Grotesque

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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 buildings which are not used as drainspouts should not be called gargoyles, but rather referred to simply as grotesques, or chimeras.

Contents 1 In art history 2 In typography 3 In literature 4 In architecture 5 In chess 6 On the Internet 7 Etymology 8 See also 9 Notes 10 Bibliography 11 External links

[edit] 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. 30BCE), 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 growslender 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. "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."^[1] In these grotesque decorations a tablet or candelabrum might provide a focus; frames were extended into scrolls that formed part of the surrounding deigns 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.

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".

In contemporary illustration art, the "grotesque" figures, in the ordinary conversational sense, commonly appear in the genre grotesque art, also known as fantastic art.

[edit] In typography

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

• Akzidenz Grotesk (1896)
• Franklin Gothic (1905), Morris Fuller Benton
• Monotype Grotesque (1926) by F.H. Pierpont
• Univers (1957), Adrian Frutiger
• Helvetica (1958), Max Miedinger, based on Akzidenz Grotesk

The later designs are sometimes classified as neo-grotesque (see: typeface).

[edit] 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.

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. 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.

Sherwood Anderson, in his short story collection Winesburg, Ohio, included a prefatory chapter titled "The Book of the Grotesque" in which he established the idea of the grotesque character as an overarching principle in the book.

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 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."

[edit] In architecture

While often confused with gargoyles, these stone carvings are not born from the general form of a water spout. This type of sculpture is also called a chimera.

[edit] In chess

Chess problems with positions which would be regarded by conventional criteria as "ugly", especially those in which a small number of white pieces fight against a much larger number of black ones, are called grotesques. See grotesque (chess) for more.

[edit] On the Internet

In the early days of the World Wide Web, Dan's Gallery of the Grotesque was a macabre archive of grotesque images. Digitized photos included animals run over by vehicles, human corpses from autopsies , and other graphic images. The website was an early Internet fad. As well, with the rise of internet literature and e-published books, the internet also freely provides, G.E. Graven's epic novel, Grotesque, A Gothic Epic (Online Novel).

[edit] 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.

[edit] See also

• Rigoletto, an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi.
• Sheela Na Gig
• Hunky Punk
• Mask
• Mummers play
• Pumpkin
• Southern Gothic

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

• Sheinberg, Esti (2000-12-29). Irony, satire, parody and the grotesque in the music of Shostakovich (in English). UK: Ashgate, 378. ISBN 0-7546-0226-5. 
• Kayser, Wolfgang (1957) The grotesque in Art and Literature, New York, Columbia University Press
• Lee Byron Jennings (1963) The ludicrous demon: aspects of the grotesque in German post-Romantic prose, Berkeley, University of California Press
• Bakhtin, Mikhail (1941). Rabelais and his world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

• Selected bibliography by Philip Thomson, The Grotesque, Methuen Critical Idiom Series, 1972.
• Dacos, N. La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la Renaissance (London) 1969.

[edit] External links

• Video tour of the most vivid examples of medieval Parisian stone carving - the grotesques of Notre Dame