A Company of Artists Watching a Mountebank Show: studies in seventeenth-century caricature

A Company of Artists, a forgotten caricature of Annibale Carracci s students and followers, represented as a crowd watching a street performance of mountebanks, is closely tied to different stages of the historiography of caricature. It follows the first accounts of its origins and strategies by the Seicento theorists, testifying to its centrality in the Carracci studio in Bologna. The drawing s arrival in British collections coincided with the first Anglophone history of caricature, published by Charles Rogers in 1778, and, later, with the redefinition of caricature studies among the Warburg circle of scholars. This text is an inquiry into the subversive potential of caricature as a critical art form of early modernity. It argues that by adopting bodily deformation as its modus operandi, and by aligning artists with mountebanks, the drawing contributes to the reinvention of the codes of artists self-representation, renouncing the previous emphasis on their social status to privilege companionship and performativity.