Grotesque

About

The grotesque began as ornament. When painted rooms of Nero's buried Golden House in Rome were rediscovered around 1480, their walls of vines sprouting half-human creatures were called grottesche, ‘things from the grottoes’. Raphael's workshop spread the style across the Vatican Loggias, and the word came to mean any fusion of human, animal and plant that breaks natural order.

It widened to the absurd, ugly and disturbing. Gothic masons set leering gargoyles on cathedrals, and Hieronymus Bosch peopled The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1510) with bird-headed demons. The Ugly Duchess (c. 1513), attributed to Quinten Massys, mocks vanity through an old woman in a young woman's dress, and Francisco de Goya's Los Caprichos (1799) filled satire with monsters. Modern versions run from Peter Saul's melting cartoon figures to H. R. Giger's biomechanical creature for the film Alien (1979) and Jake and Dinos Chapman's fused child mannequins.