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.

These '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 curving foliage elements.

[not verified in body] 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.

Stylized versions, common in Imperial Roman decoration, were decried by Vitruvius (c. 30 BC) who, in dismissing them as meaningless and illogical, offered the following description: 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.

"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.

"[5] 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.

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.

[12] Counter Reformation writers on the arts, notably Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, bishop of Bologna,[13] turned upon grottesche with a righteous vengeance.

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 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".

[16] 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".

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.

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.

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 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.

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 origin of this association can be traced back to English typefounder William Thorowgood, who introduced the term "grotesque" and in 1835 produced 7-line pica grotesque—the first sans-serif typeface containing actual lowercase letters.