The grotesques are a particular type of parietal pictorial decoration that has its roots in Roman painting of the Augustan period and which was rediscovered and popularized since the late fifteenth century. The term now also designates the character of what seems ridiculous, bizarre, laughable, mingled with a certain fright.Despite the difficulty of identifying forms of grotesque because of their extraordinary variety and diversity, any grotesque could be reduced to the implementation of one or more of these reasons: repetition, hybridity, metamorphosis.
Since at least the 18th century, 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 in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity. More specifically, the grotesque forms on Gothic buildings, when not used as drain-spouts, should not be called gargoyles, but rather referred to simply as grotesques, or chimeras.
The grotesque decoration is characterized by the depiction of hybrid and monstrous beings, chimeras, often portrayed as slim and whimsical figurines, which blend in geometric and naturalistic decorations, symmetrically structured, on a background that is generally white or in any case monochrome. The figures are very colorful and give rise to frames, geometric effects, intertwining and so on, but always maintaining a certain levity and airiness, due to the fact that generally the subjects are left minutes, almost calligraphic, in the background. The predominantly imaginative and playful illustration does not always pursue a purely ornamental function, but sometimes also plays a didactic and encyclopedic purpose, reproducing inventories of the arts and sciences or eponymous representations.
Rémi Astruc 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. 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.
Origin:
The word comes to describe the ornaments of the Domus Aurea, the House of the Golden Age (also called Golden House) built by Nero and which is covered with strange patterns. At the end of the fifteenth century, a young Roman fell into a hole on the slopes of the Oppius and found himself in a kind of cave covered with surprising paintings, hence the name of “grotesque” that was given to these paintings. In fact, it was Domus Aurea, who was buried. The term originally did not have the same meaning as at present. The grotesque paintings are whimsical montages of various elements (architectures, vases, garlands, foliage, etc), often containing human and animal figures that can possibly be chimerical and caricatured but not always.
Grotesque History:
Grotesque is a extravagant style (its motives were defined as ridiculous, vulgar or absurd) extended the use of the term grotesque as synonymous with such adjectives, even the irregular, rude and distasteful. Also it is denominated like this the relative thing to the artificial caves The decoration with pebbles or rocaille (in gardening and interiors respectively) is own of later styles (the Rococo of century XVIII). Much earlier is the use of monsters in medieval art (gargoyles, corbels); while the final phase of the Renaissance, the Mannerism, has some outstanding examples of it (Park of the monsters of Bomarzo). The grotesque ended up defining an aesthetic category differentiated from the classic idea of beauty, as opposed to the category of the sublime.
The grotesques are a kind of free and funny painting invented in antiquity to decorate the walls where only forms suspended in the air could be placed. In them, the artists represented monstrous deformities, daughters of the whims of nature or the extravagant fantasy of the painters: they invented those forms out of all rule, they hung a very thin thread a weight that could never have supported, transformed into leaves the legs of a horse and legs of a man on crane legs, and also painted a lot of mischief and extravagance. The one with the most overflowing imagination seemed the most capable. After the rules were introduced and the marvel was limited to the friezes and the compartments to decorate. -Giorgio Vasari
Early examples in Roman ornaments:
In art, grotesques are ornamental arrangements of arabesques with interlaced garlands and small and fantastic human and animal figures, usually set out in a symmetrical pattern around some form of architectural framework, though this may be very flimsy. Such designs were fashionable in ancient Rome, as fresco wall decoration, floor mosaics, etc., and were decried by Vitruvius (c. 30 BC), who in dismissing them as meaningless and illogical, offered the description: “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.”
When Nero’s palace in Rome, the Domus Aurea, was inadvertently rediscovered in the late 15th century, buried in fifteen hundred years of fill, the first breakthrough was from above, so that those keen to see the rooms had to be lowered down into them on ropes, completing their resemblance to caves, or grottoes in Italian. The Roman wall decorations in fresco and delicate stucco were a revelation.
Grotesque in Renaissance:
It is presumed that the grotesques used since the Renaissance are imitations of paintings discovered in underground grottoes of Antiquity monuments, mainly in the baths of Tito and Livia in Rome, in Domus Aurea of Nero, in Villa Adriana in Tivoli and in various buildings of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Benvenuto Cellini, in his autobiography, reflects how the term Grottesca or Grottesche began to be used from the discovery, in 1480, of vaulted rooms of the Domus Aurea that had remained buried for ten centuries. The unveiling of its complex wall decorations caused a sensation in Rome and interested artists such as Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, il Pinturicchio, Raphael, Giovanni da Udine, il Morto da Feltre, Bernardo Poccetti, Marco Palmezzano or Gaudenzio Ferrari.
The first appearance of the word grottesche appears in a contract of 1502 for the Piccolomini Library attached to the duomo of Siena. They were introduced by Raphael Sanzio and his team of decorative painters, who developed grottesche into a complete system of ornament in the Loggias that are part of the series of Raphael’s Rooms in the Vatican Palace, Rome. “The decorations astonished and charmed a generation of artists that was familiar with the grammar of the classical orders but had not guessed till then that in their private houses the Romans had often disregarded those rules and had adopted instead a more fanciful and informal style that was all lightness, elegance and grace.” In these grotesque decorations a tablet or candelabrum might provide a focus; frames were extended into scrolls that formed part of the surrounding designs as a kind of scaffold, as Peter Ward-Jackson noted. Light scrolling grotesques could be ordered by confining them within the framing of a pilaster to give them more structure. Giovanni da Udine took up the theme of grotesques in decorating the Villa Madama, the most influential of the new Roman villas.
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 architraves and 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.”
The grotesque of Juan Nani is a decorative motif based on fantastic beings, vegetables and animals, complexly linked and combined forming a whole. It is a theme associated with the Renaissance and is usually formed, in its upper part, by a human or animal head or torso that ends up in a set of plants or plant elements from below.
Grotesque in 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, Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata (1522) offered ready-made iconographic shorthand for vignettes. More familiar material for grotesques could be drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The Vatican loggias, a loggia corridor space in the Apostolic Palace open to the elements on one side, were decorated around 1519 by Raphaels’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.
In Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel Giovanni da Udine composed during 1532-33 “most beautiful sprays of foliage, rosettes and other ornaments in stucco and gold” in the coffers and “sprays of foliage, birds, masks and figures”, with a result that did not please Pope Clement VII Medici, however, nor Giorgio Vasari, who whitewashed the grottesche decor in 1556. Counter Reformation writers on the arts, notably Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, bishop of Bologna, turned upon grottesche with a righteous vengeance.
Vasari, echoing Vitruvius, described the style as follows: “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 Francesco Ubertini, called “Bacchiacca”, delighted in inventing grotteschi, and (about 1545) painted for Duke Cosimo de’ Medici a studiolo in a mezzanine at the Palazzo Vecchio “full of animals and rare plants”. Other 16th-century writers on grottesche included Daniele Barbaro, Pirro Ligorio and Gian Paolo Lomazzo.
Engravings, woodwork, book illustration, decorations:
In the meantime, through the medium of engravings the grotesque mode of surface ornament passed into the European artistic repertory of the 16th century, from Spain to Poland. A classic suite was that attributed to Enea Vico, published in 1540-41 under an evocative explanatory title, Leviores et extemporaneae picturae quas grotteschas vulgo vocant, “Light and extemporaneous pictures that are vulgarly called grotesques”. Later Mannerist versions, especially in engraving, tended to lose that initial lightness and be much more densely filled than the airy well-spaced style used by the Romans and Raphael.
Soon grottesche appeared in marquetry (fine woodwork), in maiolica produced above all at Urbino from the late 1520s, then in book illustration and in other decorative uses. At Fontainebleau Rosso Fiorentino and his team enriched the vocabulary of grotesques by combining them with the decorative form of strapwork, the portrayal of leather straps in plaster or wood moldings, which forms an element in grotesques.
Grotesque in Baroque and 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. 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 Pompeii and the other buried sites round Mount Vesuvius from the middle of the century. It continued in use, becoming increasingly heavy, in the Empire Style and then in the Victorian period, when designs often became as densely packed as in 16th-century engravings, and the elegance and fancy of the style tended to be lost.
Extensions of the Grotesque:
Artists began to give the tiny faces of the figures in grotesque decorations strange caricatured expressions, in a direct continuation of the medieval traditions of the drolleries in the border decorations or initials in illuminated manuscripts. From this the term began to be applied to larger caricatures, such as those of Leonardo da Vinci, and the modern sense began to develop. It is first recorded in English in 1646 from Sir Thomas Browne:”In nature there are no grotesques”. By extension backwards in time, the term became also used for the medieval originals, and in modern terminology medieval drolleries, half-human thumbnail vignettes drawn in the margins, and carved figures on buildings (that are not also waterspouts, and so gargoyles) are also called “grotesques”.
A boom in the production of works of art in the grotesque genre characterized the period 1920–1933 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.
Literature of the Grotesque:
One of the first uses of the term grotesque to denote a literary genre is in Montaigne’s Essays. The Grotesque is often linked with satire and tragicomedy. 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”.
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 (to cite one example) 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 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. Gothic writings often have grotesque components in terms of character, style and location. In other cases, the environment described may be grotesque – whether urban (Charles Dickens), or the literature of the American south which has sometimes been termed “Southern Gothic”. Sometimes the grotesque in literature has been explored in terms of social and cultural formations such as the carnival(-esque) in François Rabelais and Mikhail Bakhtin. Terry Castle has written on the relationship between metamorphosis, literary writings and masquerade.
Grotesque body is a concept of the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin that applies to the work of Rabelais.
Justus Möser (Harlekin, oder Verteidigung des Grotesk-Komischen – “Harlequin or the defense of the grotesque-comic” -, 1761) identifies in “exaggeration of the figures” of the comedy of art an identity with the caricature of the plastic arts, allowing the theater a peculiar way of describing “the customs of men”.
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 monster.) Obvious examples would include the physically deformed and the mentally deficient, but people with cringe-worthy social traits are also included. The reader becomes piqued by the grotesque’s positive side, and continues reading to see if the character can conquer their darker side. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the figure of Caliban has inspired more nuanced reactions than simple scorn and disgust. Also, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the character of Gollum may be considered to have both disgusting and empathetic qualities, which fit him into the grotesque template.
Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the most celebrated grotesques in literature. Dr. Frankenstein’s monster can also be considered a grotesque, as well as the title character, Erik in The Phantom of the Opera and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. Other instances of the romantic grotesque are also to be found in Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, in Sturm und Drang literature or in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The romantic grotesque is far more terrible and sombre than the medieval grotesque, which celebrated laughter and fertility. It is at this point that a grotesque creature such as Frankenstein’s monster (in Mary Shelley’s novel published in 1818) begins to be presented more sympathetically as the outsider who is the victim of society. But the novel also makes the issue of sympathy problematic in an unkind society. This means that society becomes the generator of the grotesque, by a process of alienation. In fact, the grotesque monster in Frankenstein tends to be described as ‘the creature.’
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.
Edgar Allan Poe, in the literary context of Romanticism, wrote a set of stories that were published in 1840 with the title Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (“tales of the grotesque and arabesque”), which seems to refer to the use of these concepts in an essay by Walter Scott (On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition – “Of the supernatural in the fictional composition” -).
During the nineteenth-century category of grotesque body was increasingly displaced by the notion of congenital deformity or medical anomaly. Building on this context, the grotesque begins to be understood more in terms 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.’ 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.
Southern Gothic is a genre frequently identified with grotesques and William Faulkner is often cited as the ringmaster. Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one” (“Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”, 1960). In O’Connor’s often-anthologized short-story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, the Misfit, a serial killer, is clearly a maimed soul, utterly callous to human life but driven to seek the truth. The less obvious grotesque is the polite, doting grandmother who is unaware of her own astonishing selfishness. Another oft-cited example of the grotesque from O’Connor’s work is her short-story entitled “A Temple Of The Holy Ghost”. The American novelist, Raymond Kennedy is another author associated with the literary tradition of the grotesque.
Contemporary writers of literary grotesque fiction include Ian McEwan, Katherine Dunn, Alasdair Gray, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Umberto Eco, Patrick McGrath, Natsuo Kirino, Paul Tremblay, Matt Bell, Chuck Palahniuk, Brian Evenson, Caleb J. Ross (who writes domestic grotesque fiction), Richard Thomas and many authors who write in the bizarro genre of fiction. In 1929, G.L Van Roosbroeck wrote a book called “GROTESQUES” (illustrations by J. Matulka) published by The Williamsport Printing and Binding Co., Williamsport, PA. It is a collection of 6 stories and 3 fables for the children of tomorrow.
Pop culture of the Grotesque:
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.
The Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello used the term “grotesque” as a noun for his own naturalistic theatrical style that reflects a comic and tragic reality.
In the theater of Argentina and Uruguay, a dramatic genre subgenre is called “grotesque”, derived from the sainete and vaudeville, which since the beginning of the 20th century showed the lives of immigrants crowded into tenements or tenements (cheap rooms that generally shared a yard). The perspective was caricatured, responding to the stereotype and mockery with which the Creoles used to see Italians, Spaniards, Russians or Arabs arrived in the recent migratory waves. Some of the authors of the sainetes were, however, children of these immigrants.
A prominent piece of the sainete is El conventillo de la Paloma, by Alberto Vacarezza, whose main stage is precisely the patio of the tenement. Armando Discépolo introduced a dramatic and somber turn in the focus of those environments and created what he called “grotesque criollo”. The works Mustafá, Giácomo, Babilonia, Stéfano, Cremona and Relojero, premiered between 1921 and 1934, are tragicomedias representative of a dramaturgy that influenced later authors, such as Roberto Cossa, Osvaldo Dragún, Carlos Gorostiza and Griselda Gambaro.
Similar theatrical styles are the grotesque (dramatic form created by the Spaniard Ramón del Valle Inclán -Louces de bohemia, Los cuernos de don Friolera-, who defined it as an attempt to show reality in a distorting mirror), the theater of the absurd ( Alfred Jarry, Samuel Beckett, Miguel Mihura, Eugène Ionesco) and later forms of surreal humor (in theatrical and non-theatrical settings).
Theatre of the Grotesque:
The term Theatre of the Grotesque refers to an anti-naturalistic school of Italian dramatists, writing in the 1910s and 1920s, who are often seen as precursors of the Theatre of the Absurd. Characterized by ironic and macabre themes of daily life in the world war 1 era. Theatre of the grotesque was named after the play ‘The Mask and the Face’ by Luigi Chiarelli, which was described as ‘ a grotesque in three acts’.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt is a major author of contemporary grotesque comedy plays.
Architecture of the Grotesque:
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. This word is derived from the Italian word babbuino, which means “baboon”.
Typography of the Grotesque:
The word “Grotesque”, or “Grotesk” in German, is also frequently used as a synonym for sans-serif in typography. At other times, it is used (along with “Neo-Grotesque”, “Humanist”, “Lineal”, and “Geometric”) to describe a particular style or subset of sans-serif typefaces. The origin of this association can be traced back to English typefounder William Thorowgood, who first introduced the term “grotesque” and in 1835 produced 7-line pica grotesque—the first sans-serif typeface containing actual lowercase letters. An alternate etymology is possibly based on the original reaction of other typographers to such a strikingly featureless typeface.
Popular Grotesque typefaces include Franklin Gothic, News Gothic, Haettenschweiler and Lucida Sans (although the latter lacks the spurred “G”), whereas popular Neo-Grotesque typefaces include Arial, Helvetica and Verdana.