The word grotesque derives from grotto decorative art discovered in Titus’s baths
Evidence
“The word grotesque derives from a type of Roman ornamental design first discovered in the fifteenth cenury, during the excavation of Titus’s baths. Named after the ‘grottoes’ in which they were found, the new forms consisted of human and animal shapes intermingled with foliage, flowers, and fruits in fantastic designs which bore no relationship to the logical categories of classical art. For a contemporary account of these forms we can turn to the Latin writer Vitruvius. Vitruvius was an official charged with the rebuilding of Rome under Augustus, to whom his treatise On Architecture is addressed. Not surprisingly, it bears down hard on the ‘improper taste’ for the grotesque. ‘Such things neither are, nor can be, nor have been,’ says the author in his description of the mixed human, animal, and vegetable forms: … For how can a reed actually sustain a roof, or a candelabrum the ornament of a gable? or a soft and slender stalk, a seated statue? or how can flowers and half-statues rise alternately from roots and stalks? Yet when people view these falsehoods, they approve rather than condemn, failing to consider whether any of them can really occur or not.” - Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce8 By the time of Grotesque (After the Gramme), the Fall’s pulp modernism has become an entire political-aesthetic program. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1127
Categorization
- DEFINE: Etymology of ‘grotesque’ grounded in a specific Renaissance discovery, with Vitruvius’s contemporary objection quoted.
- CANDY: The etymology — grotesque from grotto wall paintings found excavating Titus’s baths — is a genuinely tweetable trivia nugget.
- XREF: connects to: The category of the grotesque originally named human-animal-plant hybrids defying classical logic