
When used in conversation, grotesque commonly means strange, fantastic, ugly or bizarre, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks or gargoyles on churches. More specifically, the grotesque forms on Gothic buildings, when not used as drain-spouts, should be called grotesques or chimeras rather than gargoyles.
Welcome to CWAnswers
CWAnswers is your guide to the sprawling world wide web. The directory aims to provide a useful guide made by users. You can share your knowledge as well - simply sign up and edit your first entry. For questions just contact the team at support - at - cwanswers.com.
Weblinks for Grotesque
Top 10 for Grotesque
Things about Grotesque you find nowhere else.
Select content modules
Grotesque — Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress
Blogs about: Grotesque. Featured Blog. French erotica, and, icon of erotic art #42 ... Grotesque paintings and drawings is a current exhibition at the Royal ...en.wordpress.com/tag/grotesque/Adoration of Beauty and the Grotesque
... my personal blog page called Adoration of Beauty and the Grotesque, on the World ... Paradox of the Daily Blog: Evolving online satire versus superficial postings ...beauty-and-the-grotesque.blogspot.com/Grotesque : Effect Measure
Code Blue Blog. Confined Space. Environmental Health News. Genetics and Public Health ... Greg Laden's Blog. 3Friday Flotsam : Eruptions ...scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/grotesque/grotesque definition | Dictionary.com
Definition of grotesque at Dictionary.com with free online dictionary, ... Copy & paste this link to your blog or website to reference this page. Related Searches ...dictionary.reference.com/browse/grotesqueGrotesque Radio on Blog Talk Radio Month: 08/2008
Grotesque Radio is all about unsigned artists. The main focus is to give all Underground/Unsigned artists a chance to shine and reach out through the air waves. We ...www.blogtalkradio.com/GrotesqueRadio/blog/2008/08
When used in conversation, grotesque commonly means strange, fantastic, ugly or bizarre, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks or gargoyles on churches. More specifically, the grotesque forms on Gothic buildings, when not used as drain-spouts, should be called grotesques or chimeras rather than gargoyles.
Etymology
The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The expression comes from the unearthing and rediscovery of ancient Roman decorations in caves and buried sites in the 15th century. These "caves" were in fact rooms and corridors of the Domus Aurea, the unfinished palace complex started by Nero after the great fire from 64 AD.

In art history
In art, grotesques are a decorative form of arabesques with interlaced garlands and strange animal figures. Such designs were fashionable in ancient Rome, as fresco wall decoration, floor mosaics, etc., and were decried by Vitruvius (ca. 30 BCE), who in dismissing them as meaningless and illogical, offered quite a good description: "reeds are substituted for columns fluted appendages with curly leaves and volutes take the place of pediments, candelabra support representations of shrines, and on top of their roofs grow slender stalks and volutes with human figures senselessly seated upon them." When Nero's Domus Aurea was inadvertently rediscovered in the late fifteenth century, buried in fifteen hundred years of fill, so that the rooms had the aspect of underground grottoes, the Roman wall decorations in fresco and delicate stucco were a revelation; they were introduced by Raphael Sanzio and his team of decorative painters, who developed grottesche into a complete system of ornament in the Loggias that are part of the series of Raphael's Rooms in the Vatican Palace, Rome. "The decorations astonished and charmed a generation of artists that was familiar with the grammar of the classical orders but had not guessed till then that in their private houses the Romans had often disregarded those rules and had adopted instead a more fanciful and informal style that was all lightness, elegance and grace." In these grotesque decorations a tablet or candelabrum might provide a focus; frames were extended into scrolls that formed part of the surrounding designs as a kind of scaffold, as Peter Ward-Jackson noted. Light scrolling grotesques could be ordered by confining them within the framing of a pilaster to give them more structure. Giovanni da Udine took up the theme of grotesques in decorating the Villa Madama, the most influential of the new Roman villas.
Through engravings the grotesque mode of surface ornament passed into the European artistic repertory of the sixteenth century, from Spain to Poland. Soon grottesche appeared in marquetry (fine woodwork), in maiolica produced above all at Urbino from the late 1520s, then in book illustration and in other decorative uses. At Fontainebleau Rosso Fiorentino and his team enriched the vocabulary of grotesques by combining them with the decorative form of strapwork, the portrayal of leather straps in plaster or wood moldings, which forms an element in grotesques. By extension backwards in time, in modern terminology for medieval illuminated manuscripts, drolleries, half-human thumbnail vignettes drawn in the margins, are also called "grotesques".

























