grotesque painting and painting as grotesque in the renaissance
TRANSCRIPT
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 .
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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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*'..V . ' 1 • '• *gg • •
Fig. 1 Luzio Romano, grotesque painting. 1544-1546. Fresco. Cagliostra. Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome. (Photo: author)
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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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Fig. 2 Giovanni da Udine, grotesques. 1516-1517. Fresco. Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, Vatican Palace. (Photo: author)
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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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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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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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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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