Grotesque art
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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| [[Image:Two Bodyheads by Paul Rumsey.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Two Bodyheads'' ([[2003]]) by [[Paul Rumsey]]]] | [[Image:Two Bodyheads by Paul Rumsey.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Two Bodyheads'' ([[2003]]) by [[Paul Rumsey]]]] | ||
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| - | :''[[grotesque]], [[visual arts]], [[caricature]], [[fantastic art]], [[art horror]], [[Bosch]]'' | + | :''[[grotesque]], [[visual arts]], [[caricature]], [[fantastic art]], [[art horror]]'' |
| ==In antiquity== | ==In antiquity== | ||
| ===Greece=== | ===Greece=== | ||
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| ====Nero's Domus Aurea==== | ====Nero's Domus Aurea==== | ||
| 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 [[grotto]]es, the Roman wall decorations in fresco and delicate [[stucco]] were a revelation. | 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 [[grotto]]es, the Roman wall decorations in fresco and delicate [[stucco]] were a revelation. | ||
| + | ==Middle Ages== | ||
| + | [[Bosch]] | ||
| ==Renaissance== | ==Renaissance== | ||
| 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 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. | ||
Revision as of 13:40, 23 August 2012
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In antiquity
Greece
In ancient Greece, from the 4th century BC, the terracotta figurines have a decorative function. Thus, figurines represent theatrical characters, such as Julius Pollux recounts in his Onomasticon (2nd century CE): the slave, the peasant, the nurse, the fat woman, the satyr from the satyr play, etc. The features are readily caricatured and distorted. 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.
Rome
In ancient Roman 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."
Nero's Domus Aurea
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.
Middle Ages
Renaissance
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".
See also Christoph Jamnitzer (German, 1563-1618) and Dominicus Custos.
Natural history as category of the grotesque
- See Ambroise Paré, Conrad Gessner, Bartolomeo Ambrosinus, Olaus Magnus, Giovanni Cavazzi da Montecuccolo
Contemporary grotesque
In contemporary illustration art, the "grotesque" figures, in the ordinary conversational sense, commonly appear in the genre grotesque art, also known as fantastic art.
See also
- Comic Grotesque
- Disparites & Deformations: Our Grotesque' (2004) by Robert Storr.
- Leonardo's grotesques
