Among the earliest exhibits in ‘Figures of the Fool’ is a marginal illustration in a French medieval illuminated manuscript showing two bizarre, proto-Boschian figures lining up for combat. One is part-fish and part-knight (dressed in chainmail, albeit with bird’s legs); the other is a deformed individual wearing a cap and bells and sporting one face on his head and another on his arse. The exclusion of such figures of folly from the body of the religious text that they border nicely mirrors the marginal status of individuals in medieval society adjudged fous (‘fools’) – those considered devoid of a spiritual faculty or an ability to reason, or else held to be hybrid beings closer to the animal world than to humanity.

Set in the freshly renovated Hall Napoléon in the Louvre, and covering a period from the Middle Ages to the early 19th century, the exhibition forces folly from the margins to the centre of our gaze through a dazzlingly rich assemblage of objects, over three hundred in total. These are drawn mainly from northern Europe (northern France, the Netherlands and west Germany) and range from illuminated manuscripts, books, drawings, paintings, engravings, sculptures, tapestries, chesspieces, playing cards, fancy floor tiles and precious glasswork through to what might be called the material culture of folly – the caps, bells, whistles and marottes associated with the special type of fou that was the court jester.

We tend to view the figure of the medieval and Renaissance fool or jester through 19th-century filters – to think of Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo and Verdi’s Rigoletto. Perhaps the show’s most striking achievement is to transcend these anachronistic and wistful habits and to reveal how much more complicated – and fascinating – the world of the fool has been.

The exhibition’s organisers, Elisabeth Antoine-König and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, have chosen not to approach the subject through the anachronistic prism of mental illness. As they observe, the category of ‘natural fool’ in earlier times was often held to include the mentally or physically impaired (it could encompass cultural outsiders as well). They place the exhibition’s emphasis on ‘artificial fools’ – those who assumed a fool’s identity. Playing the fool might be done with passionate sincerity – by the likes of St Francis of Assisi, self-declaredly ‘God’s fool’ – or with sardonic insouciance and comic and sometimes malevolent intent.

Court jesters, masters of the art of playing the fool, are at the heart of the show. A magnificently affecting assemblage of portraits of jesters from the late 15th and 16th centuries bears witness to the humanity of these individuals, many of whom were in fact ‘natural’ fools to start with, and whose often misshapen form was the butt of courtier derision. Yet jesters gave as well as they got. They specialised in parodying, mocking and demeaning society’s most cherished values and codes of behaviour, provoking laughter at their expense. The jester’s marotte deliberately mimicked the princely sceptre, and allowed its holder free rein to make pitiless fun of the princely elite and courtly values. By making a wise man of the fool (as well as vice versa), jesters prompted reflection on social conventionality in all its forms.

Courtly love was an early target of jester derision: in manuscript illuminations and later in paintings and engravings, a fool was often presented lewdly playing gooseberry on courting couples, nailing their high-flown romance as flimsy cover for lust. The earthy ribaldry in such representations was part of a constant predilection among jesters for low, sexualised and scatological humour that targeted bodily orifices for crude comic effect. Female sexuality was a particular target, reinforcing gender stereotypes in fairly brutal fashion.

The late 15th and 16th centuries saw the spirit of the fool run amok beyond the courts of princes. The grammar of folly that the jester had developed spread throughout society, helped by the advent of the printing press and the diffusion of engravings. Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, published during the carnival in Basel in 1494, played a key role in the veritable explosion of folly. The work, illustrated with crude but highly effective woodcuts, chronicles the imaginary voyage of a crew dressed in classic jester mode and bound for a fool’s paradise. Multiple editions and many translations meant that it ran the Bible close as the most published book in Europe in the 16th century. It contributed to an increasing readiness across European societies to critique authority in all its forms in festivities, carnivals and charivaris (‘rough music’ in English), which became prevalent in towns and villages. Many images on display – most notably Hieronymus Bosch’s fantastical reimagining of Brant’s Ship of Fools and several village scenes by the Brueghels – highlight the imaginative energy that they unleashed.

Was this festive ‘turning the world upside down’ a precursor of radical social rebelliousness, a dry run for revolt, or merely a way to let off steam? Historians have long debated the issue and there is no easy answer. What is incontestable is that from the 16th century, secular and religious authorities combined to put checks on boisterous outbreaks of folly. Puritanism famously had no time for ‘cakes and ale’, let alone such forms of excessive merriment as charivaris. Where Protestantism led, Catholicism followed. In the wake of the Council of Trent, the Counter-­Reformation trained its fire on any collective fun-making that hinted at pagan – or, at any rate, non-Catholic – values. The political climate was changing too. Louis XIV, the last French king to inherit a court jester, set the tone by abolishing the position early in his reign. Jesters did not respect the lofty spirit of majesty that rulers across Europe now promoted around themselves and their entourages. New codes of bodily discipline obliged courtiers to resist extreme displays of passion, close their lips and clench their buttocks. The open-mouthed laugh (or even smile) was taboo: it was regarded as plebeian, impolite or a symptom of incipient insanity.

‘Figures of the Fool’ passes lightly over these broader ‘civilising’ processes and ascribes the decline of the world of the fou to the rise of reason and enlightenment, a little unquestioningly perhaps. The exhibition highlights the persistence of folly in European culture into the 17th and 18th centuries, albeit in diluted form, notably in the literary exploits of Don Quixote, the refined high jinks of the commedia dell’arte, and the spectacular contortions of danses mauresques (‘Moorish dances’). This undermines some of the show’s coherence, for although its focus is on northern Europe, these later developments had roots in Mediterranean Europe and maybe even beyond. The danses mauresques raise issues of global conquest, colonialism and race, which the exhibition studiously avoids (despite the black faces of many of the dancers). In addition, it seems odd that, after purposively omitting mental illness from the body of the show, the curators give pride of place to the nascent discipline of psychiatry in the exhibition’s final section, which is devoted to the Romantic age.

Yet if the intellectual fabric of the exhibition starts to fray towards its end, ‘Figures of the Fool’ is quite brilliant on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which provide the bulk of the exhibits. As well as providing a visual feast, the exhibition argues powerfully that the fou held a place at the centre of thinking about society in these times and that folly offered a tool for seeing the world more clearly. Maybe we should cling to that sentiment as we enter the era of Trump 2.0.