Ornament and Metamorphosis

The Grotesque and its Rediscovery

In the 1480s a young man fell into a hole close to the Coliseum in Rome and found himself amongst the most beautiful and bizarre wall paintings he had ever seen – or so the legend goes. Other sources claim it was the painter Pinturicchio who fell into the hole. Neither of them knew they had rediscovered the Domus Aurea, Roman emperor Nero’s pleasure palace. And for centuries this remained unknown, Piranesi’s 1756 engraving Veduta degli Avanzi dell Terme di Tito still labels the Domus Aurea as “House of Titus”. The rediscovery of the Domus Aurea is also how the term grotesque was coined. Its wall paintings were referred to as grottesche because in the 15th century the Roman remains were still believed to be grotte, Italian for grottoes. This noun wrought the adjective grottesco, referring to the unusual characteristics of the hybrid creatures on the wall paintings. Later it gained a supernatural and paradoxical connotation which in the 16th century, when grotesque ornament spread through Europe, was carried over to the English language. Ait Daoud wrote: “…The term ‘grotesque’ gradually took on a broader meaning, with the bizarre, monstrous, imaginative, caricatural connotations we still associate …”. Today, the noun grotesque still refers to architecture or artwork including motifs of hybrid animal and human forms, while the adjective may either refer to those same qualities or mean ludicrous from incongruity or absurd.
This text provides an overview of the Domus Aurea’s grotesque architectural ornaments, their rediscovery and development in the late 15^th and 16^th centuries. The correlation between the Domus Aurea, Mannerism and the Northern Renaissance is addressed in three respective sections with the intent of understanding why artists and architects produced grotesque architectural ornament and its hybrid monstrous creatures throughout history.