GROTESQUES. - Wall decorations in stucco or fresco, depicting plant forms, human or animal figures often of strange shapes, and anthropomorphic beings, arranged in a graceful and fanciful manner.
The earliest decorations, discovered in Rome in the underground chambers of Nero's Domus aurea (grottoes), gave their name to this genre of ornament and served as models, in both design and color, for subsequent forms. The first grotesques date to the late fifteenth century: the Borgia apartments in the Vatican and the Piccolomini Library in Siena offer examples due to the art of Pinturicchio. Luca Signorelli painted grotesques, with scenes from the Divine Comedy, in the cathedral of Orvieto; Filippino Lippi in Rome and in Florence.
Gold and vivid hues are the essential elements of grotesques which, with their gay and elegant motifs, enrich architectural forms, reaching in the sixteenth century the highest peak of elegance and preciousness, on the model of the ornaments of the ancient "grottoes." A perfect executor of them was Giovanni da Udine, a good disciple of Raphael, who left works full of harmony, especially in the stucco decorations of the villa that belonged to the Medici, later called the Farnesina in Rome. Other examples of grotesque decoration are those left by Poccetti, by Cristoforo Gherardi, by Simone Mosca, by Benedetto da Rovezzano, by Allori, by Feltrini, by Cosini, by Vasari. As time goes on, grotesques undergo notable transformations; the decoration becomes predominantly architectural, losing much of that coloristic element so characteristic of the ancient examples. Despite subsequent attempts at reworking — which established themselves in the eighteenth century, with a rather naturalistic character — that refined style and chromatic splendor proper to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were never again attained.
Bibliography2 works
Pietro Gazzola