‘Whether the mind wants eyes, or eyes want minde’. Parasitic twins and intellectual disability in early modern Europe: the case of Lazzaro and Giovanni Battista Colloredo

Luca Baratta explores the early seventeenth-century case of the Genoese brothers Lazzaro and Giovanni Battista Colloredo, two Italian conjoined twins who performed as street artists across Europe. Fictional and non-fictional accounts (medical and legal treatises, illustrated advertising broadsheets and fliers, accounts of local history, ballads and poems) are examined to zero in on the parasitic twin, Giovanni Battista, who is severely disabled and mute. His intellectual disability materialises as a lack of autonomous abstract thinking, will and consciousness, and the complete dependency on Lazzaro for everyday tasks. Hence, Giovanni Battista's intellectual disability is politically exploited to attack Catholics’ unconscious subordination to the Pope's authority. From time to time Giovanni Battista appears as an individual endowed with a name, a soul, and partial autonomy (in breathing and in some movements), but more often he is relegated and stigmatised for his dependence on his brother (in nutrition, walking and personal care). This divergence that affects the twins’ functioning represents, therefore, a very fertile case study to investigate the auroral early modern conceptualisation of intellectual disability, constantly depicted in differential terms (norm vs. exception, healthiness vs. infirmity, wholeness vs. incompletion).