GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE

Una Roman D'Elia

Among the grotesques that were so popular nature, so we could say do grotesques, which in sixteenth-century , a self-consciously we could definitely call the dreams of paint playful image has escaped the attention of ing."5 Dialectic, Barbaro maintained, satisfies scholars: a hybrid monster at his easel, paint reason, oratory the senses and reason, poetry ing another hybrid, his model (Fig. 1). This more the senses than reason. Grotesques are witty image condenses the tensions around instead akin to sophistry—argument and pure imitation and invention that also animate artistry for their own sake, untethered by Renaissance writings about grotesques. logic or nature.6 When light and fantastic paintings, soon deemed grotesques "a very dubbed grotesques, were unearthed in the ridiculous and licentious species of painting" ruins of Nero's Golden House in the fifteenth but also praised their inventiveness: "miscar century, a classical text was conveniently ried monsters [sconciature di mostri] . . . available as a key to their interpretation.1 things without rules ... a great weight on Vitruvius had famously derided these "mon the thinnest thread that could not hold it, a sters" as paintings of the impossible: "These horse with legs of leaves and a man the legs things do not exist nor can they exist nor of a crane, and infinite swags of drapery and have they ever existed."2 He wrote of archi sparrows."7 Vasari listed impossibilities—a tecture with ridiculously thin supports and weight and drapery without support and hy of heads and bodies sprouting from plants brid monsters—but also sparrows, local birds and concluded that grotesques cause delight that naturally fly. Vasari's odd reference to rather than appealing to judgment.3 Vitru sparrows, which are hardly "miscarried mon vius's language was central to the debate sters," betrays a tension between art and na over grotesques in the sixteenth century. Vi ture characteristic of Renaissance grotesques. truvius mentioned figures, human and bes Ancient examples include birds neatly tial, appearing out of foliage but seemed arranged in a pattern on perches, but nothing most outraged by architectural violations of like the veristic birds that flit around Re the laws of physics. Renaissance commen naissance grotesques. tators shifted their focus to hybrid monsters.4 Vasari called Giovanni da "almost Daniele Barbaro, in his 1567 commentary the inventor" of grotesques and lauded the on Vitruvius, added a reference to "mixtures grotesques of the Loggia of as of various species" among the list of impos "most lovely and capricious inventions, full sibilities. Barbaro also offered an explana of the most varied and extravagant things tion: "Certainly, just as fantasy in sleep con you could possibly imagine." Giovanni da fusedly represents images of things to us Udine's fruit, birds, fish, and sea monsters and often puts together things of a diverse are "most natural" and "alive and true."8

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

This content downloaded from 130.015.241.167 on June 10, 2016 07:37:47 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 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 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 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, , "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 their hair, Raphael and his shop by cutting fantastic creatures? are not only returning to antiquity, but also Painting—It is in the clouds that I see fan the source itself. But such reshaping 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 for the Bernardo Dovizi, who, priate patron, 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 '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

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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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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)

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into grotesques. The landscape itself and the that again in its tone seems to taunt the style of painting are sketchy ("una macchia pompous fool who would dare to make a d'un terms paese"), that both capture the leaden, theoretical reading of it. I hope that and ephemeral organic in nature and suggest I can be acquitted of this charge but am fully conspicuously artful intervention in the form aware that interpreting grotesques is a slip of a visible quick brushstroke. Chimerical pery game. grotesques derive ultimately from nature, There are also scant grounds for a highly mediated so many times that Nature herself intellectualized reading since we know very cannot understand them. little about the painter, Luzio Romano, ex If Renaissance grotesques by their very cept that he was a follower of Perino del existence comment on the relationship be Vaga, which makes him another one of tween nature and artifice, they rarely include Raphael's heirs. Raphael died in his thirties of depictions artists.14 The idea of artist and on Good Friday in 1520 and was repeatedly art as grotesque is embodied most vividly compared to Christ.16 After Raphael was, at in the previously unnoticed and unpublished his own request, buried in the Pantheon, vignette of a grotesque painter frescoed in other artists, including , fol Castel Sant'Angelo in around 1545 (Fig. lowed suit, as the pious seek to be buried I).15 The image is part of the decoration of a near the relics of a saint.17 Pietro Bembo's vault in the apartment known as the Caglios Latin epitaph was later translated by Alexan tra, which was originally an open loggia on der Pope: the top level of the papal fortress and resi Here lies Raphael. dence, was subsequently walled and used as Living, great Nature fear'd he might outvie a prison, and is now a storeroom and in Her works, and dying, fears herself may accessible to the public. The loggia was dec die.18 orated during Pope Paul Ill's renovation of the castle, a part of his revival of Rome and Luzio Romano's grotesque painter conveys papal splendor after the devastating Sack of a similar paradoxical conceit about art and Rome. From this loggia, the pope and his nature to this solemn distich, but in a playful court could escape the heat, enjoy the view, tone appropriate to a space used for relax and watch fireworks. ation. As lions leap symmetrically below and Again, the point is not that Luzio was foliate-tailed caryatids hold up a frame con reading Bembo and translating his difficult sisting of a vine that is a single line, one Latin into visual form, which seems highly grotesque poses, his snaky nether regions unlikely, but that images articulated the same giving new meaning to the phrase "figura complex ideas about art, imitation, and na serpentinata." The other fishy-tailed man, ture as literary texts. This loggia was painted nude except for his painter's cap, pauses like in 1544-1546, before the theoretical debates a professional to consider his work so far. about grotesques had been published. The He is a competent modern painter—we can only prior Renaissance writing about gro just make out that the figure he has painted tesques is in Sebastiano Serlio's 1537 treatise is foreshortened from his point of view. His on architecture, a text that we have no reason easel's thin legs are balanced on the waves. to assume Luzio knew. This image and the The image is a light and elegant joke, one other artfully natural grotesques of the first

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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 '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. Because artists 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 , 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 à la grotesques 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 de dans la figures l'imaginaire peinture italienne de dearment, connote an oversight, or refer to male gen la de la Renaissance fin (Paris: Flammarion, 1997); italia. But in this case, Vasari 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 The Dacos, Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art with only slight variations. Giorgio Vasari, Le opere, Treasure, trans. Josephine Bacon (New York: ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (: 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: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999), p. 91. 1561, ed. Nicole Dacos and Caterina Furlan (Udine: 3. See for a also, 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

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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 (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 (: 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),

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