Laughter in Ancient Rome by Mary Beard

Author:Mary Beard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520277168
Publisher: University of California Press

DEATH BY LAUGHTER—AND SOME AGELASTIC TRADITIONS

There were even wider—and sometime dangerous—implications in Roman connections between different forms of imitation and laughter. One of these is starkly illustrated in an anecdote preserved in Festus’ second-century CE dictionary, On the Meaning of Words.73 Under the entry for Pictor (painter), we read of the death of the famous fifth-century BCE artist Zeuxis: “The painter Zeuxis died from laughing when he was laughing immoderately at a picture of an old woman that he himself had painted. Why the story was related at this point by Verrius when his purpose was to write about the meaning of words, I really do not understand—and when he also quoted some not particularly clever anonymous lines of poetry about the same thing: ‘What limit is he going to set on his laughter, then, / Unless he wants to end up like that painter who died laughing?’”74 This story was to have a notable afterlife in a self-portrait by Rembrandt, painted in his old age. It shows the artist laughing, and in the background is an apparently ugly figure. The significance of this scene has often puzzled critics. Is this, for example, Rembrandt as Democritus? Almost certainly it is not. For the secondary figure in the background seems clearly female, and if so, this must surely be Rembrandt as Zeuxis—facing his end, with a specifically painterly reference (see fig. 6).75

I am not concerned here with the truth of the story (it is first attested centuries after the death of Zeuxis, and even assuming that the reference in Festus to the Augustan writer Verrius Flaccus is correct, we have no idea what his source might have been). Nor am I concerned with the physiological possibility of death through laughter—a well-known urban legend in both ancient and modern culture. My question is simply why would we imagine that Zeuxis would find a painting of an elderly lady so laughable? And so very laughable that it killed him?

We might think in terms of mainstream ancient misogyny (and of the despised cultural category of the crone). What else are old women fit for, except to be laughed at? What would an artist do who had made an image of a crone, except laugh at it? Are old women deadly, even in the laughter they provoke? Misogyny of this sort may well be part of it, but there is more to this story of laughter than that.76

Whatever Zeuxis’ paintings really looked like (they are all lost), later descriptions and discussions, largely of Roman date, focused on their imitative quality. This is most clearly seen in the famous, and much analyzed, story of the mimetic competition between Zeuxis and his rival Parrhasius recounted by Pliny the Elder: Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so lifelike that it deceived the birds (who came to peck at them), but it did not secure his victory, because Parrhasius created an image that deceived even Zeuxis (he painted a curtain, which Zeuxis tried to pull back).77 The anecdote in

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