grotesque painting and painting as grotesque in the renaissance

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GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE Author(s): Una Roman D'Elia Source: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 5-12 Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23611168 . Accessed: 30/04/2014 12:15 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Source: Notes in the History of Art. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 80.198.104.140 on Wed, 30 Apr 2014 12:15:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE

GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCEAuthor(s): Una Roman D'EliaSource: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 5-12Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23611168 .

Accessed: 30/04/2014 12:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Source:Notes in the History of Art.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 80.198.104.140 on Wed, 30 Apr 2014 12:15:15 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE

GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE

IN THE RENAISSANCE

Una Roman D'Elia

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, paint ing another hybrid, his model (Fig. 1). This

witty image condenses the tensions around

imitation and invention that also animate

Renaissance writings about grotesques. When light and fantastic paintings, soon

dubbed grotesques, were unearthed in the

ruins of Nero's Golden House in the fifteenth

century, a classical text was conveniently available as a key to their interpretation.1 Vitruvius had famously derided these "mon

sters" as paintings of the impossible: "These

things do not exist nor can they exist nor

have they ever existed."2 He wrote of archi tecture with ridiculously thin supports and

of heads and bodies sprouting from plants and concluded that grotesques cause delight rather than appealing to judgment.3 Vitru vius's language was central to the debate over grotesques in the sixteenth century. Vi

truvius mentioned figures, human and bes

tial, appearing out of foliage but seemed

most outraged by architectural violations of

the laws of physics. Renaissance commen

tators shifted their focus to hybrid monsters.4

Daniele Barbaro, in his 1567 commentary on Vitruvius, added a reference to "mixtures

of various species" among the list of impos sibilities. Barbaro also offered an explana tion: "Certainly, just as fantasy in sleep con

fusedly represents images of things to us and often puts together things of a diverse

nature, so we could say do grotesques, which

we could definitely call the dreams of paint

ing."5 Dialectic, Barbaro maintained, satisfies

reason, oratory the senses and reason, poetry more the senses than reason. Grotesques are

instead akin to sophistry—argument and pure

artistry for their own sake, untethered by

logic or nature.6

Giorgio Vasari deemed grotesques "a very ridiculous and licentious species of painting" but also praised their inventiveness: "miscar

ried monsters [sconciature di mostri] . . .

things without rules ... a great weight on

the thinnest thread that could not hold it, a

horse with legs of leaves and a man the legs of a crane, and infinite swags of drapery and

sparrows."7 Vasari listed impossibilities—a weight and drapery without support and hy brid monsters—but also sparrows, local birds that naturally fly. Vasari's odd reference to

sparrows, which are hardly "miscarried mon

sters," betrays a tension between art and na

ture characteristic of Renaissance grotesques. Ancient examples include birds neatly

arranged in a pattern on perches, but nothing like the veristic birds that flit around Re

naissance grotesques. Vasari called Giovanni da Udine "almost

the inventor" of grotesques and lauded the

grotesques of the Loggia of Pope Leo X as

"most lovely and capricious inventions, full

of the most varied and extravagant things

you could possibly imagine." Giovanni da

Udine's fruit, birds, fish, and sea monsters are "most natural" and "alive and true."8

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Page 3: GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE

T

*'..V . ' 1 • '• *gg • •

Fig. 1 Luzio Romano, grotesque painting. 1544-1546. Fresco. Cagliostra. Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome. (Photo: author)

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Page 4: GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE

Giovanni da Udine emerges in this account

as both an inventor of fantastic grotesques and a master of naturalism. In his paintings, which predate by decades Renaissance writ

ings on grotesques, nature and artifice in

tertwine in constant play. Naturalistically

wriggling and flying animals fall into sym metrical calligraphic patterns in a self-con

scious expression of the way in which arti

fice mimics, transforms, and controls nature

(Fig. 2). Raphael (with the assistance of Giovanni

da Udine, who probably painted these fig ures) included a wry commentary among the grotesques in the Stufetta of Cardinal

Bibbiena in the Vatican (Fig. 3).9 Here the

play is on the imitation of antiquity. The

muscular forms of ancient colossal statues

of river gods are made into tiny elfin crea

tures with wispy beards. Boys tame their

traditionally unruly locks by washing their

hair and giving them a modern haircut—

forms of personal grooming that surely hap

pened in this space, which was a sort of

sauna. The idea of washing a river god makes the conceit even sillier. Further levels of interpretation are possible since river gods can signify the source of invention; therefore,

by cutting their hair, Raphael and his shop are not only returning to antiquity, but also

reshaping the source itself. But such light wit does not encourage ponderous readings.

These playful images are entirely appro

priate for the patron, Bernardo Dovizi, who, before he became Cardinal Bibbiena, had

written what many call the first Renaissance

comedy, La Calandria, a bawdy, irreverent

play—with no discernable moral—about

adultery and replete with cross-dressing and

genital groping.10 Baldassare Castiglione's

prologue lauds the play as modern, not an

cient; vernacular, not Latin; and prose, not

poetry. Castiglione was aware that the play was highly classical—he tells the audience

that since Plautus was so careless as to forget to lock up his plays, he deserved to have

them pilfered.11 Raphael and Castiglione vis

ited ancient sites together and surely made

jokes about what it meant to be ancient and

modern. The paintings in the Stufetta are

not in any direct sense based on the Calan

dria or Castiglione's prologue, but these im

ages articulate a similar tension between the imitation of antiquity and modern invention.

They are, as Pietro Aretino would later write

of the conceits of another follower of

Raphael, Giulio Romano, "anciently modem

and modemly ancient [anticamente modemi

e modernamente antichi]."12 They are also

naturally artful and artfully natural.

Anton Francesco Doni gave a complex

reading of the relationship between nature

and artifice in grotesques in his 1549 dia

logue Disegno. Nature does not understand

grotesques, and Art, Painting, and Sculpture seek to explain:

Art [to Painting]—When you depict in paint ing a sketchy landscape [ritrai in pittura una macchia d'un paese], do you not often

see there animals, men, heads, and other

fantastic creatures?

Painting—It is in the clouds that I see fan tastic animals and castles with infinite and diverse people and figures.

Art—Do you believe that these are actually in the clouds?

Painting—No ... in the chaos of my brain ... castles in air.13

An artist sees grotesques in the landscape, sketched in blots of paint, and in the shifting forms of clouds—or possibly paintings of clouds. These inchoate shapes are trans formed by "the chaos" of an artist's fantasy

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Page 5: GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE

" VT^M

■hH^'SU

, v_ A ■ * ■'

w VBnt

K.

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Fig. 2 Giovanni da Udine, grotesques. 1516-1517. Fresco. Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, Vatican Palace. (Photo: author)

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Page 6: GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE

mm

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Ifii

am , mm

Fig. 3 Raphael, Giovanni da Udine, and workshop, Boy Drying a River God's Hair. 1516. Fresco with wax. Stufetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, Vatican Palace. (Photo: author)

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Page 7: GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE

10

into grotesques. The landscape itself and the

style of painting are sketchy ("una macchia d'un paese"), terms that both capture the

ephemeral and organic in nature and suggest conspicuously artful intervention in the form of a visible quick brushstroke. Chimerical

grotesques derive ultimately from nature, mediated so many times that Nature herself cannot understand them.

If Renaissance grotesques by their very existence comment on the relationship be tween nature and artifice, they rarely include

depictions of artists.14 The idea of artist and art as grotesque is embodied most vividly in the previously unnoticed and unpublished vignette of a grotesque painter frescoed in Castel Sant'Angelo in around 1545 (Fig. I).15 The image is part of the decoration of a vault in the apartment known as the Caglios tra, which was originally an open loggia on the top level of the papal fortress and resi

dence, was subsequently walled and used as a prison, and is now a storeroom and in accessible to the public. The loggia was dec orated during Pope Paul Ill's renovation of the castle, a part of his revival of Rome and

papal splendor after the devastating Sack of Rome. From this loggia, the pope and his court could escape the heat, enjoy the view, and watch fireworks.

As lions leap symmetrically below and foliate-tailed caryatids hold up a frame con

sisting of a vine that is a single line, one

grotesque poses, his snaky nether regions giving new meaning to the phrase "figura serpentinata." The other fishy-tailed man, nude except for his painter's cap, pauses like a professional to consider his work so far. He is a competent modern painter—we can

just make out that the figure he has painted is foreshortened from his point of view. His easel's thin legs are balanced on the waves. The image is a light and elegant joke, one

that again in its tone seems to taunt the

pompous fool who would dare to make a

leaden, theoretical reading of it. I hope that I can be acquitted of this charge but am fully aware that interpreting grotesques is a slip pery game.

There are also scant grounds for a highly intellectualized reading since we know very little about the painter, Luzio Romano, ex

cept that he was a follower of Perino del

Vaga, which makes him another one of

Raphael's heirs. Raphael died in his thirties on Good Friday in 1520 and was repeatedly compared to Christ.16 After Raphael was, at his own request, buried in the Pantheon, other artists, including Perino del Vaga, fol lowed suit, as the pious seek to be buried near the relics of a saint.17 Pietro Bembo's Latin epitaph was later translated by Alexan der Pope:

Here lies Raphael. Living, great Nature fear'd he might outvie

Her works, and dying, fears herself may die.18

Luzio Romano's grotesque painter conveys a similar paradoxical conceit about art and nature to this solemn distich, but in a playful tone appropriate to a space used for relax ation.

Again, the point is not that Luzio was

reading Bembo and translating his difficult Latin into visual form, which seems highly unlikely, but that images articulated the same

complex ideas about art, imitation, and na ture as literary texts. This loggia was painted in 1544-1546, before the theoretical debates about grotesques had been published. The

only prior Renaissance writing about gro tesques is in Sebastiano Serlio's 1537 treatise on architecture, a text that we have no reason to assume Luzio knew. This image and the other artfully natural grotesques of the first

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Page 8: GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE

11

half of the sixteenth century are not illus

trating the textual debates, which come later. One of the great claims of grotesques was that they were not based upon texts. Without a governing narrative, they are pure creations of artists, who have no need to turn to a lit

erary adviser for an "invenzione." Luzio's hybrid artist demonstrates how

grotesques imitate nothing but themselves, how they are completely independent from nature. Of course, the joke only works be cause Luzio's artist paints from life, and the

image follows the conventions of naturalism, such as foreshortening and a consistent light source. The fantasy offers a playful inver

sion, a deliciously silly mirroring and cycling between inspiration and creation, a new ab surd way to envision the maxim that an artist

always paints himself. Artistic creation is the juxtaposition of disparate things, mon strous couplings both unnatural and fecund. As Vasari would repeatedly make clear in his Lives, an artist's work was a reflection of his personality, most famously Raphael's grace and Michelangelo's terribilità. There

fore, if art is hybridization, the artist is a

grotesque, an embodiment of what Doni would a few years later have Painting call "the chaos of my brain." Leon Battista Al berti had written that the painter was only concerned with depicting things that can be

seen,19 but grotesques offered a greater scope for art. Because artists themselves are mar velous monsters, both divine and bestial, who conflate strangely disparate things, art can make even our dreams living and true.

NOTES

I would like to thank Anthony D'Elia, Stuart Lingo, Marcia Hall, Aimee Ng, Susanne McColeman, Laurie

Schneider Adams, and the anonymous readers.

1. On Renaissance grotesques, see Nicole Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des

grotesques à la Renaissance (London: Warburg Insti

tute/Brill, 1969); Philippe Morel, Les grotesques: Les

figures de l'imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1997); Alessandra Zamperini, Le Grottesche: Il sogno délia

pittura nella decorazione pariétale (San Giovanni Lu

patoto [Verona]: Arsenale, 2007), pp. 121-195; and

Nicole Dacos, The Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art

Treasure, trans. Josephine Bacon (New York:

Abbeville, 2008). 2. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed,

Thomas Noble Howe et ai, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 91. 3. See also, for a reference to the ridiculousness

of hybrids and, therefore, the limits of poetic decorum,

Horace, Ars poética, in Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1972), p. 279.

4. For a collection of the key texts, see Scritti d'arte

del Cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi, 9 vols. (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1977), III, pp. 2617-2701.

5. Daniele Barbara, ibid., pp. 2633-2638. Trans lations are my own unless otherwise noted.

6. Ibid., pp. 2634-2635. See also Barocchi's in troduction to this section on pp. 2619-2620.

7. The word "passerotto" could be a term of en

dearment, connote an oversight, or refer to male gen italia. But in this case, Vasari clearly invokes the literal

meaning, "sparrow." This passage is in both the 1550 edition (book I: "Proemio," ch. XXVII) and the 1568 edition (book I: "Introduzione, della pittura," ch. XIII), with only slight variations. Giorgio Vasari, Le opere, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: Sansoni,

1906), I, p. 193. 8. Ibid., VI, pp. 552-554. 9. See Nicole Dacos, in Giovanni da Udine 1487

1561, ed. Nicole Dacos and Caterina Furlan (Udine: Casamassima, 1987), p. 39. On the Stufetta, see also Deoclecio Redig de Campos, "La Stufetta del Cardinal

Bibbiena in Vaticano e il suo restauro," Rômisches

Jahrbuch fiir Kunstgeschichte 20 (1983):221-240. 10. Bernardo Dovizi, La Calandria (Siena: 1521),

frequently republished. Compare, for a Neoplatonic

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Page 9: GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE

12

reading of the play in relation to the Stufetta, Franco

Ruffini, Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento: La "Ca

landria" alla corte di Urbino (Bologna: Il Mulino,

1986). 11. Ibid., p. 127. 12. Pietro Aretino, Lettere sull'arte, ed. Ettore

Camesasca, 3 vols, in 4 (Milan: Milione, 1957), I, p. 215.

13. Anton Francesco Doni, Disegno (Venice:

Apresso Gabriel Giolito di Ferrarii, 1549), fols. 21v

22v. On this passage, with a different emphasis, see

also Morel, pp. 86-89.

14. Depictions of musicians and writers are much

more common. The other examples of artists I have

found are in a pilaster by Sodoma in the cloister of

Monte Oliveto Maggiore (illustrated in Morel, fig. 49) and in an initial by a follower of Cornells Floris in the

register of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke, illustrated

in Antoinette Huysmans etal., Cornelis Floris, 1514

1575 (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1996), fig. 267.

15. On this space, its decoration, and the subse

quent damage it suffered, see Gli affreschi di Paolo

Ilia Cast el Sant'Angelo, progetto ed esecuzione 1543

1548, ed. Filippa M. Aliberti Gaudioso and Eraldo

Gaudioso, exh. cat., 2 vols. (Rome: De Luca, 1981),

II, pp. 37-45. On Luzio Romano (Luzio Luzzi da

Todi), see Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodino, "Ad

denda a Luzio Luzzi disegnatore," Bollettino d'arte

86, no. 116 (2001 ):39—78. 16. For documents, see John Shearman, ed.,

Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483-1602), 2

vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), I, pp.

569-571,572-574,575-578,581-583. See also Kath

leen Weil-Garris, "La morte di Raffaello e la 'Trasfig urazione,'

" in Raffaello e I'Europa, atti del IV Corso

Internazionale di Alta Cultura, ed. Marcello Fagioli and Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello stato, Librería dello stato, 1990), pp. 179-187.

17. On the evidence for Raphael's lost will and his

tomb, see Shearman, I, pp. 569-571, and Susanna

Pasquali, "From the Pantheon of Artists to the Pan

theon of Illustrious Men: Raphael's Tomb and Its

Legacy," in Pantheons: Transformations of a Monu

mental Idea, ed. Richard Wrigley and Matthew Craske

(Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 35-56.

18. Shearman, I, pp. 640-642.

19. Leon Battista Alberti, Delia pittura, ed. Luigi Mallè (Florence: Sansoni, 1950), p. 55.

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