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 support@jstor.org.

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
 GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE
IN THE
Una Roman
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
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
RENAISSANCE
D'Elia
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
 T
*'..V
•. '•'*gg
1
••

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

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
Giovanni da Udine emerges in this account poetry. Castiglione was aware that the play
as both an inventor of fantastic grotesques was highly classical—he tells the audience
and a master of naturalism. In his paintings, that since Plautus was so careless as to forget
which predate by decades Renaissance writ to lock up his plays, he deserved to have
ings on grotesques, nature and artifice in them pilfered.11 Raphael and Castiglione vis
tertwine in constant play. Naturalistically ited ancient sites together and surely made
wriggling and flying animals fall into sym jokes about what it meant to be ancient and
metrical calligraphic patterns in a self-con modern. The paintings in the Stufetta are
scious expression of the way in which arti not in any direct sense based on the Calan
fice mimics, transforms, and controls nature dria or Castiglione's prologue, but these im
(Fig. 2). ages articulate a similar tension between the
Raphael (with the assistance of Giovanni imitation of antiquity and modern invention.
da Udine, who probably painted these fig They are, as Pietro Aretino would later write
ures) included a wry commentary among of the conceits of another follower of
the grotesques in the Stufetta of Cardinal Raphael, Giulio Romano, "anciently modem
Bibbiena in the Vatican (Fig. 3).9 Here the and modemly ancient [anticamente modemi
play is on the imitation of antiquity. The e modernamente antichi]."12 They are also
muscular forms of ancient colossal statues naturally artful and artfully natural.
of river gods are made into tiny elfin crea Anton Francesco Doni gave a complex
tures with wispy beards. Boys tame their reading of the relationship between nature
traditionally unruly locks by washing their and artifice in grotesques in his 1549 dia
hair and giving them a modern haircut— logue Disegno. Nature does not understand
forms of personal grooming that surely hap grotesques, and Art, Painting, and Sculpture
pened in this space, which was a sort of seek to explain:
sauna. The idea of washing a river god
Art [to Painting]—When you depict in paint
makes the conceit even sillier. Further levels
ing a sketchy landscape [ritrai in pittura
of interpretation are possible since river gods
una macchia d'un paese], do you not often
can signify the source of invention; therefore,
see there animals, men, heads, and other
by cutting their hair, Raphael and his shop fantastic creatures?
are not only returning to antiquity, but also
Painting—It is in the clouds that I see fan
reshaping the source itself. But such light tastic animals and castles with infiniteand
wit does not encourage ponderous readings.
diverse people and figures.
These playful images are entirely appro
Art—Do you believe that these are actually
priate for the patron, Bernardo Dovizi, who, in the clouds?
before he became Cardinal Bibbiena, had
Painting—No ... in the chaos of my brain
written what many call the first Renaissance
... castles in air.13
comedy, La Calandria, a bawdy, irreverent
play—with no discernable moral—about An artist sees grotesques in the landscape,
adultery and replete with cross-dressing and sketched in blots of paint, and in the shifting
genital groping.10 Baldassare Castiglione's forms of clouds—or possibly paintings of
prologue lauds the play as modern, not an clouds. These inchoate shapes are trans
cient; vernacular, not Latin; and prose, not formed by "the chaos" of an artist's fantasy

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
 w
VBnt

K.

"
VT^M
■hH^'SU
,
■ ■'
v_ A *

1 , __—- •'-•>

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

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
 mm

am ,
mm
1jE3l

Ifii
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)

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
 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
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
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
 11

half of the sixteenth century are not illus always paints himself. Artistic creation is
trating the textual debates, which come later. the juxtaposition of disparate things, mon
One of the great claims of grotesques was strous couplings both unnatural and fecund.
that they were not based upon texts. Without As Vasari would repeatedly make clear in
a governing narrative, they are pure creations his Lives, an artist's work was a reflection
of artists, who have no need to turn to a lit of his personality, most famously Raphael's
erary adviser for an "invenzione." grace and Michelangelo's terribilità. There
Luzio's hybrid artist demonstrates how fore, if art is hybridization, the artist is a
grotesques imitate nothing but themselves, grotesque, an embodiment of what Doni
how they are completely independent from would a few years later have Painting call
nature. Of course, the joke only works be "the chaos of my brain." Leon Battista Al
cause Luzio's artist paints from life, and the berti had written that the painter was only
image follows the conventions of naturalism, concerned with depicting things that can be
such as foreshortening and a consistent light seen,19 but grotesques offered a greater scope
source. The fantasy offers a playful inver for art. Becauseartists themselves are mar
sion, a deliciously silly mirroring and cycling velous monsters, both divine and bestial,
between inspiration and creation, a new ab who conflate strangely disparate things, art
surd way to envision the maxim that an artist can make even our dreams living and true.

NOTES

I would like to thank Anthony D'Elia, Stuart Lingo, 4. For a collection of the key texts, see Scritti d'arte
Marcia Hall, Aimee Ng, Susanne McColeman, Laurie del Cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi, 9 vols. (Torino:
Schneider Adams, and the anonymous readers. G. Einaudi, 1977), III, pp. 2617-2701.
5. Daniele Barbara, ibid., pp. 2633-2638. Trans
1. On Renaissance grotesques, see Nicole Dacos, lations are my own unless otherwise noted.
La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des 6. Ibid., pp. 2634-2635. See also Barocchi's in
grotesques à la Renaissance(London: Warburg Insti troduction to this section on pp. 2619-2620.
tute/Brill, 1969); Philippe Morel, Les grotesques: Les 7. The word "passerotto" could be a term of en
figures de l'imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de dearment, connote an oversight, or refer to male gen
la fin de la Renaissance italia. But in this case, Vasari
(Paris: Flammarion, 1997); clearly invokes the literal
Alessandra Zamperini, Le Grottesche: Il sogno délia meaning, "sparrow." This passage is in both the 1550
pittura nella decorazione pariétale (San Giovanni Lu edition (book I: "Proemio," ch. XXVII) and the 1568
patoto [Verona]: Arsenale, 2007), pp. 121-195; and edition (book I: "Introduzione, della pittura," ch. XIII),
Nicole Dacos, The Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art with only slight variations. Le opere,
Giorgio Vasari,
Treasure, trans. Josephine Bacon (New York: ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: Sansoni,
Abbeville, 2008). 1906), I, p. 193.
2. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed, 8. Ibid., VI, pp. 552-554.
Thomas Noble Howe et ai, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland 9. See Nicole Dacos, in Giovanni da Udine 1487
(New York: CambridgeUniversityPress, 1999), p. 91. 1561, ed. Nicole Dacos and Caterina Furlan (Udine:
3. See also, for a reference to the ridiculousness Casamassima, 1987), p. 39. On the Stufetta, see also
of hybrids and, therefore, the limits of poetic decorum, Deoclecio Redig de Campos, "La Stufetta del Cardinal
Horace, Ars poética, in Ancient Literary Criticism: Bibbiena in Vaticano e il suo restauro," Rômisches
The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Jahrbuch fiir Kunstgeschichte 20 (1983):221-240.
Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon 10. Bernardo Dovizi, La Calandria (Siena: 1521),
Press, 1972), p. 279. frequently republished. Compare, for a Neoplatonic

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
 12

reading of the play in relation to the Stufetta, Franco II, pp. 37-45. On Luzio Romano (Luzio Luzzi da
Ruffini, Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento: La "Ca Todi), see Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodino, "Ad
landria" alla corte di Urbino (Bologna: Il Mulino, denda a Luzio Luzzi disegnatore," Bollettino d'arte
1986). 86, no. 116 (2001 ):39—78.
11. Ibid., p. 127. 16. For documents, see John Shearman, ed.,
12. Pietro Aretino, Lettere sull'arte, ed. Ettore Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483-1602), 2
Camesasca, 3 vols, in 4 (Milan: Milione, 1957), I, p. vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), I, pp.
215. 569-571,572-574,575-578,581-583. See also Kath
13. Anton Francesco Doni, Disegno (Venice: leen Weil-Garris, "La morte di Raffaello e la 'Trasfig
"
Apresso Gabriel Giolito di Ferrarii, 1549), fols. 21v urazione,' in Raffaello e I'Europa, atti del IV Corso
22v. On this passage, with a different emphasis, see Internazionale di Alta Cultura, ed. Marcello Fagioli
also Morel, pp. 86-89. and Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Istituto poligrafico
14. Depictions of musicians and writers are much e Zecca dello stato, Librería dello stato, 1990), pp.
more common. The other examples of artists I have 179-187.
found are in a pilaster by Sodoma in the cloister of 17. On the evidence for Raphael's lost will and his
Monte Oliveto Maggiore (illustrated in Morel, fig. 49) tomb, see Shearman, I, pp. 569-571, and Susanna
and in an initial by a follower of Cornells Floris in the Pasquali, "From the Pantheon of Artists to the Pan
register of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke, illustrated theon of Illustrious Men: Raphael's Tomb and Its
in Antoinette Huysmans etal., Cornelis Floris, 1514 Legacy," in Pantheons: Transformations of a Monu
1575 (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1996), fig. 267. mental Idea, ed. Richard Wrigley and Matthew Craske
15. On this space, its decoration, and the subse (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 35-56.
quent damage it suffered, see Gli affreschi di Paolo 18. Shearman, I, pp. 640-642.
Ilia Cast el Sant'Angelo, progetto ed esecuzione 1543 19. Leon Battista Alberti, Delia pittura, ed. Luigi
1548, ed. Filippa M. Aliberti Gaudioso and Eraldo Mallè (Florence: Sansoni, 1950), p. 55.
Gaudioso, exh. cat., 2 vols. (Rome: De Luca, 1981),

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