Since romanticism, the buffoon, the mountebank and the clown have been hyperbolic and purposely deforming images, with which artists have wanted to show themselves and expose the very nature of art. It is an undercover self-portrait, whose intention is not limited to the sarcastic or painful caricature. An attitude so often repeated, that is reinvented so stubbornly over three or four generations, should not go unnoticed to our attention. The ironic game is used as an interpretation of oneself by itself: it is a ridiculous epiphany of art and of the artist. Criticism of bourgeois respectability thus has its equivalent in self-criticism directed against one's "aesthetic" vocation, one of the components that must be recognized as characteristic of "modernity", for more than a hundred years. Jean Starobinski was born in Geneva in 1920. His studies in literature and medicine at the University of Geneva have led him to explore both the path of the history of ideas, literature and medicine, as well as that of literary and artistic criticism. Member of the Institut de France and the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, as well as other European and American academies, among his books, translated into a dozen languages, include Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The transparence et l'obstacle (1957), L'invention de la Liberté (1964), 1789. Les emblèmes de la Raison (1973), Montaigne en mouvement (1982). The mélancolie au miroir. Trois lectures de Baudelaire (1990), Les enchantereses (2005).