Grotesque
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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When commonly used in conversation, grotesque means strange, fantastic, ugly or bizarre, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks or gargoyles on churches. More specifically, the grotesque forms on Gothic buildings, when not used as drainspouts, should not be called gargoyles, but rather referred to simply as grotesques, or chimeras.
The term clearly originated in the visual realm; the first to use it in a literary context was Sir Walter Scott in the "On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition" (1827), his extended analysis of the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann.
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Wiktionary
Adjective
- Bizarre or fantastic in appearance.
- Disgusting or otherwise viscerally reviling.
Noun
- A style of ornamentation characterized by fanciful combinations of intertwined forms.
Etymology
The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The expression comes from the unearthing and rediscovery of ancient Roman decorations in caves and buried sites in the 15th century. These "caves" were in fact rooms and corridors of the Domus Aurea, the unfinished palace complex started by Nero after the great fire from 64 AD.
In art history
In art, grotesques are a decorative form of arabesques with interlaced garlands and strange animal figures. Such designs were fashionable in ancient Rome, as frescoed wall decoration, 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." 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; 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.
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
In fiction, a character is usually considered a grotesque if he induces 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 his darker side. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the figure of Caliban has inspired more nuanced reactions than simple scorn and disgust.
Victor Hugo's The 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. Other instances of the romantic grotesque are also to be found in E. A. Poe, Hoffmann, the Sturm and Drang movement or Sterne. Romantic grotesque is far more terrible and somber than medieval grotesque, which celebrated laughter and fertility.
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.
Southern Gothic is the genre most 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 her 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.
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
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 Disparites & Deformations: Our Grotesque.
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
- Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, by Edgar Allen Poe
- Comic Grotesque, on the grotesque in German Symbolist art, edited by Pamela Kort
- Encyclopedia of the Marvelous, the Monstrous, and the Grotesque, an extensive online resource by Ian Mccormick
- Grotesque checklist by David Lavery
