GROTESQUE PAINTING AND PAINTING AS GROTESQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE Una Roman D'Elia Among the grotesques that were so popular nature, so we could say do grotesques, which in sixteenth-century Italy, 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 Giorgio Vasari 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 Udine "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 Pope Leo X 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 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). T *'..V ' •. '• 1 • • *gg Fig. 1 Luzio Romano, grotesque painting. 1544-1546. Fresco. Cagliostra. Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome. (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). 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 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 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 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). VBntw 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 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). 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 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). 10 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 Perino del Vaga, 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.