M.A. Katritzky

Abstract

Within months of each other, two prominent Renaissance artists produced starkly contrasting drawings of atypical bodies on the human conjoinment spectrum. Albrecht Dürer’s polished and dated coloured drawing of 1512 depicts two-headed conjoined twins Elsbeth and Margit Mandelin-Engelhartin, who died in 1512, days after their birth in Ertingen, Germany; Leonardo da Vinci’s tiny ink sketch records a youth whose headless conjoined twin grows from his chest. Dürer amply documents his subjects, specifying their names, date and place of birth; for Leonardo’s twins, these details are first provided here.

The visual sources and medical accuracy of Dürer’s unrealistically standing newborns are uncertain; Leonardo’s minute sketch accurately records parasitic conjoined twinning. This archive-based enquiry applies interdisciplinary methodologies to my review of prior scholarship, with extensive reference to early modern textual and visual documents previously unconnected to these drawings. For art history, I reconsider Dürer’s visual sources and confirm the dating of Leonardo’s drawing to late 1513. For medical history, I initiate rigorous anatomical scrutiny of Dürer’s conjoined bodies; contextualizing Leonardo’s subject within related visual and textual documentation enables me to identify him as the earliest named case of this type of parasitic conjoined twinning to survive beyond infancy. As a theatre specialist, I situate the Mandelin-Engelhartin twins as passive performers, shown for gain by their parents and provide the name, date and place of birth of Leonardo’s subject: he is Jacques Floquet, born in Dreux, France, in 1500, and I confirm his high-earning status as a professional itinerant performer and extend our knowledge of his commercial strategies and performative practice, based on exhibiting his conjoined body.

Keywords: conjoined twins, parasitic twins,  Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Jacques Floquet, Ertingen

Full text: OAJ_ISSUE_12_article_4_final

Appendix to article 4: Picturing Bodies_4_Katritzky_APPENDIX

DOI: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2025w04

Biographical note 
M.A. Katritzky is Professor of Theatre Studies and Director, The Open University Centre for Research into Gender and Otherness in the Humanities; co-editor (with Pavel Drábek) of Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre (2020) and a former NIAS, Herzog August Bibliothek and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow who publishes extensively on theatre iconography, court festival and travelling performers in early modern Europe. Monographs include: Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians: Hippolytus Guarinonius and the Brothers Felix and Thomas Platter (2012), Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500–1750 (2007) and The Art of commedia: a Study in the commedia dell’arte 1560–1620 with Special Reference to the Visual Records (2006).