The Grotesques in the Italian Art of the Late 15th — Early 16th Centuries: Historiography and History (original) (raw)
Related papers
Paradigms of Renaissance Grotesques
[Essays&Studies 43] Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2019
This collection offers a set of new readings on the history, meanings, and cultural innovations of the grotesque as defined by various current critical theories and practices. Since the grotesque frequently manifests itself as striking incongruities, ingenious hybrids, and creative deformities of nature and culture, it is profoundly implicated in early modern debates on the theological, philosophical, and ethical role of images. This consideration serves as the central focus from which the articles in the collection then move outward along different lines of conceptualization, chronology, cultural relevance, place, and site. They cover a wide spectrum of artistic media, from prints to drawings, from sculptures to gardens, from paintings to stuccos. As they do this, they engage with, and bring together, theoretical perspectives from writers as diverse as Plato and Paleotti, Vitruvius and Vasari, Molanus and Montaigne. Whether travelling a short distance from Nero’s Domus Aurea to Raphael’s Vatican logge, or across the ocean from Italy to New Spain, this volume goes further than any previous study in defining the historic understanding of grotesque and, in so doing, providing us with a more nuanced resource for our understanding of an art form once viewed as peripheral.
Grotesque Painting and Painting as Grotesque in the Renaissance
Source: Notes in the History of Art, 2014
Among the grotesques that were so popular in sixteenth-century Italy, a self-consciously playful image has escaped the attention of scholars: a hybrid monster at his easel, painting another hybrid, his model. This witty image condenses the tensions around imitation and invention that also animate Renaissance writings about grotesques. For further on grotesques, invention, imitation, and interpretation in the Renaissance, see my book, Raphael's Ostrich (Penn State UP, 2015).
The Cult of the Monstrous: Caricature, Physiognomy, and Monsters in Early Modern Italy
Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, 2012
Caricature emerged as a pictorial genre in early modern Italy and became a potent form of social satire practiced by the period’s foremost draftsmen, including the Carracci and Guercino. The deformed and misshapen subjects of caricature drawings coincided with a fascination with monstrosity. Monsters, aberrations, and anomalies reflected a cultural appreciation for the curious. The monster that slowly took shape in scientific literature was first alluded to in comparative physiognomic texts that related human to beast, then made brief appearances in the discourse on medical conditions, and finally became the primary focus of specialty publications. The attention given to physical aberrance led to the birth of teratology, the medical study of abnormal development, and the subsequent publication of several well-known monster histories by Fortunio Liceti and Ulisse Aldrovandi. This essay considers the rise of the monstrous by examining several trends in contemporary scientific discours...
Artifact, 2017
This paper discusses the affect of images, focusing on the notion in the art and theory of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that movement in painting corresponds with (emotional) movement in the spectator and with the imagination or creativity of the artist. It addresses the work of Signorelli, Morto da Feltro, Pinturicchio, and Sodoma (c. 1500) and, in particular, their grotesques. This art form, which became remarkably prolific in fresco decorations of the villas and palaces of the sixteenth century, was appreciated as a figuration of movement, understood both literally in terms of the grotesque’s composition as a figura serpentinata and metaphorically as generated by the turbulent imagination of the artist. It is argued that grotesques constituted a field within the visual culture of the time that, due to its marginality and its investigation of metamorphosis and monstrosity, challenged the boundaries between image and spectator and explored the creative power of the artist.
Grotesque and Caricature, 2024
Grotesque and Caricature, Leonardo to Bernini examines these two genres across Renaissance and Early Modern Italy. Although their origins stem from Antiquity, it were Leonardo da Vinci's early teste caricate that injected fresh life into the tradition, greatly inspiring generations of artists. Critical among them were his Milanese followers, such as Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, and also Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo as well as, notably, Annibale Carracci, Guercino, and Bernini among others. Their artistic production-drawings, prints, paintings, and sculpture-reveals deep interest in physical, physiognomic, and psychological observations with a penchant for humor and wit. Written by an international group of established and emerging scholars, this volume explores new insights to these complementary artistic genres.