Grotesque  

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"You should feel two emotions when approaching a Grotto: fear and desire. You should fear what may be inside, but desire to discover." --Leonardo da Vinci


"Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne" --Horace


"If - as Adonis Kyrou contends - “the modern marvelous is popular, and the best and most exciting films are, beginning with Méliès and Fantômas, the films shown in local fleapits” - the contemporary marvelous - and by extension the contemporary grotesque - is shown in video games and on MTV."--Sholem Stein


"The protracted onstage torture of Shakespeare's Gloucester in King Lear is the very height of the theatrical grotesque, but so is in less graphic terms, the fate of Samuel Beckett's hapless heroes and heroines-the female mouth of Mouth, for instance. From Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose" to Paul Bowles's "A Distant Episode," from images of demonic flesh of Max Klinger, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele to Francis Bacon, Eric Fischl, Robert Gober; from Jeremias Gotthelf ("The Black Spider," 1842) to postmodern fantasists Angela Carter, Thomas Ligotti, Clive Barker, Lisa Tuttle and mainstream best-sellers Stephen King, Peter Straub, Anne Rice - we recognize the bold strokes of the grotesque, however widely styles vary. (Is a ghost story inevitably of the genre of the grotesque? - no. Victorian ghost stories, on the whole, are too "nice"-too ladylike, whatever the sex of the writer. Much of Henry James's ghostly fiction, like that of his contemporaries Edith Wharton and Gertrude Atherton, though elegantly written, is too genteel to qualify.) The grotesque is the hideous animal-men of H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, or the taboo-images of the most inspired filmmaker of the grotesque of our time, David Cronenberg (The Fly, The Brood, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch) - that is, the grotesque always possesses a blunt physicality that no amount of epistemological exegesis can exorcise. One might define it, in fact, as the very antithesis of "nice."--Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994) by Joyce Carol Oates

Grotesque Head (c. 1480-1510) by Leonardo da Vinci, clearly the inspiration for The Ugly Duchess
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Grotesque Head (c. 1480-1510) by Leonardo da Vinci, clearly the inspiration for The Ugly Duchess
Stryge (1853) is a print by French etcher Charles Méryon depicting one of the chimera of the Galerie des chimères of the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral.
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Stryge (1853) is a print by French etcher Charles Méryon depicting one of the chimera of the Galerie des chimères of the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral.
 This page Grotesque is part of the publication bias list of the Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia, presented by Alfred Jarry.
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This page Grotesque is part of the publication bias list of the Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia, presented by Alfred Jarry.
Grotesque mask for  La Porte de Parsifal. (c. 1891) by French sculptor Jean-Joseph Carriès
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Grotesque mask for La Porte de Parsifal. (c. 1891) by French sculptor Jean-Joseph Carriès

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The word grotesque comes from the Latin root "grotto" which originated from Greek krypte "hidden place," meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century. The "caves" were in fact rooms and corridors of the Domus Aurea, the unfinished palace complex started by Nero after the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, which had become overgrown and buried, until they were broken into again, mostly from above. Spreading from Italian to the other European languages, the term was long used largely interchangeably with arabesque and moresque for types of decorative patterns using "non-existent forms [..] in which tendrils of the vine, acanthus foliage, parts of beasts and men and birds and fabulous creatures are brought into quasi-organic fusion with candelabra, goblets, lyres, and other familiar objects of utility" (Symonds, 1890).

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, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, disgusting, horrific and abject and thus is often used to describe weird shapes going as far back as the depictions of therianthropic Egyptian deities.

In performance, and literature, grotesque also refers to things that simultaneously invoke in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as empathic pity. In the words of Philip Thomson in The Grotesque (1972, p. 27), a basic definition of the grotesque (in narratology) is "the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response. It is significant this clash is paralleled by the ambivalent nature of the abnormal as present in the grotesque."

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.

Contents

Avant la lettre

As is the case with many sensibilities, it can be traced before the term itself is coined.

In antiquity

Egypt
Ancient Egyptian art

The grotesque sensibility (as in horrific and abject) existed long before the term grotesque was coined, and can be traced to therianthropic cave paintings such as The Sorcerer and depictions of therianthropic Egyptian deities.[1].

Greece
Ancient Greek art

terracotta figurines are decorative artifacts. By the Hellenistic era, the figurines become grotesques: deformed beings with disproportionate heads, sagging breasts or prominent bellies, hunchbacks and bald men. Grotesques are a specialty of the city of Smyrna, even if produced everywhere in the Greek world, for instance, in Tarsus or Alexandria.

Examples

Rome

Comedy masks of ancient Roman theatre

The word grotesque was not yet coined during Roman antiquity but in ancient Roman art, 'grotesques' were a decorative form of arabesques with interlaced garlands, festoons and strange animal figures. Such designs were fashionable in ancient Rome and can be famously found in the Domus Aurea. They consist of frescoed wall decorations, floor mosaics, etc., and were decried by Vitruvius (ca. 30 BCE), who in dismissing them as meaningless and illogical, offered quite a good 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." (see Vitruvius on the grotesque)

Another ancient writer who mentions grotesque painting but not the word grotesque was Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. He uses the word gryllus for a class of grotesque figures first used in painting by Antiphilus of Alexandria: "he painted a figure in a ridiculous costume, known jocosely as the Gryllus; and hence it is that pictures of this class are generally known as "Grylli."

Middle Ages

Bernard of Clairvaux in "Apologia ad Guillelmum" wrote on the "deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity" of monastic art. Explicit corbels featured grotesque figures.

It is the age of Bosch (Christ Carrying the Cross) and Brueghel (The Fall of the Rebel Angels).

More examples
The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger and A demon firing an arrow into the buttocks of a merman

The word grotesque is coined

Renaissance

Etymology

When Nero's Domus Aurea was inadvertently rediscovered in the late fifteenth century, buried in fifteen hundred years of fill, so that the rooms had the aspect of underground grottoes, the Roman wall decorations in fresco and delicate stucco were a revelation. The style was soon copied.

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." (Peter Ward-Jackson) 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."

Art

The decorations in Nero's Domus Aurea were introduced to 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." --Sheinberg, Esti, Irony, satire, parody and the grotesque in the music of Shostakovich. UK: Ashgate. pp. 378.

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.

Through engravings the grotesque mode of surface ornament passed into the European artistic repertory of the sixteenth century, from Spain to Poland.

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. By extension backwards in time, in modern terminology for medieval illuminated manuscripts, drolleries, half-human thumbnail vignettes drawn in the margins, are also called "grotesques".

list of works

Mannerism and Baroque

mannerism, baroque

See the French ornemanistes and the Dutch auricular style.

"Christoph Jamnitzer’s designs are, perhaps, a high-water-mark of a trend in Northern European mannerist grotesquerie that had begun in Antwerp in the 1550s, with the stylised designs of Cornelis Floris, and which had been continued by such artists and craftsmen as Joris Hoefnagel, in the illuminated alphabet appended to the Mira Calligraphiæ Monumenta, and by the brothers de Bry, in their Neiw Kunstliches Alphabet of 1595." --Giornale Nuovo"

Mannerism

Vasari on the grotesque

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.

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" (Lives), 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.

Giorgio 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.

Flanders
Flemish fantastique, Flemish Mannerism

The grotesque masks, Pourtraicture ingenieuse de plusieurs façon de Masques by Cornelis Floris, engraved by Frans Huys, are an excellent example the mannerist grotesque.


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 sixteenth 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.

From Baroque to Victorian era

In the 17th and 18th century 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.

Rococo

singerie, Faun (Watteau), Jean Bérain the Elder


19th century

Extensions of the term in art

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.

In typography

Grotesque (generally with an upper-case G) is the style of the sans serif types of the 19th century. Capital-only faces of this style were available from 1816. The name "Grotesque" was coined by William Thorowgood, the first to produce a sans-serif type with lower case, in 1832.

In literature

see also fantastic literature, fantastique

Etymology

While the term grotesque originated in the visual realm; it is generally accepted that the first use of the term grotesque to describe literature, was in the chapter "Of friendship" in Montaigne's Essays. Montaigne referred to his writing as if he were a painter and compared his essays to grotesques:

what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?[3]

Montaigne goes on to quote Horace: "Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne."

One of the first texts to use the term as an insult was Sir Walter Scott in the "On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition" (1827), his extended analysis of the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann.

Style and nature

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.

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.

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".

Antecedents

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 sixteenth-century drama. (Grotesque comic elements can be found in major works such as King Lear.)

18th century

Another major source of the grotesque is in satirical writings of the eighteenth 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.

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 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. Romantic grotesque is far more terrible and sombre than medieval grotesque, which celebrated laughter and fertility.

19th century

The grotesque received a new shape with Alice 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.

20th century

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.

The German and Dutch tradition

Flemish grotesque, German grotesque, Flemish literature

In Germany, authors such as Salomo Friedlaender and Paul Scheerbart began to label their short stories as grotesken (grotesques). Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen was influenced by these two writers and similarly wrote 'grotesques'. The tradition was continued by Flemish writers Gust Gils and Gaston Burssens, both writers of short stories they labeled grotesques. Other writers in the genre include Ferdinand Bordewijk, Til Brugman and Fritzi Harmsen van Beek.

A writer that needs to be mentioned in this category is Franz Kafka. It should not come as a surprise that van Ostaijen had been Kafka's first foreign translator, publishing in Dutch five of Kafka's short prose pieces from Betrachtung in 1925.

An anthology of German Grotesken by Karl Otten was published in 1962 under the title Expressionismus - grotesk.

21st century

Contemporary writers of grotesque fiction include Will Self and Chuck Palahniuk, and many authors who write in the bizarro genre of fiction.

One example is Ludwigs Erbe by Peter Lenk.

Bibliography

Secondary

See also

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. This type of sculpture is also called a chimera. Used correctly, the term gargoyle refers to mostly eerie figures carved specifically as terminations to spouts which convey water away from the sides of buildings. In the Middle Ages, the term babewyn was used to refer to both gargoyles and grotesques. This word is derived from the Italian word babuino, which means "baboon".

By connotation

aberrant - abnormal - absurd - ambivalence - amusement - arabesque - black comedy - bizarre - black comedy - human body - burlesque - caricature - carnivalesque - demon - deviant - disgust - eccentricity - exaggeration - excess - extraordinary - extravagance - fantastic - fantastique - fantasy - fear - freaks - gargoyle - horror - humor - incongruous - laughter - ludicrous - macabre - monstrous - mythology - outlandish - parody - ridicule - satire - strange - supernatural - surreal - terror - travesty - ugly - uncanny - unconventional - unusual - weird

Theory

John Ruskin on the grotesque

A number of art and literary historians have written on the grotesque sensibility, the first exploration of the grotesque was by English art historian John Ruskin in the 19th century, in The Stones of Venice and Modern Painters. But even before Ruskin, an anthology of Leonardo's grotesques was published in France under the title Recueil de testes de caractere et de charges dessinees par Leonard de Vinci florentin (1730). In the 20th century there was The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1957) by German historian Wolfgang Kayser and Russian Mikhail Bakhtin, who developed the notion of "grotesque body" in relation to the work of French Renaissance writer François Rabelais.

The first post-war study on the grotesque was by Philip Thomson (The Grotesque, 1972). Notes on the grotesque sensibility have been written by Joyce Carol Oates in the introduction to Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque and the contemporary grotesque in the visual arts has been explored by Robert Storr in Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque (2004).

Late 20th and early 21st century research, primarily published on the internet, was done by such enthusiasts as Ian Mccormick, whose Encyclopedia of the Marvelous, the Monstrous, and the Grotesque is indispensable and by David Lavery in his grotesque checklist.

See also

See also

To be added




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