applause from the people for the graciosos of comedy, it gives to the kings court-jesters.
The inventors and retailers of jokes soon became inevitable figures, and among them there must have been some who were classical far superior to all the mere court-jesters, to whom competition, a changing public, and the quick apprehension of the audience, all advantages of life in Florence, were wanting.
Perhaps the most curious feature of the procession was provided by the clowns, both men and women an interesting survival of the court-jesters of the Middle Ages powdered and painted like their fellows of the circus, and performing many of their stereotyped antics.
These lodgings were situated in the second or inner court of the vast palace of Whitehall, in that wing of the castle which contained the apartments of all the higher officers of the royal household, and so those of the court-jesters also; for the king's fool was at that period a very important and respectable personage, who occupied a rank equal to that of a gentleman of the royal bed-chamber.
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