Perejon, the Buffoon of the Count of Benavente and of the Grand Duke of Alba

Perejon was a court jester — a 'buffoon' in the sixteenth-century Spanish nomenclature — in the service of the Count of Benavente and later the Grand Duke of Alba. Antonis Mor's portrait of him around 1560 at the Prado is a significant document in the history of the court fool as a subject for serious painting. While buffoons and dwarfs were maintained at European courts partly as objects of amusement, their portraits by leading artists asserted their integration into the visual economy of court life and sometimes implied complex relationships of trust and intimacy between fool and master. Mor treats Perejon with the same technical seriousness afforded to aristocratic sitters, withholding the grotesque exaggeration that lesser artists might have employed, and the result is a work of considerable dignity.

The canvas ground is prepared consistently with Mor's other Prado commissions of the period. The fool's costume — typically more colourful and elaborately cut than noble dress — provides Mor with an unusual palette for a court commission, requiring the rendering of patterned fabric in addition to his standard black-velvet vocabulary. The face, as always, is handled with smooth, layered glazes.