The Grottesche Part 1. Fragment to Field

CHAPTER 11 The Grottesche Part 1. Fragment to Field

We touched on the grottesche as a mode of aggregating decorative fragments into structures which could display the artist’s mastery of design and imagi- native invention.1 The grottesche show the far-reaching transformation which had occurred in the conception and handling of ornament, with the exaltation of antiquity and the growth of ideas of artistic style, fed by a confluence of rhe- torical and Aristotelian thought.2 They exhibit a decorative style which spreads through painted façades, church and palace decoration, frames, furnishings, intermediary spaces and areas of ‘licence’ such as gardens.3 Such proliferation shows the flexibility of candelabra, peopled acanthus or arabesque ornament, which can be readily adapted to various shapes and registers; the grottesche also illustrate the kind of ornament which flourished under printing. With their lack of narrative, end or occasion, they can be used throughout a context, and so achieve a unifying decorative mode. In this ease of application lies a reason for their prolific success as the characteristic form of Renaissance ornament, and their centrality to later historicist readings of ornament as period style. This appears in their success in Neo-Renaissance style and nineteenth century

1 The extant drawings of antique ornament by Giuliano da Sangallo, Amico Aspertini, Jacopo Ripanda, Bambaia and the artists of the Codex Escurialensis are contemporary with—or reflect—the exploration of the Domus Aurea. On the influence of the Domus Aurea in the formation of the grottesche, see Nicole Dacos, La Découverte de la Domus Aurea et la Formation des grotesques à la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, Leiden: Brill, 1969); idem, “Ghirlandaio et l’antique”, Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome 39 (1962), 419– 55; idem, Le Logge di Raffaello: Maestro e bottega di fronte all’antica (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1977, 2nd ed. 1986); idem, Le Logge di Raffaello: L’antico, la bibbia, la bottega, la fortuna (Milan: Jaca Books and Vatican City: Musei Vaticani, 2008); idem, “Il trastullo di Raffaello”, Paragone 19, 219 (May 1962), 3–29; Dacos and Furlan, Giovanni da Udine. 2 F or surveys of the grotesques, see Philippe Morel Les Grotesques: Les figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1997); idem, “Il fun- ziamento simbolico e la critica delle grottesche nella seconda metà del Cinquecento”, in Roma e l’antico nell’arte e nella cultura del Cinquecento, ed. Marco Fagiolo (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1985), 149–78; Cristina Acidini Luchinat “La grottesca”, Storia dell’arte italiana XI, Part 3, IV (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 161–200. The principal Cinquecento dis- cussions of grottesche by Ligorio, Lomazzo, Armenini and Paleotti are excerpted in SAC III, Part 15. 3 The use of black and white sgraffito grotesques on façades appears with Andrea di Cosimo Feltrini.

Figure 11.1 Bernardo Buontalenti and Bernardino Poccetti, Palazzo di Bianca Capello, Florence, 1570–74. Photo: Sailko, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3-0, desaturated from original. pattern books, where they appear as the distinctive style of Italian Renaissance ornament.4 The grottesche as universally applicable all’antica decorative style thus typified the nineteenth century understanding of the Renaissance as the beginning of historicist style.5 The result of such proliferation would ultimately be to strengthen the distinction between fine and “decorative” or “minor” arts, with the latter conceived globally as pleasurable décor. The grottesche show the limitations in approaching ornament as a genealogy of motifs, rather than as the handling of relations.6 The flourishing of so-called grotesque decoration, from antiquity on, occurs in periods when scenographic design and the historicist revival of earlier art are dominant in decorative

4 See Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament; nineteenth century revival of the grottesche exploits their flexibility in varied mediums, such as polychrome ceramics, decorative brick- work, stained glass and carved wood. 5 Cf. Ruskin’s oppositions between the “organic” nature of Gothic decoration versus the false, historic artifice of classicism. 6 See Focillon, Life of Forms, 67–68.