GROTTESCHE. — Wall decorations in stucco or fresco, depicting vegetal forms, human or animal figures often of strange shapes, and anthropomorphic beings, arranged in a graceful and fanciful manner.
The primitive decorations discovered in Rome in the underground chambers of Nero’s Domus aurea (grotte) gave this type of ornament its name and served as models, in design and colour, for later forms. The earliest g. date from the late Quattrocento: the Borgia Apartment in the Vatican and the Piccolomini Library in Siena offer examples attributable to the art of Pinturicchio. Luca Signorelli painted g., with scenes from the Divina Commedia, in Orvieto Cathedral; Filippino Lippi did likewise in Rome and Florence.
Gold and vivid colours are the essential elements of the g., which, with their cheerful and elegant motifs, enrich architectural forms, reaching the height of elegance and sumptuousness in the Cinquecento, on the model of the ornaments of the ancient « grotte ». Their perfect exponent was Giovanni da Udine, a good disciple of Raffaello, who left works full of harmony, especially in the stucco decorations of the villa that belonged to the Medici and was later called the Farnesina, in Rome. Other examples of decoration in g. are those left by Poccetti, Cristoforo Gherardi, Simone Mosca, Benedetto da Rovezzano, Allori, Feltrini, Cosini, and Vasari. As time progresses, the g. undergo considerable transformations; the decoration becomes predominantly architectural, losing much of that colouristic element so characteristic of the ancient examples. Despite subsequent attempts at reworking them — which emerged in the Settecento with a rather naturalistic character — that refined style and chromatic splendour peculiar to the Quattrocento and Cinquecento were never again attained.