Jean Fouquet, ‘The Martyrdom of St Apollonia’, and the History of the Theatre: Iconography and the Limits of Evidence

This volume locates Jean Fouquet’s Martyrdom of St Apollonia at the very centre of his ambitions and achievements as a painter of manuscripts. It reveals the painter to be, above all, a consummate ‘textual artist’, one who reads, interprets, and interacts with the texts he illustrates. In so doing, it places the Apollonia image within the devotional context from which it has been abstracted. This volume also discusses the famous contributions of the Apollonia image to the history of the theatre. The painting has been seen primarily as proof that the artist was a ‘man of the theatre’, and it has been celebrated as a literal portrait, even a photographic snapshot, of a medieval theatre in performance. In an examination of these claims, this book critically analyses some of the most widely held but little documented doctrines about medieval theatre practices – doctrines that derive almost exclusively from interpretations of The Martyrdom of St Apollonia.