The Grotesque, origins and meaning
The term ‘grotesque’ derives from Renaissance Italy. When Nero’s Golden Palace
(Domus Aurea) was accidentally discovered buried under over a millenium’s worth of
landfill, the rooms looked like underground tunnels or grottos. Some walls were
decorated with fantastic images—hybrid human and animal figures, eloborate plant
scrolls—all interlaced in a fantastic fashion to symbolise the exuberance and
unpredictability of nature.
Renaissance artists and architects reproduced these forms, and over subsequent centuries
the term then broadened its meaning to include anything that does not fit ruling concepts
of beauty and order.
The greatest Renaissance writer to exploit the new fashion was the French author,
François Rabelais (1483-1553) in his novels about Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the
now classic study of this aspect of his work is Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World
(first published in 1965). His ideas on the ideology of carnival were developed and
challenged by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression (1986)
An example of Renaissance ‘grotesque’