Grotesque - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The word grotesque comes from the same Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

root as "Grotto
Grotto
A grotto is any type of natural or artificial cave that is associated with modern, historic or prehistoric use by humans. When it is not an artificial garden feature, a grotto is often a small cave near water and often flooded or liable to flood at high tide...

", 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

Domus Aurea

The Domus Aurea was a large landscaped portico villa, designed to take advantage of artificially created landscapes built in the heart of Ancient Rome by the Emperor Nero after the Great Fire of Rome had cleared away the aristocratic dwellings on the slopes of the Palatine...

, the unfinished palace complex started by Nero

Nero

Nero , was Roman Emperor from 54 to 68, and the last in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Nero was adopted by his great-uncle Claudius to become his heir and successor, and succeeded to the throne in 54 following Claudius' death....

after the Great Fire of Rome

Great Fire of Rome

The Great Fire of Rome was an urban fire that occurred beginning July 19, AD 64.-Background:According to Tacitus, the fire spread quickly and burned for six days. Only four of the fourteen districts of Rome escaped the fire; three districts were completely destroyed and the other seven suffered...

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

Arabesque

The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines, often combined with other elements...

and moresque

Moresque

Moresque is an obsolete alternative term to "Moorish" in English, and in the arts has some specific meanings. By itself the word is used of forms found in ornament and decoration in the applied arts in Europe. Often it is a synonym for arabesque or interlace patterns in the Mannerist and Northern...

for types of decorative patterns using curving foliage elements.

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, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween

Halloween

Hallowe'en , also known as Halloween or All Hallows' Eve, is a yearly holiday observed around the world on October 31, the night before All Saints' Day...

masks. In art, performance, and literature, grotesque, however, may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as empathic

Empathy

Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...

pity

Pity

Pity originally means feeling for others, particularly feelings of sadness or sorrow, and was once used in a comparable sense to the more modern words "sympathy" and "empathy"...

. More specifically, the grotesque forms on Gothic buildings

Gothic architecture

Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....

, when not used as drain-spouts, should not be called gargoyle

Gargoyle

In architecture, a gargoyle is a carved stone grotesque, usually made of granite, with a spout designed to convey water from a roof and away from the side of a building thereby preventing rainwater from running down masonry walls and eroding the mortar between...

s, but rather referred to simply as grotesques, or chimeras

Chimera (architecture)

Used in describing an architectural feature, chimera means a fantastic, mythical or grotesque figure used for decorative purposes. Chimerae are often described as gargoyles. Used correctly, the term gargoyle refers to mostly eerie figures carved specifically as terminations to spouts which convey...

.

Rémi Astruc has recently argued that although there is an immense variety of motifs and figures, the three main tropes of the grotesque are doubleness, hybridity and metamorphosis. Beyond the current understanding of the grotesque as an aesthetic category, he demonstrated how the grotesque functions as a fundamental existential experience. Moreover, Astruc identifies the grotesque as a crucial, and potentially universal, anthropological device that the societies have used to conceptualize alterity and change.

Early examples in Roman ornaments

In art, grotesques are ornamental arrangements of arabesque

Arabesque

s 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. Such designs were fashionable in ancient Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, as fresco wall decoration, floor mosaics, etc., and were decried by Vitruvius

Vitruvius

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman writer, architect and engineer, active in the 1st century BC. He is best known as the author of the multi-volume work De Architectura ....

(ca. 30 BCE), who in dismissing them as meaningless and illogical, offered the 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

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

Grotto

A grotto is any type of natural or artificial cave that is associated with modern, historic or prehistoric use by humans. When it is not an artificial garden feature, a grotto is often a small cave near water and often flooded or liable to flood at high tide...

es, the Roman wall decorations in fresco and delicate stucco

Stucco

Stucco or render is a material made of an aggregate, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as decorative coating for walls and ceilings and as a sculptural and artistic material in architecture...

were a revelation.

Etymology in Renaissance

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." 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

Giovanni da Udine

Giovanni Nanni, also Giovanni de' Ricamatori, better known as Giovanni da Udine , was an Italian painter and architect born in Udine....

took up the theme of grotesques in decorating the Villa Madama

Villa Madama

Villa Madama is situated half way up the slope of Monte Mario Which faces directly north-east and because the hill is curved the part which looks towards Rome faces south and the opposite faces north-west...

, the most influential of the new Roman villas.

In the 16th century, such artistic license and irrationality was controversial matter. Francisco de Holanda

Francisco de Holanda

Francisco de Holanda , was a Portuguese humanist and painter. Considered to be one of the most important figures of the Portuguese Renaissance, he was also an essayist, architect, and historian...

puts a defense in the mouth of Michelangelo

Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...

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 architrave
Architrave
An architrave is the lintel or beam that rests on the capitals of the columns. It is an architectural element in Classical architecture.-Classical architecture:...

s and cornices of branches of myrtle and doorways of reeds and other things, all seeming impossible and contrary to reason, yet yet it may be really great work if it is performed by a skillful artist."

Mannerism

The delight of Mannerist

Mannerism

Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe...

artists and their patrons in arcane iconographic programs available only to the erudite could be embodied in schemes of grottesche, Andrea Alciato

Andrea Alciato

Andrea Alciato , commonly known as Alciati , was an Italian jurist and writer. He is regarded as the founder of the French school of legal humanists.-Biography:...

's Emblemata
Emblemata
Usually known simply as the "Emblemata", the first emblem book appeared in Augsburg in 1531 under the title Viri Clarissimi D. Andreae Alciati Iurisconsultiss. Mediol. Ad D. Chonradum Peutingerum Augustanum, Iurisconsultum Emblematum Liber...

(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

Medici Chapel

The Medici Chapels is a structure in the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy. It comprises two structures added to Brunelleschi's original design, each intended to celebrate the power of the Medici as Grand Dukes of Tuscany. One is the Sagrestia Nuova, the "New Sacristy", designed by...

Giovanni da Udine

Giovanni Nanni, also Giovanni de' Ricamatori, better known as Giovanni da Udine , was an Italian painter and architect born in 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", with a result that did not please Pope Clement VII Medici

Pope Clement VII

Clement VII , born Giulio di Giuliano de' Medici, was a cardinal from 1513 to 1523 and was Pope from 1523 to 1534.-Early life:...

, however, nor Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.-Biography:...

, who whitewashed the grottesche decor in 1556. Counter Reformation writers on the arts, notably Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti

Gabriele Paleotti

Gabriele Paleotti was an Italian Cardinal and Archbishop of Bologna.-Life:Paleotti was born at Bologna. Having acquired, in 1546, the title of Doctor of Civil and Canon Law, he was appointed to teach civil law. In 1549 he became a canon of the cathedral, but he did not become a priest until later...

, bishop of Bologna, turned upon grottesche with a righteous vengeance.

Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari

recorded that Francesco Ubertini, called "Bacchiacca", delighted in inventing grotteschi, and (about 1545) painted for Duke Cosimo de' Medici

Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany

Cosimo I de' Medici was Duke of Florence from 1537 to 1574, reigning as the first Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1569.-Biography:...

a studiolo in a mezzanine at the Palazzo Vecchio

Palazzo Vecchio

The Palazzo Vecchio is the town hall of Florence, Italy. This massive, Romanesque, crenellated fortress-palace is among the most impressive town halls of Tuscany...

"full of animals and rare plants". Other 16th-century writers on grottesche included Daniele Barbaro

Daniele Barbaro

Daniele Matteo Alvise Barbaro was an Italian translator of, and commentator on, Vitruvius. He also had a significant ecclesiastical career, reaching the rank of Cardinal....

, Pirro Ligorio

Pirro Ligorio

Pirro Ligorio was an Italian architect, painter, antiquarian and garden designer.-Biography:Ligorio was born in Naples. In 1534 he moved to Rome, where he developed his interest in antiquities, and was named superintendent to the ancient monuments by the Popes Pius IV and Paul IV...

and Gian Paolo Lomazzo

Gian Paolo Lomazzo

Gian Paolo Lomazzo was an Italian painter, more remembered for his writings on art theory, belonging to the second generation that produced Mannerism in Italian art and architecture.Gian Paolo Lomazzo was born in Milan from a family emigrated from the town of Lomazzo...

Engravings, woodwork, book illustration, decorations

In the meantime, through the medium of engraving

Engraving

Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...

s 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

Enea Vico

Enea Vico was an Italian engraver.Vico was born in Parma. He specialized in grotesque engravings based on antique paintings. Vico made engravings for Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and later Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara. He died in Ferrara in 1567 .-References:...

, 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

Marquetry

Marquetry is the art and craft of applying pieces of veneer to a structure to form decorative patterns, designs or pictures. The technique may be applied to case furniture or even seat furniture, to decorative small objects with smooth, veneerable surfaces or to freestanding pictorial panels...

(fine woodwork), in maiolica

Maiolica

Maiolica is Italian tin-glazed pottery dating from the Renaissance. It is decorated in bright colours on a white background, frequently depicting historical and legendary scenes.-Name:...

produced above all at Urbino

Urbino

Urbino is a walled city in the Marche region of Italy, south-west of Pesaro, a World Heritage Site notable for a remarkable historical legacy of independent Renaissance culture, especially under the patronage of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino from 1444 to 1482...

from the late 1520s, then in book illustration and in other decorative uses. At Fontainebleau

Château de Fontainebleau

The Palace of Fontainebleau, located 55 kilometres from the centre of Paris, is one of the largest French royal châteaux. The palace as it is today is the work of many French monarchs, building on an early 16th century structure of Francis I. The building is arranged around a series of courtyards...

Rosso Fiorentino

Giovanni Battista di Jacopo , known as Rosso Fiorentino , or Il Rosso, was an Italian Mannerist painter, in oil and fresco, belonging to the Florentine school.-Biography:...

and his team enriched the vocabulary of grotesques by combining them with the decorative form of strapwork

Strapwork

In the history of art and design, the term strapwork refers to a stylised representation in ornament of strips or bands of curling leather, parchment or metal cut into elaborate shapes, with piercings and often interwoven...

, 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

Pompeii

The city of Pompeii is a partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei. Along with Herculaneum, Pompeii was destroyed and completely buried during a long catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning...

and the other buried sites round Mount Vesuvius

Mount Vesuvius

Mount Vesuvius is a stratovolcano in the Gulf of Naples, Italy, about east of Naples and a short distance from the shore. It is the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted within the last hundred years, although it is not currently erupting...

from the middle of the century. It continued in use, becoming increasingly heavy, in the Empire Style and then in the Victorian

Victorian architecture

The term Victorian architecture refers collectively to several architectural styles employed predominantly during the middle and late 19th century. The period that it indicates may slightly overlap the actual reign, 20 June 1837 – 22 January 1901, of Queen Victoria. This represents the British and...

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.

Extensions of the term in art

Artists began to give the tiny faces of the figures in grotesque decorations strange caricature

Caricature

A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...

d expressions, in a direct continuation of the medieval traditions of the drolleries

Drolleries

Drolleries , often called a "grotesque", are decorative thumbnail images in the margins of Illuminated manuscripts, most popular from about 1250 through the 15th century, although found earlier and later...

in the border decorations or initials in illuminated manuscript

Illuminated manuscript

An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniature illustrations...

s. From this the term began to be applied to larger caricatures, such as those of Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...

, and the modern sense began to develop. It is first recorded in English in 1646 from Sir Thomas Browne

Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne was an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric....

:"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 gargoyle

Gargoyle

s) 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

German art

German art has a long and distinguished tradition in the visual arts, from the earliest known work of figurative art to its current output of contemporary 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

Fantastic art

Fantastic art is an art genre. The parameters of fantastic art have been fairly rigorously defined in the scholarship on the subject ever since the 19th century. There was a movement of science fiction and fantasy artists prior to and during the Great Depression, which were mainly cover art and...

In literature

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.)

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

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

), 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

François Rabelais

François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...

and Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...

. Terry Castle has written on the relationship between metamorphosis, literary writings and masquerade.

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

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...

's Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's Travels
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels , is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of...

provides a variety of approaches to grotesque representation. In poetry, the works of Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

provide many examples of the grotesque.

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

Monster

A monster is any fictional creature, usually found in legends or horror fiction, that is somewhat hideous and may produce physical harm or mental fear by either its appearance or its actions...

.) 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 Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...

, the figure of Caliban

Caliban (character)

Caliban is one of the primary antagonists in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.- Character :Caliban is forced into servitude on an island ruled by Prospero. While he is referred to as a calvaluna or mooncalf, a freckled monster, he is the only human inhabitant of the island that is otherwise...

has inspired more nuanced reactions than simple scorn and disgust. Also, in J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...

's The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...

, the character of Gollum may be considered to have both disgusting and empathetic qualities, which fit him into the grotesque template.

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

'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

The Phantom of the Opera

Le Fantôme de l'Opéra is a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serialisation in "Le Gaulois" from September 23, 1909 to January 8, 1910...

and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast is a traditional fairy tale. The first published version of the fairy tale was a rendition by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, published in La jeune américaine, et les contes marins in 1740...

. Other instances of the romantic grotesque are also to be found in Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

, E.T.A. Hoffmann

E.T.A. Hoffmann

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann , better known by his pen name E.T.A. Hoffmann , was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist...

, in Sturm und Drang
Sturm und Drang
Sturm und Drang is a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s, in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism...

literature or in Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Romantic grotesque is far more terrible and sombre than medieval grotesque, which celebrated laughter and fertility.

The grotesque received a new shape with Alice in the Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...

, 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

Children's literature

Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...

, but still utterly strange.

Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. It resembles its parent genre in that it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot...

is a genre frequently identified with grotesques and William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...

is often cited as the ringmaster. Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...

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

A Good Man is Hard to Find (short story)

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is a short story written by Flannery O'Connor in 1953. The story appears in the collection of short stories of the same name, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The interpretive work of scholars often focuses on the controversial final scene.-Background:The short story was...

," 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

Raymond Kennedy

Raymond Kennedy was an American novelist. He was born in Wilbraham, Massachusetts to James Patrick Kennedy and Orise Belanger and was the youngest of three brothers. Kennedy spent his formative years in Belchertown and Holyoke...

is another author associated with the literary tradition of the grotesque.

Theatre of the Grotesque

The term Theatre of the Grotesque refers to an anti-naturalistic

Naturalism (theatre)

Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theatre that attempts to create a perfect illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies: detailed, three-dimensional settings Naturalism is a...

school of Italian dramatists, writing in the 1910s and 1920s, who are often seen as precursors of the Theatre of the Absurd

Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work...

.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire...

is a major author of contemporary grotesque comedy plays.

In architecture

In architecture the term "grotesque" means a carved stone figure.

Grotesques are often confused with gargoyle

Gargoyle

s, 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

Chimera (architecture)

. 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

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

word babuino, which means "baboon

Baboon

Baboons are African and Arabian Old World monkeys belonging to the genus Papio, part of the subfamily Cercopithecinae. There are five species, which are some of the largest non-hominoid members of the primate order; only the mandrill and the drill are larger...

In typography

The word "Grotesque", or "Grotesk" in German, is also frequently used as a synonym for sans-serif

Sans-serif

In typography, a sans-serif, sans serif or san serif typeface is one that does not have the small projecting features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the French word sans, meaning "without"....

in typography

Typography

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...

. At other times, it is used (along with "Neo-Grotesque", "Humanist", "Lineal", and "Geometric") to describe a particular style or subset of sans-serif typefaces. The origin of this association can be traced back to English typefounder William Thorowgood, who first introduced the term "grotesque" and in 1835 produced 7-line pica grotesque—the first sans-serif typeface containing actual lowercase letters. An alternate etymology is possibly based on the original reaction of other typographers to such a strikingly featureless typeface.

Popular Grotesque typefaces include Franklin Gothic

Franklin Gothic

Franklin Gothic and its related faces are realist sans-serif typefaces originated by Morris Fuller Benton in 1902. “Gothic” is an increasingly archaic term meaning sans-serif. Franklin Gothic has been used in many advertisements and headlines in newspapers. The typeface continues to maintain a...

, News Gothic

News Gothic

News Gothic is a realist sans-serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton, and released by the American Type Founders in 1908. The typeface was originally drawn in two lighter weights, a medium text weight using the title News Gothic, and a closely related light weight marketed under the name...

, Haettenschweiler

Haettenschweiler

Haettenschweiler is a realist sans-serif typeface based on an uppercase metal-cast type called Schmalfette Grotesk . The face is named for Walter Haettenschweiler, who with Armin Haab, published the book Lettera which uses Schmalfette Grotesk.Haettenschweiler is often compared with Helvetica...

and Lucida Sans (although the latter lacks the spurred "G"), whereas popular Neo-Grotesque typefaces include Arial

Arial

Arial, sometimes marketed or displayed in software as Arial MT, is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts. Fonts from the Arial family are packaged with Microsoft Windows, some other Microsoft software applications, Apple Mac OS X and many PostScript 3 computer printers...

, Helvetica

Helvetica

Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann.-Visual distinctive characteristics:Characteristics of this typeface are:lower case:square dot over the letter i....

and Verdana

Verdana

Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography group...

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Early examples in Roman ornaments

Etymology in Renaissance

Mannerism

Engravings, woodwork, book illustration, decorations

From Baroque to Victorian era

Extensions of the term in art

In literature

Theatre of the Grotesque

In architecture

In typography

See also

Further reading

External links