Grotesque
Since at least the 18th century (in French and German, as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks. In art, performance, and literature, however, grotesque may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes an audience feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity.
The English word first appears in the 1560s as a noun borrowed from French, itself originally from the Italian grottesca (literally "of a cave" from the Italian grotta, 'cave'; see
Rémi Astruc[2] has argued that although there is an immense variety of motifs and figures, the three main tropes of the grotesque are doubleness, hybridity and metamorphosis.[3] Beyond the current understanding of the grotesque as an aesthetic category, he demonstrated how the grotesque functions as a fundamental existential experience. Moreover, Astruc identifies the grotesque as a crucial, and potentially universal, anthropological device that societies have used to conceptualize alterity and change.[not verified in body]
History
Early examples in Roman ornament
In art, grotesques are ornamental arrangements of
For example, reeds are substituted for columns, fluted appendages with curly leaves and volutes take the place of pediments, candelabra support representations of shrines, and on top of their roofs grow slender stalks and volutes with human figures senselessly seated upon them.[4]
Emperor Nero's palace in Rome, the Domus Aurea, was rediscovered by chance in the late 15th century, buried in fifteen hundred years of land fill. Access into the palace's remains was from above, requiring visitors to be lowered into it using ropes as in a cave, or grotte in Italian. The palace's wall decorations in fresco and delicate stucco were a revelation.
Etymology in Renaissance
The first appearance of the word grottesche appears in a contract of 1502 for the
In the 16th century, such artistic license and irrationality was controversial matter. Francisco de Holanda puts a defense in the mouth of Michelangelo in his third dialogue of Da Pintura Antiga, 1548:
"this insatiable desire of man sometimes prefers to an ordinary building, with its pillars and doors, one falsely constructed in grotesque style, with pillars formed of children growing out of stalks of flowers, with
cornices of branches of myrtle and doorways of reeds and other things, all seeming impossible and contrary to reason, yet it may be really great work if it is performed by a skillful artist."[6]
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Pilgrim bottle, by the Fontana workshop from Urbino, Italy, c. 1560–1570, tin glazed earthenware (majolica), Victoria and Albert Museum, London
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Ceiling decorated with arabesques in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy, by various architects, including Giorgio Vasari, c. 1560–1581[7]
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Ceilings decorated with grotesques in the Vatican Library, Vatican City, by Domenico Fontana, 1587–1588[8]
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Mother Nature is surrounded by grottesche in this fresco detail from Villa d'Este.
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Renaissance grotesque motifs in assorted formats
Mannerism
The delight of Mannerist artists and their patrons in arcane iconographic programs available only to the erudite could be embodied in schemes of grottesche,[9] Andrea Alciato's Emblemata (1522) offered ready-made iconographic shorthand for vignettes. More familiar material for grotesques could be drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses.[10]
The Vatican loggias, a loggia corridor space in the Apostolic Palace open to the elements on one side, were decorated around 1519 by Raphael's large team of artists, with Giovanni da Udine the main hand involved. Because of the relative unimportance of the space, and a desire to copy the Domus Aurea style, no large paintings were used, and the surfaces were mostly covered with grotesque designs on a white background, with paintings imitating sculptures in niches, and small figurative subjects in a revival of Ancient Roman style. This large array provided a repertoire of elements that were the basis for later artists across Europe.[11]
In Michelangelo's
Vasari, echoing Vitruvius, described the style as follows:[11]
"Grotesques are a type of extremely licentious and absurd painting done by the ancients ... without any logic, so that a weight is attached to a thin thread which could not support it, a horse is given legs made of leaves, a man has crane's legs, with countless other impossible absurdities; and the bizarrer the painter's imagination, the higher he was rated".
Vasari recorded that
Engravings, woodwork, book illustration, decorations
In the meantime, through the medium of
Soon grottesche appeared in
From Baroque to Victorian era
In the 17th and 18th centuries the grotesque encompasses a wide field of teratology (science of monsters) and artistic experimentation. The monstrous, for instance, often occurs as the notion of play. The sportiveness of the grotesque category can be seen in the notion of the preternatural category of the lusus naturae, in natural history writings and in cabinets of curiosities.[17][18] The last vestiges of romance, such as the marvellous also provide opportunities for the presentation of the grotesque in, for instance, operatic spectacle. The mixed form of the novel was commonly described as grotesque – see for instance Fielding's "comic epic poem in prose" (Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones).
Grotesque ornament received a further impetus from new discoveries of original Roman frescoes and stucchi at
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Baroque – grotesque on a saddle pad, 1600–1650, gold thread
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Baroque – grotesques on a door in the Palais du Parlement de Bretagne, Rennes, France, unknown architect, sculptor and painter, 17th century (Louis XIV era)
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Baroque – grotesques on theboiserie of a room from the Hôtel Colbert de Villacerf, now in the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, unknown architect, sculptor and painter, c. 1650[19]
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Baroque – grotesques on a door in the Galerie d'Apollon, Louvre Palace, Paris, by Louis Le Vau and Charles Le Brun, after 1661[20]
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Louis XVI style – the Boudoir of Marie-Antoinette, Palace of Fontainebleau, Fontainebleau, France, decorated with arabesques in the Pompeiian Style, by the Rousseau brothers, 1785
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Neoclassical – door, by Pierre Rousseau, 1790s, oil on panel, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, US
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Neoclassical – vase with scenes of storm on land and grotesques, by the Duc d'Angoulême's porcelain factory, c. 1797–1798, hard-paste porcelain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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Renaissance Revival – cast iron door window grill of a building on the Boulevard du Temple no. 42, Paris, unknown architect, c. 1850
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Renaissance Revival – cast iron door window grill of Rue du Bac no. 34, Paris, unknown architect, c. 1850
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Neoclassical – interior of Le Grand Véfour, Paris, by M.L. Viguet, 1852[21]
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Neoclassical – interior of Le Grand Véfour, Paris, by M.L. Viguet, 1852[22]
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Neoclassical – interior of Le Grand Véfour, Paris, by M.L. Viguet, 1852[23]
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Eclectic – grotesques panel in the Napoleon III Apartments of the Louvre Palace, unknown painted and designer, c. 1860
Extensions of the term in art
Artists began to give the tiny faces of the figures in grotesque decorations strange
A boom in the production of works of art in the grotesque genre characterized the 1920–1933 period of German art. In contemporary illustration art, the "grotesque" figures, in the ordinary conversational sense, commonly appear in the genre grotesque art, also known as fantastic art.
In literature
One of the first uses of the term grotesque to denote a literary genre is in Montaigne's Essays.[25] The Grotesque is often linked with satire and tragicomedy.[26] It is an effective artistic means to convey grief and pain to the audience, and for this has been labeled by Thomas Mann as the "genuine antibourgeois style".[26]
Some of the earliest written texts describe grotesque happenings and monstrous creatures. The literature of myth has been a rich source of monsters; from the one-eyed Cyclops from Hesiod's Theogony to Homer's Polyphemus in the Odyssey. Ovid's Metamorphoses is another rich source for grotesque transformations and hybrid creatures of myth. Horace's Art of Poetry also provides a formal introduction to classical values and to the dangers of grotesque or mixed form. Indeed, the departure from classical models of order, reason, harmony, balance and form opens up the risk of entry into grotesque worlds. Accordingly, British literature abounds with native grotesquerie, from the strange worlds of Spenser's allegory in The Faerie Queene to the tragi-comic modes of 16th-century drama. (Grotesque comic elements can be found in major works such as King Lear.)
Literary works of mixed genre are occasionally termed grotesque, as are "low" or non-literary genres such as pantomime and farce.
Another major source of the grotesque is in satirical writings of the 18th century. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels provides a variety of approaches to grotesque representation. In poetry, the works of Alexander Pope provide many examples of the grotesque.
In fiction, characters are usually considered grotesque if they induce both empathy and disgust. (A character who inspires disgust alone is simply a villain or a
The grotesque received a new shape with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, when a girl meets fantastic grotesque figures in her fantasy world. Carroll manages to make the figures seem less frightful and fit for children's literature, but still utterly strange. Another comic grotesque writer who played on the relationship between sense and nonsense was Edward Lear. Humorous, or festive nonsense of this kind has its roots in the seventeenth century traditions of fustian, bombastic and satirical writing.[31]
During the nineteenth-century category of grotesque body was increasingly displaced by the notion of congenital deformity or medical anomaly.[32] Building on this context, the grotesque begins to be understood more as deformity and disability, especially after the First World War, 1914–18. In these terms, the art historian Leah Dickerman has argued that "The sight of horrendously shattered bodies of veterans returned to the home front became commonplace. The accompanying growth in the prosthetic industry struck contemporaries as creating a race of half-mechanical men and became an important theme in dadaist work.'[33] The poetry of Wilfred Owen displays a poetic and realistic sense of the grotesque horror of war and the human cost of brutal conflict. Poems such as Spring Offensive and Greater Love combined images of beauty with shocking brutality and violence in order to produce a sense of the grotesque clash of opposites. In a similar fashion, Ernst Friedrich (1894–1967), founder of the Berlin Peace Museum, an anarchist and a pacifist, was the author of War Against War (1924) which used grotesque photographs of mutilated victims of the First World War in order to campaign for peace.
Contemporary writers
Contemporary writers of literary grotesque fiction include Ian McEwan, Katherine Dunn, Alasdair Gray, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Umberto Eco, Patrick McGrath, Jessica Anthony, Natsuo Kirino, Paul Tremblay, Matt Bell, Chuck Palahniuk, Brian Evenson, Caleb J. Ross (who writes domestic grotesque fiction),[34] Richard Thomas and many authors who write in the bizarro genre of fiction.
Pop culture
Other contemporary writers who have explored the grotesque in pop-culture are John Docker, in the context of postmodernism; Cintra Wilson, who analyzes celebrity; and Francis Sanzaro, who discusses its relation to childbirth and obscenity.[35]
Alien Resurrection (1997) is the only film rated by the MPAA to have "grotesque images" in its rating description,[36] mainly due to its depiction of the Newborn xenomorph and the failed clones of Ellen Ripley, who all featured grotesque human-alien (hybrid) characteristics.[37]
Theatre of the Grotesque
The term "
Friedrich Dürrenmatt is a major author of contemporary grotesque comedy plays.
In architecture
In architecture the term "grotesque" means a carved stone figure.
Grotesques are often confused with gargoyles, but the distinction is that gargoyles are figures that contain a water spout through the mouth, while grotesques do not. Without a water spout, this type of sculpture is also known as a chimera when it depicts fantastical creatures. In the Middle Ages, the term babewyn was used to refer to both gargoyles and grotesques.[38] This word is derived from the Italian word babbuino, which means "baboon".
In typography
The word "grotesque", or "Grotesk" in German, is also frequently used as a synonym for
Popular grotesque typefaces include
See also
- Ero guro
- Fractal
- Grotesque (architecture)
- Hunky punk
- Mask
- Mummers' play
- Rigoletto, an opera by Giuseppe Verdi
- Sheela na Gig
Notes
- ^ "OED-Grotesque etymology". Etymonline.com. Retrieved 2014-12-15.
- ^ Rémi Astruc, Le Renouveau du grotesque dans le roman du xxe siècle. Essai d'anthropologie littéraire, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2010, 280 p. (ISBN 978-2-8124-0170-1).
- ^ Astruc R. (2010), Le Renouveau du grotesque dans le roman du XXe siècle, Paris, Classiques Garnier.
- ^ Vitruvius 7.5.3 (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (1914). Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by Morgan, Morris Hicky. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.)
- ^ Peter Ward-Jackson, "The Grotesque" in "Some main streams and tributaries in European ornament from 1500 to 1750: part 1" The Victoria and Albert Museum Bulletin (June 1967, pp 58–70) p 75.
- ^ Quoted in David Summers, "Michelangelo on Architecture", The Art Bulletin 54.2 (June 1972:146–157) p. 151.
- OCLC 1154118123.
- ISBN 978-3-8365-3524-3.
- ^ An example, the vaulted arcade in the Palazzo del Governatore, Assisi, which was frescoed with grotesques in 1556, has been examined in the monograph by Ezio Genovesi, Le grottesche della 'Volta Pinta' in Assisi (Assisi, 1995): Genovesi explores the role of the local Accademia del Monte.
- ^ Victor Kommerell, Metamorphosed Margins: The Case for a Visual Rhetoric of the Renaissance 'Grottesche' under the Influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Hildesheim, 2008).
- ^ a b Wilson, 152
- ^ "bellissimi fogliami, rosoni ed altri ornamenti di stuccho e d'oro" and "fogliami, uccelli, maschere e figure", quoted by Summers 1972:151 and note 30.
- ^ Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane (printed at Bologna, 1582)
- ^ Noted by Summers 1972:152.
- ^ "Dilettossi il Bacchiacca di far grottesche; onde al Sig. duca Cosimo fece uno studiolo pieno d'animali e d'erbe rare ritratte dalle naturali, che sono tenute bellissime": quoted in Francesco Vossilla, "Cosimo I, lo scrittoio del Bachiacca, una carcassa di capodoglio e la filosofia naturale", Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 37..2/3 (1993:381–395) p. 383; only fragments survive of the decor.
- ^ All mentioned by Ezio Genovesi 1995, in providing explanation of the genre in the context of the painted vaulting at Assisi.
- ^ Mauries, Patrick (2002). Cabinets of Curiosities. Thames and Hudson.
- ^ Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (1998). Wonders and the Order of Nature. USA: New York: Zone Books.
- ^ "LAMBRIS DU CABINET DE L'HÔTEL COLBERT DE VILLACERF". carnavalet.paris.fr. Retrieved 31 August 2023.
- ISBN 978-0-500-02544-4.
- ^ "Immeuble en bordure du Palais-Royal, restaurant Le Grand Véfour". pop.culture.gouv.fr. Retrieved 15 October 2023.
- ^ "Immeuble en bordure du Palais-Royal, restaurant Le Grand Véfour". pop.culture.gouv.fr. Retrieved 15 October 2023.
- ^ "Immeuble en bordure du Palais-Royal, restaurant Le Grand Véfour". pop.culture.gouv.fr. Retrieved 15 October 2023.
- OED, "Grotesque"
- ^ Kayser (1957) I.2 Ce discours est bien grotesue
- ^ a b Clark (1991) pp. 20–1
- ^ Harham, Geoffrey Galt (1982). On the Grotesque. US: Princeton University Press.
- ^ Castle, Terry (1986). Masquerade and Civilization. Methuen.
- ^ See Jeanne M. Britton, 'Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" ' Studies in Romanticism Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring, 2009)3–22, p. 3.
- ^ Hanis McLaren Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: from Mary Shelley to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 42.
- ISBN 0006388442
- ^ See George M. Gould and Walter M. Pyle's Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1896).
- ^ Leah Dickerman, Dada, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2005, pp. 3–4.
- ^ "What is Domestic Grotesque Fiction and Why Do I Write It?". Calebjross.com. 2012-01-21. Retrieved 2013-03-06.
- ^ Sanzaro, Francis. The Infantile Grotesque: Pathology, Sexuality, and a Theory of Religion. Davies Group Publishers, 2016.
- ^ Alien Resurrection Film Ratings.com. Retrieved 13 February 2024.
- ^ Hybrid Creatures and Monstrous Reproduction: The Multifunctional Grotesque in Alien: Resurrection Art, Excess, and Education pp 147–160. Henriikka Huunan-Seppälä. 28 July 2019. Retrieved 14 February 2024.
- ISBN 0-7892-0182-8.
- ^ "Linéale Grotesques" (PDF). Rabbit Moon Press. 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 2, 2014. Retrieved 2010-09-08.
References
- Astruc, Rémi (2010) Le Renouveau du grotesque dans le roman du XXe siècle, essai d'anthropologie littéraire, Paris, Classiques Garnier
- Clark, John R. (1991) The modern satiric grotesque and its traditions
Further reading
- Bäckström, Per. Enhet i mångfalden. Henri Michaux och det groteska (Unity in the Plenitude. Henri Michaux and the Grotesque), Lund: Ellerström, 2005.
- Bäckström, Per. Le Grotesque dans l’œuvre d’Henri Michaux. Qui cache son fou, meurt sans voix, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007.
- Sheinberg, Esti (2000-12-29). Irony, satire, parody and the grotesque in the music of Shostakovich. UK: Ashgate. p. 378. ISBN 0-7546-0226-5. Archived from the originalon 2007-10-17.
- Kayser, Wolfgang (1957) The grotesque in Art and Literature, New York, Columbia University Press
- Lee Byron Jennings (1963) The ludicrous demon: aspects of the grotesque in German post-Romantic prose, Berkeley, University of California Press
- Bakhtin, Mikhail (1941). Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Harpham, Geoffrey Galt (1982, 2006), On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
- Selected bibliography by Philip Thomson, The Grotesque, Methuen Critical Idiom Series, 1972.
- Dacos, N. La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la Renaissance (London) 1969.
- Kort, Pamela (2004-10-30). Comic Grotesque: Wit And Mockery In German Art, 1870–1940. PRESTEL. p. 208. ISBN 978-3-7913-3195-9. Archived from the originalon 2008-03-04.
- FS Connelly (2003). "Modern art and the grotesque" (PDF). Assets.cambridge.org.
- Zamperini, Alessandra (2008). Ornament and the Grotesque: Fantastical Decoration from Antiquity to Art Nouveau. Thames and Hudson. pp. 320, 11" x 13", 250 color illustrations. ISBN 978-0-500-23856-1.
- Hansen, Maria Fabricius (2018). The Art of Transformation. Grotesques in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Edizioni Quasar. pp. 476, 9"1/2 x 11", 400 color illustrations. ISBN 978-88-7140-864-4.