"The grotesques are a category of free and comical painting invented in ancient times to decorate wall surfaces where only shapes suspended in air could find a place. The artists represented monstrous deformities created from the caprice of nature or by the extravagant fantasy of the artist: they invented these forms without any rule, hung on a thin wire weight he could not bear, transformed the legs of a horse in leaves, the legs of a man in bird legs and thus painted a variety of pranks and extravagances. The one who had the wildest imagination was considered the most gifted "
Giorgio Vasari, From painting technique Introduction, Chapter XIV, 1550

Cornelis Van Bos, Netherlands, 1550, detail of a parody procession : the failure to progress and the derision street parties. This is the world of dreams and fantasies. Birds of Flemish engravers are often unreal unlike Raphael who treats them naturalistically in the Lodges of the Vatican.

 From cave to grottesques

Vasari offers here a definition of grottesques directly inspired by Vitruvian Text (De Architectura) written ... sixteen centuries earlier. For indeed, the grottesques are an artistic tradition dating back to Roman times. Italy will be the starting point of this "renaissance" with the discovery of ancient decorations in the basement of the Domus Aurea, sumptuous palace of Emperor Nero in Rome.

We are at the end of the fifteenth century, when the taste for antiquity was largely sharpened: archaeological excavations are multiplying, artists recopy exhumed stucco and sculptures .

The Domus Aurea is miraculously preserved because it was buried quickly under the Baths of Trajan in the second century. The excavation is progressive because bulky. The vaults and walls and finally the audacious decorations reveal themselves gradually by torchlight. Visitors feel inside caves ("grottes") hence the word "grottesques" to designate these fantastic decorations. This term is needed over time with an orthographic change of importance related to the stylistic evolution during the sixteenth century: "grottesque" will lose one "t" and become "grotesque".




A context for this "renaissance" in the late fifteenth century

A combination of circumstances allows the emergence and especially the wide dissemination of grottesque in all fields of art:

The return to Rome in the fifteenth century of the popes in Avignon exile. They are confronted with a ruined city, devoid of any artistic prestige and undignified of the first Christian city. More interested in art and archeology as by religious matters (number of popes and cardinals who succeeded were from large families where the humanist spirit prevailed), the papal court sponsors the most illustrious artists Perugino , Ghirlandaio, Signorelli, Botticelli, shortly after Giovanni da Udine and Raphael. All of them are already working in Milan, Padua, Florence, Pisa and Ferrara, that were real creative and humanistic centers.

The ubiquity of ancient ruins in Rome more than anywhere else impregnates deeply sensitivity and probably leads to the emergence of an ornamental unit. Already the sculptor Donatello or painter Mantegna were endowed with a real archaeologist training. It was in the air. It was moreover found graffiti-signatures on the walls of the Domus Aurea of Ghirlandaio, of Fillipino Lippi, Pinturicchio ... showing there interest in the ornamental style they copied, performed and widely disseminated.

The development of printmaking and engraving help the rapid spread of grottesque patterns copied or reinvented. In the early sixteenth century the documentation is already abundant. It is used for the postponement in mural painting, tapestry, silverware ... Most Italian writers have known Mantegna or are influenced by Dürer. In France, half of the sixteenth century, Jacques Androuet du Cerceau emerges from anonymity thanks to François Ier, leaving collections of boards of Italian and Flemish inspiration.

The Europe of the fifteenth century, in "existential crisis" sometimes leans towards humanism ideas sometimes towards an exacerbated mysticism; the quest of advanced modernity is coming. In this period so contradictory, artists answer to new sponsors enriched by commercial expansion and willing luxury. The grottesques free of religious allusion and carrying a total novelty satisfy the desire for modernity and new adventure.




Stylistic development, the grottesque loses a "t"

From the caves of the Domus Aurea, is adopted the affective term of "grotesqueness" to describe any kind of ornamental whole rediscovered . During the sixteenth century stylistic shift of the decor transforms the spelling in "grotesque" thereby charging the word of the sense of comic, ridiculous even unbearable. The strength of the grotesque is to encompass all forms of imaginative ornamentation and passing from fancies of an Pinturicchio to light charms of a Raphael or madness of the soft structures of Cornelis Floris of Antwerp. North-South influences are incessant through engravings and travel of artists leading to a constant creative upmanship. Resources are multiple:
- Eccentricities, or droll or monsters widely represented in the manuscripts of the fourteenth century Northern Europe,
- Populated scrolls, acanthus long stems or grapevine infinitely winding which teems a scalable fauna
- Antics and chinoiserie of the seventeenth century that mark the transition to the arabesque ...

But two fundamental laws, clearly defined by André Chastel, allow us to always recognize them:

- The negation of space, it is a world without weight, without articulated thickness in a mixture of rigor and inconsistency; an architecture of the suspension and vertigo,
- And the demon laugh based on the game and on the combination of hybrid forms, half-plant, half animal and half human that occur in a living proliferation. These are forms of pure imagination where fantasy can also turn into madness.




Some findings: painters, engravers and visits

- Luca Signorelli, Chapel Saint Brice, Orvieto Cathedral, 1499-1504 Some painted decorations: Luca Signorelli (1445-1523), heir to Piero della Francesca, Saint-Brice chapel in the cathedral of Orvieto in 1499-1504
- Filippino Lippi (1457-1504), Carafa chapel of the Church of the Minerva in Rome in 1486-1493 for candelabra underbody pilasters Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence
- Pinturichio Bernardino (1454-1513), for Borgia apartments in the Vatican in Rome, Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral, one of the first to practice grottesque decor
- Raphael (1483-1520), a pupil of Perugino, chief architect and Superintendent of the Buildings in the papal court, Villa Madame, Vatican Lodges in Rome; one of the representatives of the grottesque style "Neronian"
- Giovanni da Udine (1487-1561), Raphael contributor to the Vatican in Rome Lodges and Giulio Romano in Mantua
- Primaticcio (1504-1570), based in France, a pupil of Giulio Romano, runs the site from the castle after the death of Rosso



Some examples of boards and books

- Nicoletto da Modena and Giovantonio da Brescia , for many plates of grottesques about 1500-1515 that will be distributed by etching
- Veneziano (Agostino Musi) one of the most active writers of the early sixteenth century, influenced by Dürer, he published engravings grottesques close to those of Giovanni da Udine in the Vatican Lodges
- Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (1510-after 1584), French engraver who has a great influence by his engraved publications: Le Recueil des Grandes Grotesques in 1562 showed ornamental plates full of fantasies and baroquisantes





The following patterns have been designed as "bricks" to make your grotesque decor.
In part "Large sizes" , you will find decorative sets all prepared and very large.