Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art 9789048535873

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Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art

Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Dr. Allison Levy, an art historian, has written and/or edited three scholarly books, and she has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Getty Research Institute, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library of Harvard University, the Whiting Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others. www.allisonlevy.com.

Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art Edited by Chris Askholt Hammeken and Maria Fabricius Hansen

Amsterdam University Press

The book is published with generous support from: • 15. Juni Fonden • Lillian og Dan Finks Fond • Overretssagfører L. Zeuthens Mindelegat

Cover illustration: Tommaso di Battista del Verrocchio: Bianca Cappello’s Camerino (detail), c. 1581–1582, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Newgen/Konvertus isbn 978 94 6298 496 7 e-isbn 978 90 4853 587 3 doi 10.5117/9789462984967 nur 685 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Contents List of Illustrations

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Introduction13 Chris Askholt Hammeken and Maria Fabricius Hansen Part I Grotesques 1. Ambiguous Delights: Ornamental Grotesques and Female Monstrosity in Sixteenth-Century Italy45 Maria Fabricius Hansen 2. Dissonant Symphonies: The Villa d’Este in Tivoli and the Grotesque73 Luke Morgan Part II Sacred Space and Narrative 3. Outside-In: The Intrusion of Ornament into Sacred Narrative95 Tianna Helena Uchacz 4. ‘That savage should mate with tame’: Hybridity, Indeterminacy, and the Grotesque in the Murals of San Miguel Arcángel (Ixmiquilpan, Mexico)133 Barnaby Nygren 5. Decoration in the Desert: Unsettling the Order of Architecture in the Certosa di San Martino153 Maria-Anna Aristova Part III Agency and Ornament Enlivened 6. Masquing/(Un)Masking: Animation and the Restless Ornament of Fontainebleau177 Lisa Andersen 7. Sea-Change: The Whale in the Florentine Loggia203 Chris Askholt Hammeken 8. Ornament and Agency: Vico’s Poetic Monsters221 Frances Connelly

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Part IV A Historical Perspective 9. Trafficking the Body: Prolegomena to a Posthumanist Theory of Ornament and Monstrosity245 Jacob Wamberg Index277

List of Illustrations Ill. 0.1–0.4: The Uffizi Gallery and details from the grotesques of the ceiling, Antonio Tempesta and Alessandro Allori, c. 1580, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze. Ill. 0.5: Tommaso di Battista del Verrocchio, Bianca Cappello’s Camerino, c. 1581–1582, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze. Ill. 0.6: Francesco Salviati (attributed to), Allegorical composition. Engraving (perhaps by the workshop of René Boyvin, Angers), 1550s. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Ill. 1.1: Bianca Cappello’s ‘Camerino’ (small chamber) in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze. Ill. 1.2: Detail of grotesques, Villa Farnese, Caprarola. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Polo museale del Lazio – Caprarola, Palazzo Farnese. Ill. 1.3: Andrea del Sarto, detail of Madonna of the Harpies, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Photographic Department of the Uffizi Galleries, Florence. Ill. 1.4: Marco da Faenza, detail of grotesques from Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze. Ill. 1.5: Marco da Faenza, detail of grotesques from Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze. Ill. 1.6: Bernardino Poccetti, sgraffito facade of Palazzo Ramirez Montalvo, c. 1573, Florence Photo: Pernille Klemp. Ill. 1.7: Luca Signorelli, detail of grotesques in Cappella Nuova, cathedral of Orvieto. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of the Opera del Duomo of Orvieto. Ill. 1.8: Domus Aurea, Rome, detail of ornamental frieze with female hybrid figures. Photo: Courtesy of Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Parco Archeologico del Colosseo. Ill. 1.9: Filippino Lippi, drawing with ornamental details from the Domus Aurea. Fol. 60r, Gabinetto disegni, Uffizi. Photo: Photographic Department of the Uffizi Galleries, Florence. Ill. 1.10: Amico Aspertini, detail of soldier with breastplate decorated with a female monster, Oratorio di Santa Cecilia, Bologna. Photo: Maria Fabricius Hansen. Ill. 1.11: Bernardino Poccetti, Ceiling of the entrance hall at Palazzo MarzichiLenzi in Florence (now Hotel Monna Lisa), 1585. Photo: Pernille Klemp.

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Ill. 1.12: Ill. 2.1: Ill. 2.2: Ill. 2.3: Ill. 2.4: Ill. 3.1: Ill. 3.2: Ill. 3.3: Ill. 3.4: Ill. 3.5: Ill. 3.6: Ill. 3.7: Ill. 3.8: Ill. 3.9:

ORNAMENT AND MONSTROSIT Y IN EARLY MODERN ART

Woodcut attributed to Titian, in Pietro Aretino, Stanze in lode di Madonna Angela Sirena, Venice, 1537. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gillis van den Vliete and Pirro Ligorio, Fountain of Nature, 1568. Villa d’Este, Tivoli. Photo: Luke Morgan. School of Giambologna, Fountain of the Harpies. Boboli Gardens, Florence. Photo: Luke Morgan. Il Sodoma, Grotesques and the ‘Marvels of the East,’ 1505–1508. Fresco from the cloister of the Abbey of Monte Oliveto, Siena. Photo: Luke Morgan. Workshop of Federico Zuccari, Rerum natura, Room of Nobility, Villa d’Este, Tivoli. Photo: Luke Morgan. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Title Page, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Last Supper, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.3 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Agony in the Garden, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 15.9 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Arrest of Christ, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Christ before Caiaphas, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Flagellation, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Crowning with Thorns, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Ecce Homo, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Carrying of the Cross, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.3 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

List of Illustrations

Ill. 3.10: Ill. 3.11: Ill. 3.12: Ill. 3.13: Ill. 3.14: Ill. 3.15: Ill. 3.16: Ill. 3.17: Ill. 3.18:

Ill. 3.19: Ill. 3.20: Ill. 3.21: Ill. 3.22:

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After Marcus Gheeraerts, Christ Disrobed, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Crucifixion, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Lamentation, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Harrowing of Hell, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Resurrection, print from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.3 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Cabasset, c. 1580–1590. Steel, gold, copper alloy, 25.4 x 23.2 x 33.5 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund 1904. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Aqua, from the series The Four Elements, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 19.8 x 13.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.Photo: Rijsmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts and Jan Sadeler, Resurrectio, from the series The Four Holy Days, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 28.0 x 22.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Johannes or Lucas van Doetechum after Hans Vredeman de Vries, Cartouche with Venus on a Wagon, from the series Grottesco: in diversche manieren, 1565–571. Etching, 15.6 x 20.7 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Hercules Slays the Hydra, from the series The Life of Hercules, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 11.4 x 8.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After Marcus Gheeraerts, Hercules Strangling Snakes in his Crib, from the series The Life of Hercules, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 11.4 x 8.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Marcus Gheeraerts, Composite Rotting Head of a Monk Representing an Allegory of Iconoclasm, 1560–1570. Etching, 43.5 x 31.5 cm. London, British Museum. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Marcus Gheeraerts, inscription on fol. 45r of the Album Amicorum of Johannes Vivianus, 30 January 1578. Coloured drawing on paper, 7.5 x 9.6 cm. The Hague, Royal Library. Photo: Europeana.

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Ill. 4.1: Ill. 4.2: Ill. 4.3: Ill. 4.4: Ill. 5.1: Ill. 5.2: Ill. 5.3: Ill. 5.4: Ill. 5.5: Ill. 5.6: Ill. 6.1: Ill. 6.2: Ill. 6.3:

Ill. 6.4:

Ill. 6.5: Ill. 6.6:

ORNAMENT AND MONSTROSIT Y IN EARLY MODERN ART

Anonymous painters, Coyote Warrior from north nave wall, San Miguel Arcángel, Ixmiquilpan (Hidalgo, Mexico), c. 1568–1572. Photo: Barnaby Nygren. Anonymous painters, Centaur Figure from south nave wall. San Miguel Arcángel, Ixmiquilpan (Hidalgo, Mexico), c. 1568–1572. Photo: Barnaby Nygren. Anonymous sculptors, detail of open chapel, San Luis Obispo, Tlalmanalco (State of Mexico, Mexico), c. 1565. Photo: Barnaby Nygren. Anonymous painters, Thebaid Scene from convent of San Nicolás de Tolentino, Actopan (Hidalgo, Mexico), c. 1570. Photo: Barnaby Nygren. Great Cloister, Certosa di San Martino, Naples. Photo: Maria-Anna Aristova. Great Cloister, Certosa di San Martino, Naples. Corner door surround. Photo: Maria-Anna Aristova. Great Cloister, Certosa di San Martino, Naples. Detail of door surround entablature. Photo: Maria-Anna Aristova. Great Cloister, Certosa di San Martino, Naples. Detail of the springing block of the first arch. Photo: Maria-Anna Aristova. Wendel Dietterlin, Architectura, 1598. Plate 24: Tuscan portal. Heidelberg University Library, 83 B 945 RES, t_024. Entrance courtyard, Certosa di San Martino, Naples. Detail of facade and entrance archway. Photo: Maria-Anna Aristova. Antonio Fantuzzi, Ornamental panel with central oval cartouche, 1520– 1584. Etching, 181 x 136mm, RP-P-1953–258. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Léon Davent after Primaticcio, Fontainebleau. Cryptoportico of the grotto of the Jardin des Pins, Sixteenth century. Engraving. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Léonard Thiry, Bust of Male Figure in Profile, Wearing Richly Decorated Mask, Sixteenth century. Black chalk, pen, and brown ink, brown wash. Mas. 1296 (rec.19), fol. 17. © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY. Léonard Thiry, Bust of a Female in Profile, Wearing Richly Decorated Mask, Sixteenth century. Black chalk, pen, and brown ink, brown wash. Mas. 1296 (rec.19), fol. 11. © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY. Rosso Fiorentino, Galerie François Ier at Fontainebleau, 1535. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. Attributed to Rosso Fiorentino, Design for a Wall Decoration, Sixteenth century. Pen and brown ink, brush and grey wash, 288 x 196mm. Gift of Harry G. Friedman, 1955 (55.632.8). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

List of Illustrations

Ill. 6.7: Ill. 6.8: Ill. 6.9: Ill. 6.10:

Ill. 6.11: Ill. 7.1: Ill. 7.2:

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Ill. 8.1:

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René Boyvin, Two Candlesticks, c. 1542–1580. Engraving, 139 x 180 mm, RP-P-OB-8349. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. René Boyvin, Figure in a Masquerade Costume, Sixteenth century. Drawing, Reserve B-5 Boite. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Francesco Primaticcio, Pillar on Lion’s Feet, Sixteenth century. Pen and grey-black ink, watercolor, 353 x 130mm, NMH 870/1863. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Léonard Thiry, Bust of Male in Profile, Wearing Richly Decorated Mask, Sixteenth century. Black chalk, pen, and brown ink, brown wash. Mas. 1296 (rec.19), fol. 9. © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Étienne Delaune, Mirror with Death of Julia, 1561. Engraving, 221 x 105mm, RP-P-1964–948. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Loggia dei Lanzi, built by Benci di Cione and Simone di Francesco Talenti, possibly following a design by Jacopo di Sione, 1376–1382. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. A ruined body leans against ancient ruined architecture as if echoing its decay. Woodcut by Titian’s workshop, in Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1543, p. 192. Photo: © U.S. National Library of Medicine. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish, engraving. Photo: © Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1557. Giotto di Bondone, Jonah Swallowed by the Whale, Arena Chapel, Padua, 1306. Photo: © Scala, Florence. Michelangelo, The Prophet Jonah, 1512, Sistine Chapel, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City. Photo: © Simon Abrahams/EPPH. Federico Zuccari, Monstrous door and windows in the former garden wall of Palazzo Zuccari, now the facade of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, 1590, Rome. Photo: © Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte. Monstrous grotto in the Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo, 1550–1580. Photo: Chris Askholt Hammeken. Whale mouth in the Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo, 1550–1580. Photo: Chris Askholt Hammeken. Depiction of a flayed body. Drawn by Gaspar Becerra and engraved by Nicolas Beatrizet, in Juan Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano, Rome, 1560 [1556]), p. 64. Photo: © U.S. National Library of Medicine. Unnumbered copy after Adam van Vianen’s Modelli Artificiosi di Vasi diversi d’argento et alter Opere capriciozi, published by Christiaen van Vianen, Utrecht, 1646–1652. Etching. © The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Ill. 8.2: Ill. 8.3: Ill. 8.4:

Ill. 8.5: Ill. 8.6: Ill. 8.7: Ill. 9.1: Ill. 9.2:

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Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Winter, 1563. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. Raphael Sanzio and Giovanni da Udine, Interior, Loggetta, 1519. Vatican Palace, Vatican City. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Engraved by Giorgio Tasniere after Domenico Piola, Allegorical frontispiece, from Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico, o sia, Idea dell’arguta et ingeniosa elocutione: che serue à tutta l'arte oratoria, lapidaria, et simbolica (Turin: Bartolomeo Zavatta, 1670). Hew Locke, Morley, from the Restoration series, 2006. C-type photograph with mixed media applied. Courtesy Hales Gallery, London. Photo by FXP Photography. Gonkar Gyatso, The Shambhala in Modern Times, 2008. Courtesy of the artist/TAG Fine Arts. Gonkar Gyatso, Detail, The Shambhala in Modern Times. The Great Chain of Being from Diego da Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana (1579), engraving. Universal Art Archive/Alamy Stock Photo. True and False Griffins. Griffin from the frieze of the temple of Antoninus and Faustina (141 CE), Rome, vs. griffin from porch of Verona cathedral (c. 1139). Reproduced drawing from John Ruskin, Modern Painters (Boston: Dana Estes s.a., c. 1873 [1856]), vol. III, Plate I. Fra Angelico, Fake marble panels below the Madonna delle Ombre/Madonna of the Shadows (c. 1438–1450), fresco. Florence, Museo di San Marco. © 2018. Photo: Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali e del Turismo. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne (1875–1880), oil on canvas, 12¼ x 20⅜ inches (31.1 x 51.8cm). Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917. Cat. 1111. © 2018. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Road to Golgotha (1564), detail, oil on panel. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: KHM-Museumsverband. Lion of St. Mark, miniature from the Book of Durrow (c. 650–700). Dublin, Trinity College, ms A. 4. 5. (57), fol. 191v. © 2018. Photo: DeAgostini Picture Library/Scala, Florence. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Vegetable Gardener (c. 1590), oil on wood. Cremona, Museo Civico Ala Ponzone. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), oil on canvas, 96 x 92 in (243.9 x 233.7cm). New York, Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. 333.1939 © 2018. Digital image: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

Introduction Chris Askholt Hammeken and Maria Fabricius Hansen Early Modern art – in the sixteenth century and beyond – features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres, and in all cultural centres of the Western world.1 Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament throughout the period often include layers of disquieting paradox, creating tensions – monstrosities even – that manifest themselves in a variety of ways. The monstrosity of ornament is brought into play through strategies of hybridity and metamorphosis or through ambiguous and discomforting treatments of scale, proportion, and space which diverge from the laws of nature. In some cases, dichotomies between order and chaos, artificiality and nature, or rational logic and imaginative creativity emerge from the decorative frameworks. Elsewhere, a sense of agitation undermines structures of statuesque control or erupts into wild, unruly displays of continual genesis. The ultimate monstrosity is achieved when abstract, decorative forms are joined with human-naturalistic ones. Particularly in vogue in the sixteenth century are grotesques, or grottesche as they were called in Italian around 1500, that manifest themselves as monstrous ornaments par excellence (Ill. 0.1-0.5). Such colossal ornamental attitudes thrived within sixteenth-century art, expressing an interest in strange exaggeration and curious artifice while engaging in constant interaction between centre and periphery, content and ornament, or ergon and parergon, to employ a Kantian vocabulary.2 A parergon is a framework in the broadest sense and appears as that which surrounds or supports the ergon, which is the centrepiece, in terms of form, content, or argument. The parergon is not, however, a superfluous or superficial addition to the work, but is a precondition for the ergon.

1 This introduction is based on material from the two authors’ ongoing research on the subject, partly presented in Chris Askholt Hammeken’s unpublished PhD dissertation, Unruly Ornament: On Artificial Moments in SixteenthCentury Visual Art (Aarhus University, 2016), and in Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Art of Transformation: Grotesques in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Rome: Accademia di Danimarca and Edizioni Quasar, 2018). 2 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 14; Derrida, The Truth in Painting, pp. 42–43, 56–118; see also Chapter 9 by Jacob Wamberg in this volume, p. 243.

Hammeken, C.A. and M.F. Hansen (eds.), Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789462984967_intro

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Introduc tion

 

Ill. 0.1–0.4: The Uffizi Gallery and details from the grotesques of the ceiling, Antonio Tempesta and Alessandro Allori, c. 1580, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze.    

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The conventional divide between decorative and fine art often results in ornament being overlooked as accessory, an attitude that dovetails with modern notions regarding the autonomy of easel painting. Seeking to further alternatives within this field, we have invited contributions to this book that investigate the monstrous qualities of ornament within visual art from various media and genres (e.g. painting, architecture, gardens, and decorative art). The contributions are mainly anchored in the sixteenth century, but move beyond as well in order to map some of the wider perspectives of monstrous ornament within a broader historical horizon. The chapters focus on the meaning, function, and affect of monstrosity in ornament; on its relationship to the divide between fine art and craft; on the associations of the monstrous with ambiguity and anxiety, with ornaments that oscillate between apparent objective presence and artificiality; on the gendered monstrosity of ornament (according to ancient rhetoric, ornament is considered to be feminine, in contrast to the masculinity of the argument); and on themes of hybridity, sexuality, and bodily awareness in the monstrosity of ornament. All in all, the book addresses why this special relationship between ornament and monstrosity proved so crucial to artistic endeavours of the Early Modern period. When some of the chapters expand their analyses of material from the sixteenth century outward into contemporary art and culture, it is based on the observation that monstrosity and ornament are arguably gaining momentum as fields of cultural and intellectual importance in our own, Postmodern era. After having been expelled as irrational or artistically insignificant in the modernity that emerged from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, it has taken on a renewed relevance in present-day visual culture. But before we continue with a presentation of the chapters that constitute this book, let us reflect first on the concept of ornament and, second, on the concept of monstrosity.

On Ornament: Framed between Cosmos and Cosmetics Today ornament is often characterized as something superfluous, marginal, or simply insignificant. It has come to be seen as visual addendum that does nothing but embellish or decorate a work of art, which is why it is conceived as something that can be added or omitted at will. Such an understanding represents a direct continuation of a modernist tradition derived from architects such as Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, and is accordingly in line with perspectives on ornament as useless coating or extravagant glaze overlaid upon pure form.3 Advocating smooth and clear surfaces, unblemished by excess of any kind, the modernist sentiment positions itself against ornament. Early Modern views, in contrast, tend to praise 3

See for instance, Loos, ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’.

Introduc tion

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and lionize ornament, even though the concept of ornament is vague and difficult to define, encompassing as it does a range of artistic approaches.4 Ornament might refer to certain formal aspects in a work or even communicate its entire aestheticism. As such, ornament takes its place within an open terrain of possibilities. Although denoting a decorative and surplus quality, ornament nevertheless carries a blurred meaning that is difficult to grasp as a complete concept since it figures in a field of related discourses. Etymologically, for the ancient Romans, ornare simply meant to honour or praise; ornatus related to distinction, excellence, and useful resources; and ornamentum had a dual meaning consisting of decorative adornment on the one hand and military weaponry, arms, and equipment for warfare on the other.5 Ancient cosmology makes explicit that ornament is associated with far greater activities than art alone. The Greek concept of kosmos synthesizes the idea of world order and world ornament: the cosmic and the cosmetic are related through an affinity toward the ordering of empty space in defined, decorative compositions, creating limits and displaying contrasts.6 Early Western cosmology positions ornament as filling and framing pattern through stages of coming into being, such as harmony, rhythm, and dance.7 In Plato’s Timaeus (c. 360 BC), ornament is thus the perfection and beauty of demiurgic creation, which completes the making of the world from the pre-existing four elements.8 The Christian conception in the Book of Genesis has God creating the world out of nothing, creatio ex nihili, followed by the replenishing of the land, sky, and seas, thereby adorning the world and giving substantial form to matter – which, as a process, has become known as ornatus mundi or exornatio mundi.9 Ornament is consequently understood in relation to the completeness of form. This ancient notion is echoed in the fifteenth-century writings of Leon Battista Alberti. His architectural treatise De Re Aedificatoria (editio princeps, 1485) is modelled on the Roman architect Vitruvius, who also grants ornament a central – indeed, a crowning – role in the art of building. As such, cosmic order is only achieved when ornament is added to structure.10 These ideas of ornamental architecture are repeated in sixteenth-century theoretical writings, now in richly illustrated ways: Sebastiano Serlio and Pieter Coecke van Aelst, for instance, ornament their pages with words set within portals, complete with herms, pediments, and other curious architectural fragments.

4 Recent studies devoted to the Early Modern understanding of ornament include: Guest, The Understanding of Ornament; Necipoglu and Payne, Histories of Ornament; Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque; and Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, remains a classic account on the field. 5 Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts, p. 25. 6 Fletcher, Allegory, pp. 108–109. 7 Guest, The Understanding of Ornament, pp. 21–66. 8 Plato, ‘Timaeus’. 9 Guest, The Understanding of Ornament, pp. 21–66. See also Genesis 1: 1–8. 10 Alberti, On the Art of Building, pp. 154–319.

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Suffice it to say, the Early Modern understanding regards ornament as serving to enhance the beauty of a work of art, not to smother it. Such an understanding is in line with ancient rhetoric as well, where ornament is anything but extraneous. Cicero and Quintilian, whose works had been extensively read up through the sixteenth century, consider ornament crucial for giving brightness and presence of life to forms that have been transformed through the creation of oratory or art. Rhetorical ornament thus enlivens the subject and enhances its eloquence.11 Ornament is a prerequisite to an effective, emotionally persuasive style that can move an audience.12 However, as Frances S. Connelly has argued, in the classical understanding, excessive use of ornament exerts a sensual allure and has the capacity to subvert and obscure traditions, and even threaten societal norms. For instance, in oratory, painting, and drama, it is possible for ornament and figures of speech to disrupt and overpower logical argument whenever the persuasive or compelling character mesmerizes for its own sake.13 Connelly observes how the opposition between sensual ornament on the one hand and structured and reasoned argument on the other resembles common binaries, such as femininity versus masculinity and body versus mind.14 When kept in balance, no harm is done, but the bodily response to overly abundant and indulgent ornament is capable of overwhelming and distorting order. This freedom of imagination is exactly what Immanuel Kant criticizes in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) when he argues that the lawless character of ornament has a tendency to produce nonsense.15 Kant’s work and its immense impact on modern aesthetics and the autonomy of art positions ornament as supplementary to subject: As such, ornament is understood firstly as enhancing the tastefulness through form (e.g. drapery on statues and columns in architecture) and, secondly, as merely attached finery (e.g. in the gilding on a frame, which does nothing but lead the eye astray through its shiny, golden colour and alignment with sensory matter).16 Again, as in ancient rhetoric, ornament is defined through its sensual appeal. For Kant, the bodily response evoked by ornament might distract the contemplative mode of aesthetic detachment with its eye for form.17 As a result, hierarchy, order, and separation constitute the differentiation between the central and the periphery, between ergon and parergon.18 In his reading of the framed or ornamented image in La vérité en peinture (1978), Jacques Derrida deconstructs these categories by emphasizing the parergon as absolutely fundamental to the work, exposing the very lack that it fills.19 Derrida’s 11 Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, pp. 93–96. 12 Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric, p. 22. 13 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, pp. 30–31. 14 Ibid., p. 30. 15 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 50. 16 Ibid., § 14. 17 Ibid., §§ 42, 59. 18 Ibid., § 14. 19 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, pp. 42–43, 56–118.

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understanding of the theoretical issues posed by Kant argues that parerga are not just mere Außenwerke or Beiwerke (outside or next to the main work) but are to be seen as much wider phenomena, potentially constituting a variety of significant and meaningful ornaments.20 The physical borders of the frame thus evaporate inasmuch as ornament partakes of the subject matter. Through sustained interrogation, Derrida polemically asserts: I do not know what is essential and what is accessory in a work. And above all I do not know what this thing is, that is neither essential nor accessory, neither proper nor improper, and that Kant calls parergon, for example the frame. Where does the frame take place. Does it take place. Where does it begin. Where does it end. What is its internal limit. Its external limit.21

Derrida’s doubt makes perfectly clear that centre and periphery cannot be separated from one another but are continually entangled in unstable relations. Furthermore, Derrida highlights how the erratic character of parerga makes them so extraordinary, strange, and exceptional that they sometimes come to represent the focal point of departure in a work.22 His handling of Kantian aesthetics resonates nicely with the aforementioned concerns in ancient rhetoric that ornament is capable of snatching the power of argument in a move that is at once epistemological and subversive. Discussing the role of ornament as a framing device that mediates between the viewer’s space and the surrounding visuality, thereby establishing itself as representation and not reality, Rebecca Zorach notes that ‘ornament seems to become dangerous when it stops mediating a relation to something else and starts asserting the prerogative of the object of the viewer’s attention.’23 By returning to Kant, we can better consider the relationship between ornament and artistic licence – the freedom to dare – a relationship that is crucial to the untamed ornament in sixteenth-century art. Notably, as Winfried Menninghaus has shown, the dangerous irrationality and lawless character that Kant sees in overpowering ornament can be related to the rise of a poetics of nonsense and incoherence in early Romanticism, a trend quite at odds with Enlightenment thinking.24 Menninghaus discusses how the free play of imagination in Romantic literature and art sculpts alternative worlds in chaotic fairy tales as well as in poetic and visual arabesques.25 These genres are indeed ornamental, and the arabesque in particular can be read as a free and purely aesthetic beauty, in line with Kant’s accumulations 20 Ibid., pp. 37–82; see also Wamberg, ‘Trafficking the Body’, Chapter 9 in this volume, pp. 243–275. 21 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 63. 22 Ibid., pp. 57–67. 23 Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, p. 152. 24 Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense, pp. 15–50. 25 Ibid, pp. 1–3, 32–50.

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of foliage, blossoms, shellfish, hummingbirds, wallpaper decorations, and musical fantasies.26 Leafwork and flowers in intertwining, elaborate compositions and filigree forms constitute the arabesques that feature so prominently in ornamental interior designs of Rococo art. These merge with the ornamentation of the previous centuries through the incorporation of putti, cameos, hummingbirds, candelabra, shells, and floral bouquets in ribbons, pedestals, and strapwork. The decorative variations in the frame are thus expanded upon, making space for a fantastical field of twirling lines, frivolous curves, and floral waves in structures of harmony and order. As Alessandra Zamperini observes, the very emergence of the term ornemanistes to describe artists dedicated to creating ornaments in eighteenth-century France reveals the decorative arts as a specialized field of great importance.27 The embellishment of interior rooms develops over the course of the eighteenth-century Rococo, with a taste for expanding the arabesques by incorporating exotic, Far East scenes of chinoiseries and the traditional comic genre of singeries, in which monkeys ape human behaviour.28 Yet again, these eighteenth-century ornaments charm and ease in pastel shades and elegant decorative patterns of tapestries and fabrics, rather than argue through untamed unease. At issue in Kant’s criticism is, however, that meaninglessness and madness are lurking threats when the arabesque is no longer a peripheral phenomenon, subdued as a framing device.29 Menninghaus analyses these concerns as symptomatic of the potential for semantic hollowness when the frame takes charge and spatial relations become unstable and chaotic through shifts in ornamental scale.30 These threats to the established order nonetheless appear already in the ornamental attitude of sixteenth-century visual art, which breathes new life into impulses from Antiquity with regard to questions of ornament. A tearing down of structure, hierarchy, norms, and worldview thus occurs through an artistic licence based on the very notion of ornament. The meandering lines of ornament create unstable spatial relations, characterized by vigorously overgrown ornament. The precarious and volatile spatial constructions that emerge through ornament are unsettling in different ways, yet all point to ornament as a decisive vehicle for visual expressiveness materialized in miscellaneous forms and ideas.

26 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 16, in which he distinguishes between these free beauties (corresponding to pure judgements of taste) and the dependent beauties – such as figurative art, man, architecture, and horses (corresponding to intellectualized judgments of taste). For a reading of the similarities between the free beauties and arabesques, see Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense, pp. 15–31. Notably, Kant’s idea of free beauties and the connection between ornament and music without theme or lyrics lays the groundwork for modernist visual art, in which images are no longer associated with poetry but instead are likened to music; see Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity. 27 Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque, p. 220. 28 Ibid., pp. 231–236. 29 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 50. 30 Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense, pp. 72–76.

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Our efforts to analyse ornament in an expansive field of sixteenth-century visual art involve accepting a wide, monstrous scope of ornament, one that encompasses works that predominant art-historical narratives would suggest have little or nothing to do with ornament. Because the sixteenth century’s ornamental attitude has had major implications for understandings of ornament, the phenomenon cannot simply be designated mere peripheral adornment. Returning to the concept of ornament would seem to be a productive approach to attaining a better understanding of such strange visual phenomena as artificial garden grottoes, fully ornate rooms, or hybrid works of arts and crafts. An awareness of the workings of ornament has been requested by David Summers, whose theory of ornament renders it indistinguishable from artifice: Ornament, visual or rhetorical, runs counter to one of the most deeply and confidently held articles of modern taste, and we have lost – or rejected – the language for taking it seriously. In this respect ours is different from the tradition that nourished Michelangelo […] To take an example, the greatness of the Sistine Ceiling is not lessened by the degree to which, in Renaissance terms, it was consciously and overwhelmingly ornamental. […] Ornament works, and its workings must be understood if we are to appreciate the conscious steps that lead to such great artistic accomplishment.31

The fact that ornament is inseparable from a Renaissance understanding of artifice of supreme difficulty, difficultà, gives way to an array of thought-provoking perspectives and analytical possibilities with regard to ornamental forms and their meanings. Ornamentation such as grotesques and arabesques give weight to the idea that this peculiar phenomenon has neither a beginning nor an end but is in a continual state of flux and flow.32 The persuasive expressiveness in visual arts, which can make it appear as though the image was alive, is effectively furnished with the artificiality of exaggerated movements in ornament. When Leonardo da Vinci, among others, considers the persuasion of painterly movements as similar to persuasive words in oratory, it only highlights the rhetorical perspectives of visual art.33 With regard to the dual conception of rhetorical eloquence and visual experience in ancient oratory, Quintilian fascinatingly positions enargeia as an ornament: The ornate is something that goes beyond what is merely lucid and acceptable. It consists firstly in forming a clear conception of what we wish to say, secondly in

31 Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, p. 90. 32 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 21, 26–27, 52. 33 Da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, 1956, I, p. 385. Although posthumously compiled by Leonardo’s pupil Francesco Melzi, the fragmentary text has for centuries been regarded as an original. See Farago, Re-Reading Leonardo.

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Ill. 0.5: Tommaso di Battista del Verrocchio, Bianca Cappello’s Camerino, c. 1581–1582, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze.

giving this adequate expression, and thirdly in lending it additional brilliance, a process which may correctly be termed embellishment. Consequently, we must place among ornaments that ‘enargeia’ which I mentioned in the rules which I laid down for the statement of facts, because vivid illustration, or, as some prefer to call it, representation, is something more than mere clearness, since the latter merely lets itself be seen, whereas the former thrusts itself upon our notice.34

Following Quintilian, ornament becomes closely associated with the visual through the realm of fantasy, bearing in mind that the process of enargeia triggers vividness in the mind. When Ludovico Dolce discusses artistic invention in his dialogue on painting, L’Aretino (1557), he makes use of these issues in a quite novel manner that further enhances its relevance in visual art. According to Dolce, from the intellect of the artist appears: ‘the poses, the variety, and (in a manner of speaking) the energy of the figures.’35 This idea of energia della figura in the Italian terminology – which is often roughly translated as ‘dynamism’ but probably comes closer to ‘energy’, ‘movement’, or even ‘animation’ – bears witness to the development and confusing interchangeability of 34 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, III, VIII.3.61–4.1. Summers also mentions that Quintilian considers enargeia an ornament and sees it as the highest attainment of rhetorical skill, but makes no further point with regard to its possible implications: see Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, p. 96. 35 The Italian phrase ‘l’attitudini, la varietà, e la (per così dire) energia delle figura’ appears in Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino, pp. 128–131.

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enargeia and energeia. In his unravelling of Dolce’s metaphoric phrase, John Shearman uses energy as a more plausible translation of energia. Shearman finds Dolce’s adaptation of the concept to be derived from two Venetian publications on romance from 1554 by Giovambattista Giraldi and Giovanni Battista Pigna. Whereas Pigna defines enargeia and energeia separately as the shining vividness of living presence, as opposed to the actuality in a force of detail or emphasized movement, Giraldi combines the dual qualities into energia, which he considers an artificial clarity associated with hyperbole: an intensifier used as a rhetorical device or an exaggerated figure of speech.36 Shearman proceeds to characterize the visual rhetoric in sixteenth-century heroic or epic figure painting and sculptural works, for which Michelangelo’s David (1501–1504) – by way of its colossal limbs – is exemplary in deploying energetic hyperbole as visual distortions of enlargement, extravagance, and eccentricity.37 In this respect, colour can be perceived as an ornament that seizes a visual moment in fleeting movement whereby it becomes integral to sixteenth-century ornament. Often appearing in disharmony and strong contrasts of change, illumination, and concealment, colour is an ornamental quality that highlights effects of ambiguous spatial relations. Characteristically, ornament can be defined as a movement in space that creates temporal tension. As Adeline Grand-Clément has beautifully shown when defining the aesthetics of the Archaic period in ancient Greece, the notion of poikilia (which can be translated variously as ‘marking with various colours, embroidering, being marked with various colours, striped, spotted; varied aspect, diversity; variety, intricacy, ornamentation’) signifies a taste for ornamentation through polychrome spectacles and sensory perception.38 Metallurgy, weaving, and painting all involve poikilia inasmuch as these arts display and transform a variety of colours and materials, thereby appealing to the senses and pertaining to synaesthesia. Referring to adornment, the very root of the word poikilia means to prick, to mark, to cut, or to incise; and in Latin, the term turns into pictura and pingere, to paint.39 The understanding of ornament as a cosmic and overarching component in sixteenth-century art as well is formulated by David Summers: Ornament and artifice are usually indistinguishable. This meant that the difficultà – those things which, in the nature of an art – required the greatest mastery, both because they were ‘brilliant’ in themselves when accomplished, and because the recognition of their brilliance presupposed an audience able to appreciate them, rapidly came to be regarded as ornament, and within this definition became practically inseparable from such more apparent ornament as colour or contrapposto. Figural movement, the supreme difficulty of art, was, as we have seen, ornamental in 36 Shearman, Only Connect, pp. 208–212. 37 Ibid., pp. 212–226. 38 Grand-Clément, ‘Poikilia’, pp. 406–421. 39 Ibid., pp. 406–408.

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this sense […] Foreshortening, integrally related to the representation of movement, is perhaps a more familiar example of difficultà which came to be used quite for its own sake, embellishing a theme just as metaphor or alliteration might embellish in poetry or rhetoric. […] Ornament and artifice overlapped questions of license and freedom, and it was within the rules of such assumptions that a new understanding of artistic freedom was gained.40

In this line of thought, ornament is far from marginal. It endangers argument and casts doubt upon accepted truths and values. The demonstrative licentiousness of ornament in sixteenth-century visual art appears as an ocean of figurations in which the love of complex, labyrinthine, and enigmatic layers of meaning fluctuates continuously in bizarre metamorphoses, emphasizing the relativism of vision and the cruciality of paradox in regard to perception.

On Monstrosity: Reality, Imagination, and Licence The monstrous is what differs from the known or normal, with the human body serving as the fundamental point of comparison.41 The otherness constitutive of monstrosity only makes sense when put in relation to a notion of normality. Monstrosity may be achieved through a combination of incompatible elements or uncanny effects, for instance by fitting naturalistic figures into artificial, symmetrical compositions or by fixing dynamic, animated forms within static frameworks (Ill. 0.6). Monstrous ornaments juxtapose incongruous pictorial elements – oscillating between art, technology, and life. These ornaments are figures of ambiguity and transformation, taking issue with what we expect and thematizing our perception of the world. Deriving from the Latin verbs monstrare or monere (to show or to demonstrate, to draw attention to the wondrous, to warn), the monstrous has intriguing implications, suggesting that visuality and visual art are potentially disquieting.42 40 Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, pp. 89–90. 41 Tønsberg and Wamberg, Monster; see also the essay in that volume by Wamberg, ‘Det Monstrøse’, pp. 7–43. For reflections on the characteristics of the monstrous, see Cohen ‘Monster Culture’; on late medieval notions of monstrosity, focusing on English literature, see Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality, especially pp. 1–26. 42 The etymology of monster deriving from monstrare is advanced by Augustine, The City of God, VII, XXI.viii, who develops their meaning as signs or portents. See also Huet, Monstrous Imagination, p. 6; Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, pp. 312–314; Jacobs, The Living Image, pp. 159–167; Wamberg, ‘Det Monstrøse’, p. 19; Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, pp. 173–214. For a late fifteenth-century etymological explanation which links monstrum with monere as a warning of something in the future, see the Cornu copiae seu linguae Latinae commentarii by Niccolò Perotti (written in the late 1470s, editio princeps 1489): ‘monstrum a monstrando, uel quasi monestrum, quod moneat aliquid futurum’, in Perotti, Cornu copiae, II, p. 724. Thanks are due to Marianne Pade for this reference.

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Ill. 0.6: Francesco Salviati (attributed to), Allegorical composition. Engraving (perhaps by the workshop of René Boyvin, Angers), 1550s. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The deconstruction of the logics of the real, physical world, constituent of the monstrous ornament, evokes the creation of the imagery in the mind of the artist, celebrating the human mind’s capacity to embrace fluctuations between images that exist in mental as well as physical realms.43 In this sense, Early Modern monstrous ornaments were manifestations of artists’ ability to transform ambiguities of perception into images, and were inextricably linked with reflections upon artistic licence.44 43 Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art, p. 56; Kemp, Behind the Picture, pp. 229–239; Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, p. 46; Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, pp. 61–90, Summers, The Judgment of Sense, pp. 186–193; Battisti, L’Antirinascimento. On the capacity of transformation as a new property of monsters originating in the late medieval period, see Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality, pp. 116–158, whose analysis is based on English literature, especially Mandeville’s Travels from the mid-fourteenth century. 44 Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros, pp. 156–160; Vasari, Le vite, I, pp. 143–145, and the lives of, for example, Morto da Feltre and Giovanni da Udine in Vasari, Lives, I, pp. 924–926 and II, pp. 486–497; Serlio, On Architecture, I, IV.ix, p. 379; Lomazzo, ‘Trattato dell’arte’, 1584, in Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, III,

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In a discussion that has been taken up again and again in the history of aesthetics, from the time of Plato onward, two positions were argued – one accepting and admiring artistic imagination and encouraging unrestricted artistic licence, and the other arguing the contrary. Hybrid creatures were repeatedly at the centre of attention within both lines of argumentation, making it clear that distinctions between monsters, chimeras, grotesques, and similar categories are irrelevant in this context. The criticisms of unnaturalistic strategies in visual art launched by Vitruvius and Horace, both from the first century BC, became particularly influential. Vitruvius’s treatise on architecture features a description of contemporary wall decorations, known in art history as the Fourth Pompeian style. Vitruvius objected to irrational connections between motifs as well as representations of impossible architectural compositions that defy natural law: But these paintings, which had taken their models from real things, now fall foul of depraved taste. For monsters [monstra] are now painted in frescoes rather than reliable images of definite things. Reeds are set up in place of columns, as pediments, little scrolls, striped with curly leaves and volutes; candelabra hold up the figures of aediculae, and above the pediments of these, several tender shoots, sprouting in coils from roots, have little statues nestled in them for no reason, or shoots split in half, some holding little statues with human heads, some with the heads of beasts. Now these things do not exist nor can they exist nor have they ever existed, and thus this new fashion has brought things to such a pass that bad judges have condemned the right practice of the arts as lack of skill.45

Vitruvius mainly targeted artistic transgressions against naturalism, implying a dislike for depictions that deviate from his experience of that which objectively exists. Alongside this criticism of contemporary frescoes as unnatural figments of the artist’s imagination, Horace, in his Poetics, characterized indecorous hybridity as nightmares, which became a common topos in discussions of the legitimacy of monstrosity in art: If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from laughing? Believe me […] quite like pp. 2692–2694; Armenini, ‘De’ veri precetti della pittura’, 1587, ibid., p. 2699; Ligorio, ‘Libro dell’antichita’, in Dacos, La Découverte de la Domus Aurea, pp. 161–182; Danti, ‘Trattato delle perfette proporzioni’, in Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, I, pp. 235–236. 45 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, pp. 91–92. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder actually mentions the painting in the Domus Aurea but only in passing, during his account of the artist Famulus, and with no characterization of Famulus’s work in the palace: Pliny, Natural History, IX, XXXV.120.

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such pictures would be a book, whose idle fancies shall be shaped like a sick man’s dreams [cuius, velut aegri somnia, vanae fingentur species], so that neither head nor foot can be assigned to have a single shape. ‘Painters and poets,’ you say, ‘have always had an equal right in hazarding anything.’ We know it: this licence we poets claim and in our turn we grant the like; but not so far that savage should mate with tame, or serpents couple with birds, lambs with tigers.46

In line with Horace, combinations of heterogeneous elements – i.e. figures such as centaurs and mermaids – were seen as images of artistic licence. According to the critics of imaginative creativity, it was problematic when ‘idle fancies’ and ‘a sick man’s dreams’ led to monstrous extravagances.47 As David Summers has observed, the inversion of the ancient authorities’ perspective in order to legitimize artistic licence (licenzia) gained momentum in the sixteenth century.48 Just as sixteenth-century artists chose to be blind or disobedient to ancient authorities’ cautious remarks on grotesque, hybrid, and ‘unnatural’ imagery, they apparently saw no problem with producing ornaments that were immensely more monstrous in their artful, heterogeneous juxtapositions of naturalistic elements than had been seen before, including the ancient Roman art which the sixteenth-century artists purportedly wished to imitate. The categorization of grotesques as an imagery of artistic invention is complex since the distinction between ‘real’ monsters and fictitious ones was not an issue – or was, at least, less obvious as an approach to this imagery than we might expect today. The monstrous creatures of sixteenth-century art, both the female ones and other variants, are not straightforwardly categorizable as dangerous or ‘natural’, and there is no clear distinction between their coming into being in the imagination of the artists and their actual existence in the physical world. Their imaginative forms did not dissociate the grotesques from the contemporary ideal of imitating nature since a wide range of monstrous creatures were readily accepted as actually existing, including creatures that we today generally understand as belonging to the realm 46 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, pp. 450–451. 47 This was precisely because these represented exaggerated distortions of that which was possible in nature. In the Romanesque period, the employment of figural reliefs on capitals featuring numerous monstrous forms led to the oft-quoted critical observations by St. Bernard of Clairvaux on the application of these ornaments to monastic surroundings: ‘In the cloister, under the eyes of the Brethren who read there, what profit is there in those ridiculous monsters, in that marvellous and deformed comeliness, that comely deformity? To what purpose are those unclean apes, those fierce lions, those monstrous centaurs, those half-men, those striped tigers, those fighting knights, those hunters winding their horns? Many bodies are there seen under one head, or again, many heads to a single body. Here is a four-footed beast with a serpent’s tail; there, a fish with a beast’s head. Here again the forepart of a horse trails half a goat behind it, or a horned beast bears the hinder quarters of a horse. In short, so many and so marvellous are the varieties of divers shapes on every hand.’ Bernard de Clairvaux in: Davis-Weyer, Early Medieval Art, p. 170. 48 Summers, ‘Michelangelo on Architecture’; Summers, ‘Contrapposto’, p. 343.

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of the imagination.49 Animals known from personal experience were not yet systematically distinguished from creatures known only from literature or from representations in art, such as centaurs, sphinxes, griffins, and other hybrids. Indeed, the boundaries between human, animal, and creatures from mythology were fluid – as can be seen in a continual tradition throughout the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period.50 Dense, inaccessible, uncultivated forest and mountain regions in particular were thought to be inhabited by bestial wild men or satyric creatures, just as the mysterious depths of the sea were believed to contain innumerable strange and monstrous beings.51 Such creatures were partly known from descriptions by ancient authorities, especially Pliny the Elder, and partly understood as a logical consequence of interbreeding – in other words the result of sexual encounters between different species (such as man and animal), or simply as a result of a pregnant woman looking at something monstrous, which could impress monstrous qualities upon the foetus.52 Although monsters were disquieting, we have already touched upon how the etymological origins of the word is indicative of the conception of hybrid, strange creatures as ‘marvels’, as literally remarkable, rather than as unequivocally violent, dangerous, or aggressive, as they would be represented in modern fiction. Clear-cut distinctions between the evidently good and the decisively evil are thus inadequate when seeking to understand the monstrosity of the sixteenth century.53 49 Jacobs, The Living Image, pp. 133–167; Guest, The Understanding of Ornament, pp. 501–510. 50 Agamben, The Open, p. 25. On Paracelcus’s observations that nymphs are human and animal at one and the same time, see Agamben, Nymphs, pp. 40–41; Paracelsus, ‘Liber de Nymphis’. 51 Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East’; Randall, Images in the Margins, Plate CXXXV, pp. 643–644; Große and others, Monster; Le Pogam, ‘Tête de Feuilles’, p. 41. Only toward the end of the seventeenth century was a ‘scientific’ distinction between man, wild men, and other marginal creatures suggested by Edward Tyson, who explained all strange creatures as identical to different species of monkeys: see Tyson, Orang-Outang; also Agamben, The Open, p. 24. Accordingly, Carl Linnaeus, Systema naturae, I, listed various monkeys as Satyrus, Sylvanus, Sphinx, Silenus, Faunus, etc. and an Ethiopian species of monkey was actually called ‘sphinx’ in the ancient tradition: see Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East’, p. 168, note 1. 52 This notion was sometimes attributed to Empedocles: see Huet, Monstrous Imagination, pp. 4–5. 53 In the sixteenth century, Augustine’s careful reflections on monstrous creatures and their origins in relation to God remained a forceful, philosophical point of departure from which nature’s variety was understood. While not excluding the possibility that these creatures did not exist at all, and while bearing in mind that they might be categorized as animals and not as humans, Augustine nevertheless concludes that God’s Creation includes monstrosities. This was, after all, a common experience in terms of monstrous births, which could, according to Augustine, be seen as evidence of the existence of monstrous races. In line with Augustine’s worldview in general, he accepted the diversity of God’s Creation, for instance in noting that light would make no sense if darkness did not exist. See Augustine, Of True Religion, XL.76. In general, this philosophy represented a union of an unconditioned belief in an almighty, benevolent God with an earthly life filled with turmoil, dangers, and, ultimately, death. See Augustine, The City of God, V, XVI.viii; Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East’, pp. 167–168; Jacobs, The Living Image, pp. 159–167. Compare Michel de Montaigne, who comments with regard to some monstrous births that he has seen (for instance, Siamese twins) that – in line with Augustine – nothing is ‘against nature’. Only God can fathom all relationships and order, and it is merely ignorance when people perceive some things as marvels: Montaigne, Essays, pp. 450–451.

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The learned scholar Benedetto Varchi (1503–1565) still found it relevant in the middle of the sixteenth century to lecture on the likeliness of the existence of such monstrous creatures as satyrs and centaurs, though he concluded that it was unlikely they existed.54 The natural historian and collector Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) in Bologna included all of the old mythological variants of marvellous humans and animals, hybrid species (humans with animal-like lower bodies or animals with human faces), and double-gendered figures – together with humans with various kinds of deformed body parts, excessive hairiness, dermatological diseases, Siamese twins, etc. – in his huge (nearly 800-page long) woodcut-illustrated volume on monsters, Monstrorum Historia, without distinguishing between or discussing the reality or fictionality of the creatures.55 In his Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images (1582), the Bolognese cardinal and archbishop Gabriele Paleotti, who spoke in favour of the Counter-Reformation perspective on art formulated at the Council of Trent’s final meeting in 1563, argued that the painting of grotesques – with their mere ‘caprices’, ‘vain phantasms’, and ‘irrational imaginings’ – was irreconcilable with religious art.56 At the same time, he explicitly stated that his opposition was aimed only at monsters conceived in the minds of the artists.57 Thus, his objections did not include real monsters. He was not bothered by artistic representations of monstrosities that (in his view) actually existed. In the sixteenth century, respect for sources of authority from Antiquity still thrived alongside the production of truly bizarre ornament, which would have made both Horace and Vitruvius turn in their graves. This complex relationship with the past was epitomized by Giorgio Vasari’s apparently straightforward observation in the preface to the third part of his Lives that the great achievement of his own age was freedom from rules while basing one’s work on rules.58 Monstrous ornament developed from around 1500 in a period of great artistic licence, but also in a period in which artistic imagination – overly explicit personality and overly personal style – was still perceived as potentially dangerous, with monstrous imagery appearing challenging and indecent. This historical context contributed to the special properties of the monstrous ornament relative to strategies both prior to and after the sixteenth century. 54 Varchi, Lezzioni, pp. 85–132: for instance, ‘Se i centauri sono’, pp. 125–126, and ‘Se di femmina si puo diventar Maschio’, pp. 130–132. 55 Aldrovandi, Monstrorum Historia. 56 Paleotti, Discourse, II.37–42, pp. 262–280 (quotations from p. 262). For statements on art formulated at the Council of Trent, see Tanner and others, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, pp. 774–776. 57 Paleotti, Discourse, II.37, p. 262: ‘By the term “grotesques” we do not mean those leaf clusters, trunks, festoons, or various other things that are sometimes depicted and may conform to nature […] Nor do we mean those monsters, marine or terrestrial, or whatever they may be, that nature sometimes does produce, transgressing her own order. By grotesques we mean exclusively those forms of men or animals or other things that never did or could exist in the manner in which they are represented and are the mere caprices of painters, vain phantasm, irrational imaginings on their part.’ See also Jacobs, The Living Image, pp. 159–167. 58 Vasari, Le vite, IV, p. 5: ‘Nella regola una licenzia, che, non essendo di regola, fosse ordinata nella regola e potesse stare senza fare confusione o guastare l’ordine.’

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However, the broadly liberal attitude toward artistic licence in the early decades of the 1500s was gradually (and with great local variance) supplanted by a more cautious approach from the middle of the century, growing in influence toward 1600.59 In tandem with the formulation of Counter-Reformation image policy, the voices emphasizing problematic aspects of artistic imagination grew stronger toward the end of the century, leading to serious attacks on monstrous ornament as ambiguous, unnatural, and licentious.

Historical Perspectives The monstrous aspects of sixteenth-century ornament link them to reflections upon visuality. Sixteenth-century society was markedly absorbed with visuality and optics in all fields of knowledge.60 Apparently, this period leading up to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was particularly concerned with perception, including the fundamental questions: Can we believe what we see with our own eyes? Can we take visual impressions at face value?61 At least as far back as we have extant written sources that reflect upon images, there have been concerns about the relationship between image and reality. Although vision was predominantly ranked highest in the hierarchy of the senses, its problematic nature was an ongoing theme in philosophical thinking from the ancient Greeks onward.62 Indeed, such concerns are arguably a defining feature of being human. As such, the sixteenth century did not invent the focus on vision as a cognitive field. There is nevertheless abundant evidence for a unique preoccupation with visuality, optical science, and related fields in this period, continuing well into the seventeenth century, relative to both the ancient and the medieval periods as well as to subsequent centuries.63 Along with the strong reluctance to believe in visual evidence, there was a propensity to ‘see more’ than would later be discernible to people of the Enlightenment or the Industrial Age. It was a time in which the paradox was cultivated as a literary-poetic genre, angels and demons were incontestable realities, and your neighbour could easily turn out to be a witch.64

59 MacCulloch, The Reformation, pp. 307–336. 60 Payne, Vision and its Instruments; Kleinbub, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael, pp. 2–9; O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome, p. 130; Damisch, A Theory of Cloud; Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 72; Foucault, History of Madness, pp. 157–165; Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 107–121. 61 This position is brilliantly argued by Clark, ‘Demons’. 62 Summers, The Judgment of Sense, pp. 182–193; on the historical hierarchy of the senses, see Jütte, Geschichte der Sinne, pp. 65–83. 63 Clark, ‘Demons’, with further bibliography p. 224, note 3. 64 Bundy, The Theory of Imagination; Camille, ‘Before the Gaze’; Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, pp. 117–136; Clark, ‘Demons’.

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The sixteenth century saw the culmination of the predilection to see the potential for metamorphosis in form and content, a tendency that developed gradually from Early Christianity and increasingly so from around the twelfth century.65 The inclination to see the agency of magical or demonic power in the everyday world went hand in hand with a propensity to read figurative genesis into nature’s phenomena. It was based on an age-old perception of nature as the creator of images. As urban societies grew more complex, new efforts were made to tame and systematize these dangerous powers, coinciding with a re-formation of the concepts of nature and science, beginning in the sixteenth century and reaching into the first half of the seventeenth century. The notion of nature as an active force, involved in the genesis of images, was gradually replaced by a notion of nature as passive, ruled by natural laws that man might eventually uncover and govern. In the sixteenth century, the tradition of seeing nature as latent with potential images was on its way to being substituted by the empirical, scientific perspective of nature as passive and governed by natural laws, a perspective that gained momentum in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that eventually resulted in ornaments being tamed into the non-monstrosity of modern decorative art.66 As a radically new practice of scientific (and artistic) endeavour that took the sense of vision seriously, the empirical approach received strong support from the accumulation of knowledge facilitated by printed books and images. The sixteenth-century shift in visual culture from the older perception, characterized by the appeal of generating and transforming images, to a more ‘objective’ visual regime which began to dominate from the early seventeenth century onward was linked with the development of these new media of mechanically reproduced images.67 The ability to reproduce brought about by woodcuts and other types of print from the fifteenth century onward enabled systematic classifications based on observations ‘seen by one’s own eyes’. Printed books and the mechanical reproduction of images were technological preconditions for new attempts to order the world and its phenomena by norms and categories, resulting in new standards of uniformity.68 These taxonomies were dependent upon images, which could be repeated and exchanged throughout the known 65 Bundy, The Theory of Imagination; Camille, ‘Before the Gaze’; Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, pp. 117–136; Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft, with chapters on, for instance, ‘Of Transformations, ridiculous examples brought by the Adversaries for the confirmation of their foolish doctrine’ (V.1) and ‘That the body of a man cannot be turned into a body of a beast by a Witch, is proved by strong Reasons, Scriptures, and Authorities’ (V.5); Gaukroger, Emergence of a Scientific Culture, pp. 253–262, 289–303. On the potential of transformation and change as a new theme from the twelfth century onwards, see Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, pp. 15–36, 86–100, 113–162. 66 Blume, ‘Beseelte Natur und Ländliche Idylle’, p. 191: Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, p. 39; Bredekamp, ‘Die Erde als Lebewesen’; Gaukroger, Emergence of a Scientific Culture, pp. 253–262, 289–303. 67 Eisenstein, The Printing Press; Dackerman, ‘Introduction’. 68 With regard to conceptions of time, Eisenstein, The Printing Press, I, p. 16, highlights synchronization as a new ideal, replacing temporal eclecticism with new endeavours toward uniformity; see also McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy.

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world and thus laid a common groundwork for that which was defined as ‘true’ and ‘normal’. The naturalization of uniformity and seriality coincided with the development of the new scientific approach to describing and mapping the physical world. It would be meaningless here to distil cause from effect.69 The Reformation and CounterReformation’s efforts to encourage unequivocality and to discourage paradox and the enigmatic, labyrinthine trajectories of monstrous ornament developed alongside the growth in empirical approaches and the exaltation of vision as the most important source of knowledge. The Counter-Reformation’s explicit condemnation of monstrous ornament in terms of grotesques and ‘disorderly’ and ‘confusedly arranged’ imagery was formulated in the decades when grotesques began to go out of fashion.70 The ambiguities of the sixteenth century were replaced, so to speak, by the rhetorically demonstrative, easily graspable compositions of the seventeenth century, an art characterized by a clear perspective, precise hierarchies, and unambiguous directions. The astonishingly licentious ‘abnormalities’ were expelled from ornament from around 1600 and censured in art theory, just as efforts were made to define and expel eccentricity and ‘otherness’ from society.71 Intolerance of the bizarre, extraordinary, licentious, and grotesque came to reign in visual art at the same time as society worked to exclude difference through the Inquisition and through new institutions of internment, ‘cleansing’ society of the presence of ‘the other’.72 At a time when society could no longer accommodate strange personalities and outsiders – who were declared insane, extraordinary, or particularly insightful, and who were then in turn declared to be 69 Mitchell, Image Science, pp. 125–137; McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 7–23. 70 This passage from the Council of Trent is quoted in Klein and Zerner, Italian Art 1500–1600, p. 121; for a thorough critique of these ‘disadvantages’ of grotesques, see Paleotti, Discourse, II.xxxvii – xlii, pp. 262–280. For René Descartes, writing about architecture and cities (Discourse on Method, 1637), it is self-evident that uniformity is preferable to irregularity and the accidental or disordered phenomena caused by the spans of construction time: Descartes, ‘Discourse on Method’, pp. 44–45. An example of an earlier proponent of ‘a bit of disorder and of the accidental’ is Annibal Caro, Apologia degli academici di banchi di Roma, contra M. Lodovico Castelvetro da Modena (Parma 1558), who writes that ‘si richiede taluolta un poco del disordinato; & de l’accaso’ – a ‘magnificent style’ should avoid too much precision and ‘exquisiteness’, should even be a bit disordered, just as ‘in a painting, a great master does not bother greatly to imitate hairs, eyelashes, and fingernails of a person’; quoted by D’Elia, ‘The Decorum of a Defecating Dog’, p. 130. 71 In the early sixteenth century Baldung Grien still represents witches as attractive women (Städel Museum, Frankfurt), not as old and ugly, as in subsequent times. Likewise, in Orlando Furioso, Ariosto writes of various dangerous, seductive sorceresses – for instance in the story of Alcina, who transforms her previous lovers into trees and fountains in her garden. In his History of Madness, pp. 25–40, Foucault describes ‘insanity’ as a concept that is historically and culturally determined, and that began to be defined in the sixteenth century. That some early-sixteenth century artists might officially use nicknames such as ‘Sodoma’, as testified by Vasari’s biography of the artist Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477–1549), would be difficult to imagine in a seventeenth-century context. 72 Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze, pp. 1–45 and 90–192. On a gradual change in notions of witches as in a pact with the Devil to witches as ill, see Styers, Making Magic, pp. 3–24; Foucault, History of Madness, pp. 44–77.

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witches – the increasingly absolutist power of the Church and of secular authority could no longer tolerate ornament that was ‘out of order’. Painting came to be organized into large, readable compositions, with a unifying effect, as described by Heinrich Wölfflin in his century-old observation of the formal distinctions of the Baroque. Brought about by fundamentally coherent relationships between figure and space, this new unity was independent of any particular representational idiom, handling of paint, or other technical aspects pertinent to each individual painter.73 Sixteenth-century painting has been described as rich in movement and turning bodies that, however, lead to no action, no narrative.74 In contrast, one of the innovations of seventeenth-century painterly compositions was their display of a unified narrative, complementing the epic genre in literature, which was gaining ground at the time. By the late sixteenth century, the singular period of artistic licence had come to a close, and monstrous ornaments that empathically and sensuously attract attention grew into naturalistically detailed decoration, devoid of their earlier ambiguities. The tremendously controlled, ritualized, ordered, and hierarchical tendencies in seventeenth-century culture curbed the unpredictability that was constitutive of the monstrous ornaments of the sixteenth century. The sixteenth-century fascination with monstrous ornament reflects that the creative process and the distance – even an ironic distance – between the artist and his work were gradually becoming the primary quality of creative production.75 These transformations in worldview and ideas concerning humankind were evident in a new self-awareness, historical awareness, and artistic awareness, all of which required a certain sense of distance and relativism. The seventeenth-century development of new forms of knowledge and scientific insight caused the ambiguity, humour, and sometimes disquieting qualities of ornament – which had challenged absolutes in our visual world – to become outmoded. Monstrous ornaments were transformed into an issue of ‘either/or’ – either caricature or terror – or were simply turned into innocent decoration.76 As the demonic power of magic was being expelled 73 In the German terminology, Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 16, writes of Einheit as characteristic of the Baroque, acquired ‘durch ein Zusammenziehen der Glieder zu einem Motiv oder durch Unterordnung der übrigen Elemente unter ein unbedingt führendes’, and furthermore, p. 166, on ‘die Gesamtheit der Formen’. For Morel, Les Grotesques, p. 18, it is the relationship between painting and frame that is crucial, as the frame in the seventeenth century becomes clearly separated from the picture plane or field of painting. 74 Nagel, Medieval Modern, p. 147. 75 Boysen, At Være en Anden; Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image. 76 On the origins of the genre of caricature at this time, see Gombrich and Kris, ‘The Principles of Caricature’; Gombrich and Kris, Caricature; Emison, Low and High Style, p. 120, note 374; Porzio, ‘Lomazzo e il realismo grottesco’; Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, p. 83. In parallel to this, the concepts of pure horror and disgust only reached their present definitions in the nineteenth century: see Menninghaus, Ekel; Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense.

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from images and belief systems, painting was being transformed from artefact to art. A kind of distillation separated aestheticism from utilitarianism and divided art from technology. With its modern parergonal status, ornamentation finally lost the esteem it had gained in the sixteenth century. These historical perspectives permit a wider appreciation of sixteenth-century ornament: the monstrosity of ornament is not just an isolated stylistic phenomenon of the period, but is linked to significant aspects of visual culture. If we set aside our modern preference for conceptualizing art in terms of the autonomous easel painting and works attributable to famous artists, and if we assign ornamental frameworks a more decisive role, we may gain a new appreciation of the nature of image making in Early Modernity.

A Brief Survey The chapters of the book are structured in four thematic sections that have different takes on ornament and monstrosity. The grotesques of sixteenth-century Italy are approached as a point of departure. By focusing on a particularly popular motif within the grotesques, the female monster, Maria Fabricius Hansen sets out to characterize the special character not only of the decorative frescoes and this particular motif but also of the visual culture of the sixteenth century in general. Her analysis includes reflections on femininity and hybridity and artistic licence as well as changing concepts of art throughout the period. Luke Morgan goes on to illustrate the monstrosity in garden ornament by focusing on Pirro Ligorio’s theoretical writings on the grotesque and his designs for the Villa d’Este. The fact that Pirro Ligorio was both the author of an unusually detailed theory of grottesche and the designer of a garden that incorporates grotesque imagery makes his work an important, but neglected, case study of sixteenth-century attitudes towards monstrous ornament, both in general and, more specifically, in landscape design. Chapters focusing on sacred space and narrative are up next: Tianna Helena Uchacz analyses the passion print series by the Bruges artist Marcus Gheeraerts and the unconventional use of monstrous ornament in this context. The monstrous ornament in these unusual passion prints raises questions about the nature of sacred images, the role of the grotesque, and the future of the artist in a city still traumatized by the iconoclasm of 1566 and the ‘silent iconoclasm’ of 1581. Barnaby Nygren discusses the unknown within known structures in colonial Mexico when he questions the ornamental grotesque in the frescoes of San Miguel Arcángel. Would the Augustinian monks have encouraged the use of the monumental grotesque as an organizing schema in order to allow a simultaneous pictorial presence of wildness and control, fear and wonder? Lastly, Maria-Anna Aristova studies the monastic body in her analysis of ornament in the religious context of the Certosa di San Martino in

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Naples. Through a consideration of the paradoxical role of ornament at the Certosa di San Martino, she explores the ways in which its unstable, ambiguous nature questions assumptions about the role of art and architecture in the Early Modern period. Agency and ornament enlivened are explored in the subsequent section. Lisa Andersen traces the mask as instrument of concealment and transformation in court masquerades through the animated stucco ornamentation of the Galerie at Fontainebleau, revealing a process of animation that blurred the boundaries between the art object and its viewers, and between persons and things. She argues that this animation of the King’s ornamental repertoire created both competing and complimentary opportunities for appropriation and subversion for masquerade participants. Chris Askholt Hammeken studies the strange event of a whale carcass displayed in the Florentine Loggia dei Lanzi in order to reflect more deeply on questions of lifelikeness and metamorphosis through the framework of ornament and monstrosity ignited by the whale. Finally, Frances S. Connelly discusses Giambattista Vico’s notion of grotesques as poetic monsters that appear in times of crisis and have the ability to speak through a fusion of ornament and argument. Arguing that Vico’s ideas can be applied to other periods of radical change, Connelly explores their emergence in contemporary art with ornamented and contradictory figures that embody the unprecedented cultural intermixtures and competing narratives of our world today. The concluding chapter by Jacob Wamberg frames the book by both analysing the concepts of ornament and monstrosity and placing their sixteenth-century momentum in a wider historical perspective. This chapter takes Wilhelm Worringer’s groundbreaking essay Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 1907) as its point of departure in a post-anthropocentric reflection on ornament and monstrosity. *** Through the varied material of its case studies, this anthology seeks to demonstrate the extraordinary degree to which the monstrous ornament of the Early Modern period investigated what images were, where they came from, and how they worked. This book thus contributes to the investigation of the themes of ornament and monstrosity that have attracted increasing attention in recent years but that have thus far not been brought together into a single field of analysis. As a counterpart to research into the sophisticated and elitist aspects of court culture, the present collection of chapters acknowledges and investigates the qualities not only of playfulness but also of ambiguity and anxiety. We understand the Early Modern period as representing a passage between an ancient and medieval concept of art and nature into a modern one, resulting in the unique notions of ornament and monstrosity characteristic of the time. Particularly, sixteenth-century monstrous ornament makes clear the waning of the old worldview and the dawn of the new one, as geocentrism becomes

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heliocentrism and brings with it the mind-boggling concept of infinity, intangible and difficult to grasp. In monstrous ornaments, appreciation of movement, transformation, flexibility, and stylistic excess is arguably inseparable from these cultural conditions. Excessive ornament flourishes when known stabilities grow fragile. The preoccupation with the potentials and limitations of the visual that was so typical of the Early Modern period is arguably matched only by that of our own culture today.77 The notion that the sense of vision is unreliable is related to the challenging of absolutes, an activity that has been identified in various ways as the core of the Late Modern era. There seems to be a movement away from the l’art pour l’art paradigm of past centuries, once more making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between art and other fields of creation and production.78 Recent decades have indeed been marked by a tendency toward explorations of hybridities of art, technology, and nature in ways that seem more familiar to the conditions and connections between these domains in the sixteenth century than in the centuries in between.79 These trends seem to be accompanied by ruptures in our perception of nature, including the tendency to once more perceive our environment as a living force, questioning the notion of nature as a passive entity governed only by natural laws that are destined to be uncovered and subsequently controlled by humans.80 At the same time, issues of human identity and normality have emerged with new impetus, making fascination with monstrosity a powerful presence in today’s culture. When Early Modern monstrous ornament attracts our attention today, with its mixture of knowns and unknowns, combining observations from nature and imaginative figurations, this fascination thus seems dependent upon a certain correlation across history. Uncertainty with regard to perceptions of reality – especially typical of Early Modern visual culture – reminds us of our own world and the status in our own time of the visible’s relationship to truth and knowledge.

Bibliography Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. by Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004; originally published in Italian 2002). Giorgio Agamben, Nymphs, trans. by Kevin McLaughlin and Amanda Minervini (London: Seagull, 2013; originally published in Italian in 2007).

77 Clark, ‘Demons’. 78 Reichle, Art in the Age of Technoscience; Fehrenbach, ‘Compositio Corporum’; Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, pp. 109–113; Nagel, Medieval Modern, pp. 133–154; Paldam and Wamberg, Art, Technology and Nature. 79 On Mannerism as a transepochal phenomenon, see Hofmann, Zauber der Medusa. 80 Bredekamp, ‘Die Erde als Lebewesen’; Blumenberg, ‘Das Verhältnis von Natur und Technik’; Holm and Poulsen, Nature Strikes Back; Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, p. 15; Bensaude-Vincent and Newman, ‘Introduction’.

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Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. by Joseph Rykwert and others (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum Historia (Bologna: Tebaldinus, 1642). Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans (Loeb Classical Library 411–417), trans. by William M. Green, 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1957–1972). Augustine, Of True Religion (1953), trans. by John H.S. Burleigh (Chicago: Regnery 1959). Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968; originally published in Russian in 1965). Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Paola Barocchi (ed.), Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento fra Manierismo e Contrariforma, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza 1960–1962). Paola Barocchi (ed.) Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols. (Milan: Ricciardi 1971–1977). Eugenio Battisti, L’Antirinascimento: Con una Appendice di Manoscritti Inediti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962). Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman, ‘Introduction: The Artificial and the Natural. State of the Problem’, in The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity, ed. by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 1–19. Dieter Blume, ‘Beseelte Natur und Ländliche Idylle’, in Naturund Antike in der Renaissance, ed. by Herbert Beck and Peter C. Bol (Frankfurt am Main: Liebighaus – Museum alter Plastik, 1985), pp. 173–188. Hans Blumenberg‚ ‘Das Verhältnis von Natur und Technik in Philosophischer Sicht’, Studium Generale, 4 (1961), pp. 461–467. Benjamin Boysen, At Være en Anden: Essays om Intethed, Ambivalens og Fremmedhed hos Francesco Petrarca og William Shakespeare (Odense: Syddansk University Press, 2007). Horst Bredekamp, ’Die Erde als Lebewesen, Kritische Berichte, 9, 4/5 (1981), pp. 5–37. Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, trans. by Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1995; originally published in German in 1993). Murray W. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 12, 2/3) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927). Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001). Michael Camille, ‘Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing’, in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. by Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 197–223. Stephen J. Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Mark Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Stuart Clark, ‘Demons, Natural Magic, and the Virtually Real: Visual Paradox in Early Modern Europe’, in Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Gerhild S. Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr. (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2002), pp. 223–245. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 3–25. Robin G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (1945) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). Frances Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. and ed. by Philip McMahon, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956). Susan Dackerman, ‘Introduction: Prints as Instruments’, in Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early ­Modern Europe, ed. by Susan Dackerman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2011), pp. 19–35.

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Nicole Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques a la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969). Hubert Damisch, A Theory of Cloud: Toward a History of Painting, trans. by Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002; originally published in French in 1972). Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (1998) (New York: Zone Books, 2001). Cäcilia Davis-Weyer (ed.), Early Medieval Art 300–1150: Sources and Documents (1971) (Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 17) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). Una Roman D’Elia, ‘The Decorum of a Defecating Dog’, Print Quarterly, 22, 2 (2005), pp. 119–132. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; originally published in French in 1978). René Descartes, ‘Discourse on Method’, in Discourse on Method and Other Writings, trans. by Arthur Wollaston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960; originally published in French in 1637), pp. 36–97. Mark Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, Word & Image 16, 3 (2000), pp. 310–317. Elisabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Patricia A. Emison, Low and High Style in Italian Renaissance Art (Garland Studies in the Renaissance 8) (New York: Garland, 1997). Claire Farago (ed.), Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe 1550–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). Frank Fehrenbach, ‘Compositio Corporum: Renaissance der Bio Art’, in Andrea Mantegnas camera picta im Kastell von Mantua, ed. by Andreas Hauser (Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus 9) Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), pp. 135–176. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964). Michel Foucault, History of Madness (2006), ed. by Jean Khalfa, trans. by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2009; originally published in French in 1961). Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Ernst H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979). Ernst H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris, ‘The Principles of Caricature’ (1937–1938), in Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952) (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), pp. 189–203. Ernst H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris, Caricature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940). Adeline Grand-Clément, ‘Poikilia’, in A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, ed. by Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray (Chichester: Wiley, 2015), pp. 406–421. Große Peggy, Ulrich Großmann, and Johannes Pommeranz (eds.), Monster: Fantastische Bilderwelten zwischen Grauen und Komik (Nürnberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2015). Claire Lapraik Guest, The Understanding of Ornament in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Chris Hammeken, Unruly Ornament: On Artificial Moments in Sixteenth-Century Visual Art (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Aarhus University, 2016). Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Art of Transformation: Grotesques in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Rome: Accademia di Danimarca and Edizioni Quasar, 2018). Werner Hofmann (ed.), Zauber der Medusa: Europäische Manierismen (Vienna: Löcker, 1987). Henrik Holm and Hanne Kolind Poulsen, Nature Strikes Back: Menneskets Forhold til Naturen set gennem vestlig Kunst (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2009). Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica (1929) (Loeb Classical Library 194), trans. by Henry, R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Fredrika H. Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Robert Jütte, Geschichte der Sinne: Von Antike bis zum Cyberspace (Munich: Beck, 2000). Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1963; originally published in German in 1790).

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Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (1981) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Robert Klein and Henri Zerner (eds.), Italian Art 1500–1600: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966). Christian K. Kleinbub, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, trans. by Alastair Langand Lottie M. Newman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979; originally published in German in 1934). Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, ‘Le Theme de la “Tête de Feuilles” aux XIIIe et XIVe Siècles: l’Humanisme gothique à l’Épreuve?’, in La Sculpture en Occident: Études offertes à Jean-René Gabarit, ed. by Geneviève BrescBautier and others (Dijon: Faton, 2007), pp. 33–45. Carl Linnaeus, Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species (Halae Magdeburgicae: Curt, 1760). Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’ (1908), in Ins Leere Gesprochen 1897–1900: Trotzdem 1900–1930. ­Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–2, ed. by Franz Glück (Vienna: Verlag Herold, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 276–288. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Penguin, 2003). Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge, 1962). Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) (London: Routledge, 2001). Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard, trans. by Henry Pickford (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999; originally published in German in 1995). Winfried Menninghaus, Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (1999) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002). W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne (1603), trans. by John Florio, ed. and intr. by George Saintsbury) (New York: AMS Press, 1967; first French edition 1580). Philippe Morel, Les Grotesques: Les Figures de l’Imaginaire dans la Peinture Italienne de la Fin de la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1997). Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art out of Time (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012). Gülru Necipoglu and Alina Payne (eds.), Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). John W. O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979). Dana M. Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Martlesham, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2010). Camilla S. Paldam and Jacob Wamberg (ed.), Art, Technology and Nature: Renaissance to Postmodernity (­Science and the Arts since 1750 1) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. by William McCuaig (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012; originally published in Italian in 1582). Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. by Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991; originally published in German in 1927). Paracelsus, ‘Liber de Nymphis, Sylphis, Pygmaeis et Salamandris et de Caeteris Spritibus’, in Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim called Paracelsus (1941), ed. by Henry E. Sigerist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 223–293. Alina A. Payne (ed.) Vision and its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe (­University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).

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Niccolò Perotti, Cornu copiae seu linguae Latinae commentarii, ed. by Jean-Louis Charlet, Giancarlo Abbamonte, Martine Furno, Pernille Harsting, Marianne Pade, Johann Ramminger, and Fabio Stok, 8 vols. (Sassoferrato: Istituto piceno, 1989–2001). Plato, ‘Timaeus’, in Plato: Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistles (1929) (Loeb Classical Library 234), trans. by Robert Gregg Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Pliny, Natural History (Loeb Classical Library), trans. by Harris Rackham and D.E. Eichholz, 9 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952–1962). Francesco Porzio, ‘Lomazzo e il realismo grottesco: Un capitolo del primitivismo nel Cinquecento’, in Rabisch: Il grottesco nell’Arte del Cinquecento, L’Accademia della Val di Blenio, Lomazzo e l’Ambiente Milanese, ed. by Cristina Apa (Milan: Skira, 1998), pp. 23–36. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (Loeb Classical Library), trans. by Harold Edgeworth Butler, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920–1922). Lilian M.C. Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (California Studies in the History of Art 4) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). Ingeborg Reichle, Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art (Vienna: Springer, 2009). Mark Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and the Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Reginald Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft, proving the common opinions of witches contracting with Devils and all Infernal Spirits or Familiars, are but Erroneous Novelties and Imaginary Conceptions (London: A. Clark, 1665). Sebastiano Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: ‘Tutte l’Opere d’Architettura et Prospettiva’, trans. by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). John Shearman, Only Connect…: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (1988) (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 37) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. by Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; originally published in French in 1993). Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). David Summers, ‘Michelangelo on Architecture’, Art Bulletin, 54, 2 (1972), pp. 146–157. David Summers, ‘Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art’, Art Bulletin, 59, 3 (1977), pp. 336–361. David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (1987) (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990). Norman P. Tanner and others (ed. and trans.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990). Ivar Tønsberg and Jacob Wamberg (eds.), Monster (Albertslund: Albertslund Rådhus, 2002). Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (1956) (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). Edward Tyson, Orang-Outang, sive Homy Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, and Ape, and a Man. To which is added, a Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs, and Sphinges of the Ancients. Wherein it Will Appear that They are all Either Apes or Monkeys, and not men, as Formerly Pretended (London: Thomas Bennet, Daniel Brown, Mr. Hunt, 1699). Caroline Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Benedetto Varchi, Lezzioni, lette nell'Accademia Fiorentina, sopra diverse materie poetiche e filosofiche (1548) (Florence: Giunti, 1590). Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori: Nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. by Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini (Florence: Sansoni, 1966–1987).

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Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. by Gaston de Vere (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1996; originally published in Italian in 1550 and 1568). Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. by Ingrid D. Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Jacob Wamberg, ‘Det Monstrøse’, in Monster, ed. by Ivar Tønsberg and Jacob Wamberg (Albertslund: ­Albertslund Rådhus, 2002), pp. 7–43. Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, Journal of the Warburg and ­Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), pp. 159–197. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich: Bruckmann, 1915). Alessandra Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque: Fantastical Decoration from Antiquity to Art Nouveau, trans. by Peter Spring (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008; originally published in Italian in 2007). Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

About the authors Chris Askholt Hammeken received his PhD degree in Art History from Aarhus University in 2017 on a dissertation entitled Unruly Ornament: On Artificial Moments in Sixteenth-Century Visual Art. He has had research stays in Rome and Vienna, and is now a lecturer in visual art and literature at Gammel Hellerup Gymnasium in Copenhagen, Denmark. His research interests include ornament, animation and artificiality, as well as art historiography and questions of style, space, and time. Maria Fabricius Hansen is an Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Arts and Cultural studies at the University of Copenhagen. She received a PhD from the University of Copenhagen in 1997 (on the imagery of ruins in fifteenth-century Italian painting) and a DPhil from Aarhus University in 2005 (published as The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome (Rome: ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 2003)). Her primary field of research is art and architecture from late antiquity until c. 1600, with a focus on Italian art. Her recent publications include The Art of Transformation: Grotesques in Sixteenth-­ Century Italy, Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, IL (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2018).

1. Ambiguous Delights: Ornamental ­Grotesques and Female Monstrosity in Sixteenth-­Century Italy Maria Fabricius Hansen*

Abstract In the sixteenth century, grotesques became immensely popular as a genre of ornamental painting. Within the art historical tradition, the prolific application of grotesques as fresco decoration is often explained as a consequence of the artists’ encounter with the ancient wall painting of the Domus Aurea in Rome (AD 60s). The grotesques, however, are characterized by a remarkable monstrosity compared to the decorative work of Antiquity, despite the sixteenth-century artists’ alleged imitation or revival of ancient prototypes. By focusing on female monsters, a particularly popular motif within the grotesques, this chapter aims to characterize not just the decorative frescoes but also some important characteristics of sixteenth-century visual culture in general. Keywords: art, nature, imagination, gender, the power of images, order

When sixteenth-century painters in Italy decorated rooms with frescoed grotesques, female monsters were among their favourite components within the ornamental ensembles (Ill. 1.1). The figure of the female monster is typically winged; has a naked torso with breasts; sits in a frontal, squatting position; and has goat legs (Ill. 1.2). The creature sometimes has a frightful or frightening expression on its face. It appears frequently within the marginal framework of scrolls, masks, small prospects of landscapes with ruins or mythological scenes, and among a variety of enigmatic figures, animals, and objects included in the ornamental frescoes that proliferated around the villas and palaces of the elite. Why did this female figure repeatedly make its way into the ornamental vocabulary of so many artists? What was the special appeal and relevance of this figure within the grotesques and within the wider visual culture of the period, in various regions and diverse artistic environments? * This chapter is based on material from my book, The Art of Transformation: Grotesques in SixteenthCentury Italy (Rome: Accademia di Danimarca and Edizioni Quasar, 2018).

Hammeken, C.A. and M.F. Hansen (eds.), Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789462984967_ch01

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Ill. 1.1: Bianca Cappello’s ‘Camerino’ (small chamber) in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze.

As an art form, grotesques were particularly linked with this period, going out of fashion around 1600. Their time-specific cultivation coincided with the exploration of all manner of composite conjunctions and blurred figurations, of which the female monster is just one example of many – but nevertheless represents an eye-opening leitmotif of the period. In the following pages, we shall look at some of the correlations between monstrous femininity and the attractive, arresting, even challenging potential of visual art as it was explored in the ornamental grotesques of sixteenth-century Italy.

Grotto-esque Imagery and Female Monsters The term ‘grotesques’ or grottesche was coined c. 1500 as a designation for orna­ mental frescoes allegedly inspired by paintings from Antiquity, which were explored in the years surrounding 1500 in Roman ruins, most famously Emperor Nero’s palace, the Domus Aurea (first century AD). Through the passage of time and the superimposition of new buildings, many of these ruins had been rendered subterranean, and thus grotto-esque.1 Some sixteenth-century theorists even 1 Several writers (including Francisco de Hollanda, Benedetto Varchi, Giorgio Vasari, and Benvenuto Cellini) provided this etymology: Hollanda, On Antique Painting, I.44.1, p. 148; Varchi, ‘Lezzione. Nella quale si disputa della maggioranza delle arti’, 1549, in: Barocchi, Trattati d'Arte, I, p. 532; Vasari, ‘Vita di Giovanni da Udine’, V, text, p. 448; Cellini, ‘La Vita’, I.xxxi, pp. 561–562.

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Ill. 1.2: Detail of grotesques, Villa Farnese, Caprarola. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Polo museale del Lazio – Caprarola, Palazzo Farnese.

wondered whether grotesques had originally been placed in rooms underground.2 Their subterranean, labyrinthine locations carried a suggestive potential as mnemonic loci for the origins of grotesques and contributed to their notable allure.3 Grottoes, the inner cavities of the Earth, had a dual significance, which grotesques likewise came to possess from the moment they were first defined. They were associated with that which was disquieting and disturbing, with imagery belonging to 2 Ligorio ‘Libro dell’antichita’, p. 164; Paleotti, Discourse, II.37–39, pp. 262–272. 3 See Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth, pp. 11–12 on the labyrinth as related to artistry and invention. The myth of the Cretan labyrinth built by the inventive architect Daedalus to hide the monstrous Minotaurus, the hybrid offspring of Queen Pasiphae and a bull, points to the archetypal connection between hybridity, monstrosity, creativity, and labyrinths/grottoes. On the analogies between labyrinths and grottoes, see Piel,

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the Underworld – to burial, tombs, death, and the corresponding metaphor of Hell, seen as a cavernous subterranean region, burning hot, with demons tormenting the condemned, and with the ruler of the Underworld devouring and defecating the damned. In the metaphorical language of the time, buildings were compared with the human body and, as a consequence, ruins were compared with corpses or skeletons.4 Ruinous buildings thus gave uncanny or unheimlich associations to grotesques.5 But that which was below ground was also associated with life-giving forces, known from the ancient cults of caves and sacred springs and in the legendary grottoes of Christianity (both the Birth Cave, associated with the Virgin Mary’s womb, and the cave of entombment from which Christ was resurrected). With roots in ancient mythology, generative, creative powers of nature sprang forth from the interior of the Earth, which was understood as feminine, with its cavities serving as wombs.6 A passage in one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, Codex Arundel (probably written c. 1480), gives an impression of this intriguing ambivalence, highlighting a preoccupation with and attraction to the interior of the Earth. He writes about an experience from his exploration of nature: Unable to resist my eager desire and wanting to see the great multitude of the various and strange shapes made by formative nature, and having wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern, in front of which I stood some time, astonished and unaware of such a thing. […] and after having remained there some time, two contrary emotions arose in me, fear and desire – fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvellous thing within it.7

Die Ornament-Grotteske, pp. 51–54; Pieper, Das Labyrintische, pp. 139–147; Santarcangeli, Il Libro dei Labirinti. Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth, employed the labyrinth as a common denominator of mannerism as a transepochal concept. On the relationship between grottoes and artistic genesis, see Wamberg, Landscape as World Picture, II, pp. 247–363 and Wamberg, ‘A Stone and Yet Not a Stone’. For an analysis of the grotesque as a figure of life, growth, transformation, and ambiguity, see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 21, 26–27, 52; Harpham, On the Grotesque, pp. 58–66; Eliade, Myth, Dreams and Mysteries, pp. 171–172; Campbell, ‘Giorgione’s “Tempest”’, p. 314; Bredekamp, ‘Die Erde als Lebewesen’. 4 Hansen, ‘Representing the Past’, pp. 100–101; Bredekamp, ‘Die Erde als Lebewesen’; Perrig, ‘Die Anatomie der Erde’. 5 On the unheimlich as a dual concept of both the familiar, that which is associated with home (Heim in German), and the secret, that which is but scarcely discerned (heimlich), and mischievous aspects that it may invoke, see Sigmund Freud’s classic essay ‘The Uncanny’. 6 Wamberg, Landscape as World Picture, I, pp. 208–214; on the personification of nature as a woman or a mother, see Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 2.1090–1146, 5.795–825. 7 Codex Arundel, British Library, 155a, in Richter, Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, II, §1339, p. 324: ‘E tirato dalla mia bramosa voglia, vago di uedere la gran copia delle varie e strane forme fatte dalla artifiziosa natura, ragiratomi alqua[n]to j[n]fra gli o[m]brosi scogli pervenni all’e[n]trata d’una gra[n] caverna dinanzi

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Ill. 1.3: Andrea del Sarto, detail of Madonna of the Harpies, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Photographic Department of the Uffizi Galleries, Florence.

These elements of fear and desire are pertinent to sixteenth-century grotesques. They had their origins beneath the surface of the Earth, were closely connected to nature in various ways, and were gendered accordingly. They consisted of meticulous depictions of natural elements, such as flowers, fruit, and animals, as if to emphasize art’s origins in nature, so often stressed in contemporary art-theoretical writing. They were composed in developing sequences, visualizing the growth – or birth – of one thing out of another. This was a generative, processual principle related to the feminine capability alla quale restato alqua[n]to stupefatto e jgniorante di tal cosa […] subito s’alse in me 2 cose, pavra e desiderio; paura per la minacciosa oscura spilonca, desiderio per vedere se là e[n]tro fusse alcuna miracolosa cosa.’ See also Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 78; Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, p. 1.

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Ill. 1.4: Marco da Faenza, detail of grotesques from Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze.

of delivering, reproducing, or giving birth.8 This association between grotesques and femininity is notable.9 The themes of burial, death, procreation, and birth correlate with conceptions concerning artistry and creativity during the period, representing the danger and fascination that seems to be embodied by the prolific female monster.10 The female monster that appears so frequently within grotesques shares her naked torso, breasts, and wings with the sphinx that is also popular in the genre. But the female monster differs from the sphinx in her goat’s legs and posture, challenging the viewer with her frontality and naked breasts, sitting with her legs spread, suggesting exposed genitals. This monstrous creature is known not only from the ornamental frescoes of the time but also from the decorative frameworks of other media, such as sculpture, small objects of applied art, and panel painting. It is included, for instance, in Andrea del Sarto’s altarpiece known as Madonna of the Harpies (1517); but the current name of this painting notwithstanding, the figures only roughly approximate harpies in the strict sense of this monster known from Greek mythology (Ill. 1.3).11 8 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 21–58. 9 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, pp. 2, 116–117. 10 See Alberti, On the Art of Building, VIII.2, p. 247 on ancient burial practices: ‘they buried in the bare earth: they considered it right, since the body, which was of the earth, was laid, as it were, in its mother’s womb.’ See also Wamberg, ‘A Stone and Yet Not a Stone’; Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, pp. 8, 29, 42–47. 11 Cohen, ‘Andrea del Sarto’s Monsters’.

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Ill. 1.5: Marco da Faenza, detail of grotesques from Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of Musei Civici di Firenze.

Harpies were foul, repulsive, bird-like monsters, but their winged, human torsos had bird legs and were not necessarily represented as feminine.12 The grotesques teem with other kinds of hybrids with female torsos (Ills. 1.4–1.5). In addition to the sphinxes, who are winged and whose lower bodies are those of lions, the grotesques showcase a great variety of mermaids, either with fish tails or with their lower bodies composed of leaves and foliage. Grotesques also abound with figures and monsters of male, ambiguous, or dual gender, alongside the typical combination of the human figure with animal parts. Some creatures are provided with 12 For a conventional sixteenth-century representation of harpies with women’s heads and torsos and with birds’ legs, see the woodcut illustration in Cartari, Imagini delli dei de gl’antichi, p. 247.

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Ill. 1.6: Bernardino Poccetti, sgraffito facade of Palazzo Ramirez Montalvo, c. 1573, Florence Photo: Pernille Klemp.

both breasts and a beard, or have breasts yet a conspicuously short, masculine haircut (Ills. 1.6–1.7). Interchangeability of identities is a common denominator within the ornamental frescoes of the sixteenth century. Just as harpies and sphinxes originated in the mythology and visual culture of Antiquity, a female, winged, frontal figure was likewise common, featuring, for example, in the Domus Aurea (Ill. 1.8).13 The ancient Roman version is, however, less 13 On the winged, female figure’s origin as a representation of the ‘Great Goddess’, see Curtius, ‘Die Rankengöttin’; Toynbee and Ward-Perkins, ‘Peopled Scrolls’, pp. 5–6; Schauenburg, ‘Zur Symbolik Unteritalienischen Rankenmotive’; Stoop, Floral Figurines from South Italy; Rupp, ‘The Vegetal Goddess in the Tomb of Typhon’, pp. 215–217. I am grateful to Anette Rathje for this reference.

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Ill. 1.7: Luca Signorelli, detail of grotesques in Cappella Nuova, cathedral of Orvieto. Photo: Pernille Klemp. ­Courtesy of the Opera del Duomo of Orvieto.

monstrous than its sixteenth-century sisters. In the Domus Aurea, these frontally seated, winged figures constitute an ornamental frieze through their serial repetition and are typically stylized through a limited palette. The ancient model is recorded in drawings attributed to, for instance, Filippino Lippi. Such drawings from around 1500 illustrate the figure’s transformation from a neutral ornament in ancient friezes into a novel monstrosity (Ill. 1.9). The figure was employed from very early on in decorative framings of ceilings or in sequences of grotesques on painted pilasters: for instance by Lippi in the Strozzi Chapel, Florence; by Pinturicchio in his Roman works as well as in the Libreria Piccolomini at Siena; by Pietro Perugino in his Collegio del Cambio frescoes at Perugia; and by Giovanni da Udine in his painting as part of Raphael’s workshop in Rome and after the death of his master. Amico Aspertini, for his part, placed this figure on the breastplate of a soldier in his frescoes in the Oratorio di Santa Cecilia, Bologna, c. 1506 (Ill. 1.10).14 The attraction of this female monster is also evident from its continuous use later in the century. It is integrated into the decorative frescoes of important mid-sixteenth-century commissions (see Ill. 1.1). In a late, extraordinary example in 14 It also appears within the ornaments in his drawings (Parma Codex, Biblioteca Palatina, Parma), in variants with and without goat legs – see Faietti and Nesselrath, ‘Bizar più che reverso di medaglia’, for instance pp. 47, 48, 52, 75 – and a version with breasts, goat legs, and what appears to be an erect penis, p. 65.

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Ill. 1.8: Domus Aurea, Rome, detail of ornamental frieze with female hybrid figures. Photo: Courtesy of Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Parco Archeologico del Colosseo.

Bernardino Poccetti’s (1585) ceiling at the Palazzo Marzichi-Lenzi in Florence, the figure even features pubic hair (although it is possible that this rare feature stems from a later intervention or restoration) (Ill. 1.11).15 Why did the harpy transform into the sixteenth-century woman-bird-goat hybrid? Perhaps Isidore of Seville’s much-read seventh-century etymological encyclopedia, Origines, provides a partial explanation. While a chimera is a hybrid monster of ancient mythology with a lion at the front, a snake at the back, and a she-goat in the middle, Isidore writes instead of an animal of three shapes that consists of a lion and a snake with a chimera in the middle, then adding that chimera means shegoat.16 Nevertheless, the visualization of a chimera or harpy in terms of a winged 15 This feature is extraordinary even for a sixteenth century grotesque, and it cannot be excluded that it is an addition from later restoration work. 16 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, I.xl.4.

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Ill. 1.9: Filippino Lippi, drawing with ornamental details from the Domus Aurea. Fol. 60r, Gabinetto disegni, Uffizi. Photo: Photographic Department of the Uffizi Galleries, Florence.

female figure with goat legs seems to have originated only in the late fifteenth century along with the development of grotesques as an ornamental genre. The innovative sixteenth-century augmentation with goat legs relates this monster to figures of Pan and satyrs, which also appeared frequently in sixteenth-century visual art (see Ill. 1.2). The female monsters’ simultaneously disquieting and generative powers draw their impact from their relationship to these creatures as well as from the archetypal

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Ill. 1.10: Amico Aspertini, detail of soldier with breastplate decorated with a female monster, Oratorio di Santa Cecilia, Bologna. Photo: Maria Fabricius Hansen.

power of their frontal pose.17 The figure was quite literally a capriccio, combining the original meaning of the word as a ‘sudden fright’ with reference to a goat (capra).18 Just as satyric imagery was a standard theme of grotesques, goats were standard in representations of landscapes with shepherds within ornamental frescoes. But the female monster was also a capriccio in the sense this term acquired in the sixteenth century, meaning an imaginative invention of the artist. Its prolific appearance in grotesques corresponds with a marked intensification in the preoccupation with the relationship between nature and art, including the role of the artist and his imagination in the creative process, the potential and limits of artistic invention.19 The ambiguous combination of animal and woman and the suggestion of an inviting yet dangerous sexuality are related to these notions. 17 Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, pp. 102–106, 124–146; Varchi, Opere, II, p. 577; In his account of the grotesques and their origins in Antiquity, Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, II.39, p. 270, states: ‘These cavernous places, deprived of light and filled with horror, abounded in phantasms, monsters, and counterfeit things – indeed that the infernal gods themselves sometimes took the shape of wild beasts, serpents and other monsters. Hence, they depicted those gods they called lemures or larvae, whose strange visages provoked terror in others.’ See also Frontisi-Ducroux, Du Masque au Visage. 18 Regarding the concept of capriccio, see Kanz, Die Kunst des Capriccio, pp. 11–30; Kanz, ‘Capriccio und Groteske’. 19 Campbell, ‘Giorgione’s “Tempest”’, p. 314; Blume, ‘Beseelte Natur und Ländliche Idylle’.

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Ill. 1.11: Bernardino Poccetti, ceiling of the entrance hall at Palazzo Marzichi-Lenzi in Florence (now Hotel Monna Lisa), 1585. Photo: Pernille Klemp.

Problems of Femininity and Hybridity For the erudite humanist-architect Pirro Ligorio (c. 1513–1583) – who eagerly invests grotesques with densely allegorical, hieroglyphic meaning – harpies are loaded with significance, especially blindness, privation of the true light, sinful greed, and gluttony.20 In his long, circuitous passages of highly imaginative interpretation, he mentions that sphinxes represent uncertainty and numerous other problematic properties, in line with the fact that the sphinx’s body is composed of parts of various creatures.21 In the emblematic combination of images and text in Poccetti’s ceiling of 20 Ligorio, fol. 155v in: Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea, p. 170: ‘ Le harpye non altro significano che la cecità et la privatione della vera luce, la ingordigia delli huomini dediti alla gola et al gustare la natura sporcamente, sono li scrementi et la lorditia nodrita di tali huomini che sporcano le reali et le private mense dovunque essi entrano a devorare et impire la gola, sono le miserie delle ricchezze abbassate nelli piaceri delle cose deboli et malamente appoggiate et consummate da parasiti dalli voraci ventri della ingordigia guastano la politia dell’arte che polisce la natura. Perchè l’ingordi tirano a se et vogliono sottoporre ogni cosa nel suo ventraccio, et per la sua gola si smenticano de iddio et d’ogni ratione.’ On Pirro Ligorio and grotesques, see also Chapter 2 by Luke Morgan in this volume, pp. 73–92. 21 Ligorio, fol. 155r–155v in: Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea, p. 170.

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the Palazzo Marzichi-Lenzi, the motto vitanda est improba is juxtaposed with a splittail mermaid, referring in its totality of words and image to the ancient Roman proverb known from Horace, vitanda est improba siren desidia, which translates as ‘One must avoid that wicked temptress [siren], Laziness.’22 The temptation of this problematic laziness corresponds with female hybrids’ particularly negative associations. The connection between vice and women has its longue durée in our cultural history, with a woman, Eve, who, according to the Book of Genesis, causes the Fall, serving as the archetypal character in this line of thinking. However, misogyny appears to have had particular resonance in the sixteenth century, in line with the breakthrough of the witch craze in the late fifteenth century.23 Its simultaneity with the emergence of the trend of the grotesques is notable. The preponderance of female monsters in sixteenth-century ornamental frescoes corresponds with these negative associations of femininity. In his treatise On Antique Painting (completed 1548), based on a sojourn in Italy (1538–1540), the Portuguese art theorist Francisco de Hollanda wrote about the representation of ‘invisible forms such as vices’.24 For Francisco de Hollanda, the figurative equivalent of vices was self-evidently feminine. The monsters he imagined as their allegorical representation have breasts and are related to the dark, foggy atmosphere of the Underworld. The femininity of vices was so obvious to him that it was unnecessary to corroborate it through argumentation. As Joseph Leo Koerner puts it in his analysis of Hans Baldung Grien’s representation of witches in woodcuts (1510s), the female body was seen ‘as an unclean chamber out of which pour all evils of the flesh’.25 The female body was understood to be an incomplete or deformed version of the male body. Whereas the archetypal male body, Adam, represented a unity of form, the female body – derived only from a part of Adam, from his rib – represented the supplementary, the extra, the undefined.26 The understanding of the female body as indefinite in its borders was related to the openings into its interior, especially the vaginal opening, and to its propensity for secreting 22 Horace, ‘Satires’, II.iii.13–14. 23 Note that what was to become a bestseller on witch hunting, the Malleus maleficarum, was published in the late 1480s, though I see this as a symptom and not the cause of the phenomenon. See Koerner, SelfPortraiture, pp. 317–357; Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense, p. 16; Bloch, ‘Medieval Misogyny’; Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 106–133; MacCulloch, The Reformation, pp. 544–556; De Boer, ‘Spirits of Love’, p. 131. 24 De Holanda, Da Pintura antiga, Chapter 31, p. 67. 25 Koerner, Self-Portraiture, p. 333. See Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality, pp. 116–121, 131–138, for observations on the common association of monstrosity and femininity in late medieval English literature, with Mandeville’s Travels from the mid fourteenth century as her point of departure. 26 Bloch, ‘Medieval Misogyny’, pp. 10, 11: ‘Woman, as secondary, derivative, supervenient, and supplemental, assumes all that is inferior, debased, scandalous, and perverse. […] she [Eve] is the offshoot of division and difference’; ‘If man enjoys existence (sub-stance), being, unity, form, and soul, woman is associated with accident, becoming (temporality), difference, body, and matter […]. Since the creation of woman is synonymous with the creation of metaphor, the relation between Adam and Eve is the relation of the proper to the figural, which implies always derivation, deflection, denaturing, a tropological turning away. The perversity of Eve is that of the lateral: as the outgrowth of Adam’s flank, his latus, she retains the status of translatio, of translation, transfer, metaphor, trope. She is side-issue.’

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fluids such as milk and blood.27 In this sense as well, the female body was unlimited and thus imperfect, the opposite of the Latin perficere, meaning to bring to an end, to complete, to finish. The negative associations of the imperfect and incomplete were related to the impossibility of determining clear-cut entities and boundaries, and incompleteness was inextricably bound up with the concept of monstrosity.28 In her analysis of the abject, Julia Kristeva describes the archetypal dimension of the limitlessness as problematic: ‘It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’29 It is, in short, the indeterminacy of grotesque bodies that connected them to femininity and monstrosity, with the female body representing ambiguity and the blurring of borders.30 What is decisive here is a concept of the body as open, unfinished, growing, transgressing borders, and maintaining fluctuating passages to the surrounding world while constantly generating new bodies, corresponding to Mikhail Bakhtin’s formidable analysis of the grotesque as particularly linked to the sixteenth century. Bakhtin (1895–1975) characterizes the grotesque image or body with transformation and temporal processes of conception, procreation, life, and death in ambivalent stages of metamorphosis – in opposition to a conception of the body as complete, finished, perfect, clearly defined, or detached from the world.31 He highlights the importance of bodily orifices and zones of transition with the surrounding world, as exemplified by the following passage: The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other.32 27 Huet, Monstrous Imagination, p. 3; Aristotle, Generation of Animals, II, iii, p. 175; Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice’. 28 See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s definitions of the monstrous in ‘Monster Culture’. Compare the observations by Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality, pp. 116–158, of monsters with the potential of transformation as being an innovation of high and late medieval English literature, with Mandeville’s Travels from the mid fourteenth century as her case study. 29 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. 30 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, pp. 12, 116–117. 31 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 21. 32 Ibid., p. 26.

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The grotesques explore these indeterminate meeting points observed by Bakhtin, both in small-scale details and in general compositional principles, with imagery of masks as a typical component, the transmitter or interface between exterior and interior, the illusion of art veiling or revealing nature. They are characterized precisely by the fluctuations between figures and their relationships with surrounding space, the blurring of boundaries, which are related to a processual conception of nature and existence. In Bakhtin’s words, ‘From one body a new body emerges.’33 In accordance with this perspective on the grotesque, the indefinite character of the body was emphasized in sixteenth-century art through all conceivable manner of hybrid figures or conjunctions within form and content of the artwork. Both the grotesques in general and the female monsters in particular are visual correlates to this fascination with ambiguity and metamorphosis, and indicate an awareness of instability and transformation as a fundamental condition of the time.34

The Art of Transformation The monstrosity of the female hybrid found in grotesques is heightened by the fact that the figure is not merely a conjunction of the animal and the human, but instead instils the human with bestial features. The challenging and uncanny aspect of the sixteenth-century versions of this hybrid is achieved through the mastery of seamless transformation between naturalistic and illusory components, leading to the figure’s ambiguity. This effect is often heightened through an illusionistic handling of colour, light, and shade, which rhetorical thinking regarded as the ornaments of art, in line with the innovative exploration of sfumato as a technique for blurring borders.35 In ancient rhetoric, ornament was understood as an inherent part of a wellperformed discourse, far from the modern concept of ornamentation as a superficial and superfluous addition to the primary form and content.36 However, ornamentation could easily be exaggerated, and was in that case associated with femininity. 33 Ibid., p. 26 (quote), pp. 27, 52. 34 On the growing cosmological awareness of a continuous, infinite space, followed by an acknowledgement of movement as a fundamental condition of the world, see Koyré, Études d’Histoire de la Pensée scientifique; Koyré, ‘Galileo and the Scientific Revolution’; Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement, pp. 1–15. On the connection between monstrosity and transformation, focusing on late medieval English literature, see Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality, pp. 116–158. 35 Shearman, ‘Leonardo’s Color and Chiaroscuro’; Nagel, ‘Leonardo and sfumato’. 36 The most important theoretical manifesto on this position remains Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’ (1908), while Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939), is another contribution of major significance with regard to the notion of the modern concept of art as contrary to ornamentation. Chris Hammeken has analysed these notions in his PhD dissertation, Unruly Ornament, and is currently working on publishing major parts of this research.

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Rhetorical theorists favoured reserve over excess and related inappropriate ornamentation to the decadent East, to barbarians, to uncivilized and immoral people.37 In early Christian and medieval misogynist thinking, from Tertullian on, women were associated not only with ornamentation but also with the excessive, superfluous, and false in general.38 In parallel to this, there was a subtle dividing line between admiration of women as ornaments (especially through their use of cosmetics) and contempt for ornamentation (and implicitly femininity).39 Cennino Cennini’s efforts to distance himself from his own advice on make-up in his handbook on painting (c. 1400) serves as an example of the ambivalence toward this aspect of female ornamentation.40 In the early sixteenth century, the cultural elite, as described by Baldassare Castiglione in The Courtier (1528), were similarly split between admiration of and contempt for women, opting for women who did not use make-up – a preference substantiated by the claim that men feared being ‘tricked by art’.41 One remarkable quality of the art of the period is its reflection upon the nature of the image itself, including the artist’s contribution to the interaction between art, reality, image, life, and death.42 Grotesques are an example of this exploration of the power of images. Their conjunctions of bizarre pictorial elements and ambiguous figural developments result in their ‘monstrous’ effect.43 Monstrosity is achieved by exploring the fluid transitions from one figure to another.44 The persuasiveness of the grotesques and their monstrosity lies in the transformation that takes place in the eyes and imagination of the beholder. The attraction of the female monster despite its indefinite properties and problematic gender associations is related to this illusionistic potential, and thus to the dual power and danger of visual art. The female monster thematizes the paradoxical oscillation between static artificiality and the agency or ‘aliveness’ of art. In this sense, the figure encapsulates the sixteenth-century preoccupation with the nature of the image. At the heart of the alluring-yet-disquieting grotesques – exemplified by inviting, monstrous, and imaginative female creatures – are notions of images as both pleasant and dangerous to

37 Gombrich, The Sense of Order, pp. 18–20; Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, p. 30; Schor, Reading in Detail, pp. 11–22. 38 Bloch, ‘Medieval Misogyny’, pp. 1–24. 39 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, pp. 218–257. 40 Cennini, Il Libro dell’arte, II, XIII.clxxx, p. 123. 41 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, pp. 86–87. 42 Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, p. 139; Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image; Koerner, SelfPortraiture; Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art. 43 The word ‘monster’ derives from the Latin verbs monstrare or monere (to show or to demonstrate, to draw attention to the wondrous, to warn); see the Introduction, p. 24, note 42. 44 The modern sense of the word ‘monstrous’ is practically synonymous with the current use of the word ‘grotesque’, meaning something bizarre, absurd, excessive, and even frightening; or, as defined in the Cambridge Dictionary Online, something ‘strange and unpleasant, especially in a silly or slightly frightening way’: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/grotesque (accessed 30 April 2016).

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Ill. 1.12: Woodcut attributed to Titian, in Pietro Aretino, Stanze in lode di Madonna Angela Sirena, Venice 1537. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

look at.45 The mask of Medusa is a powerful representation of the threat of femininity and the force of frontality, related to the cognitive mechanisms that attract the spectator’s attention when confronted with facial signs synthesized in masks.46 45 About scopophilia, the pleasure of looking, see the classic analysis by Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. See also Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? p. 35; Freedberg, The Power of Images, pp. 317–344; Camille, The Gothic Idol; Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts; Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, p. 154. 46 Frontisi-Ducroux, Du Masque au Visage; Eliade, ‘Masks’; Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, p. 125.

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Surrounded by snakes, the archetypal sign of transformation, the head of Medusa transforms the viewer to stone. The choreography of locomotion implied in interiors decorated with grotesques involves the artwork projecting a kind of petrification out toward the spectator.47 Grotesque ornamentation such as frontal faces, masks, and female monsters in general arrest the beholder, momentarily transforming him or her into statuesque immobility.48 Pleasure and problems with seeing are central themes of grotesques. If the representation as such is understood as gendered, with the active male gaze attracted by the image, then grotesques are at the core of this experience. In the 1537 edition of the humanist Pietro Aretino’s love poems to a woman called Angela Sirena, a woodcut illustration attributed to Titian shows the poet contemplating a split-tail siren as a figurative element appearing in the clouds (Ill. 1.12). The grotesque hybrid and the very ambiguity of cloud imagery are associated with the dangerous attraction of femininity, but are also related to notions of image-making originating in the mind of the poet.

Artistic Licence While grotesques were associated with imaginative creativity, artfulness, and artistry – and often highly appreciated for these qualities – these were also precisely the properties that rendered them controversial within certain art-theoretical environments. On a more general level, the dual properties of the female monster correspond with these ambivalent attitudes toward artistic invention at the time. The propagators of unlimited artistic licence (licenzia) held the grotesques in the highest regard, for instance with the claim that only the most inventive artists could create accomplished grotesques. In On Antique Painting, Francisco de Hollanda claimed that Michelangelo had ranked the best works of art in Italy; and, within this canon, the great master highlighted only a single work of art in Florence, namely Giovanni da Udine’s grotesques of c. 1521–1522 (no longer extant) in the Palazzo Medici.49 Of all the amazing artworks that might have been mentioned in that city, Hollanda had Michelangelo point to a grotesque work alone. This choice must be seen in relation to art terminology from around 1500, in which grotesques were understood as 47 I am grateful to Tianna Uchacz for discussing this observation with me. See Cole, ‘The Demonic Arts’, pp. 632–634; Agamben, Nymphs, pp. 6–8. 48 I am grateful to Matt Kavaler for discussions concerning this important, paradoxical quality of ornamentation. 49 Hollanda, On Antique Painting, Book 2, 2nd dialogue, p. 187. The rooms Giovanni da Udine decorated in the Palazzo Medici had been restructured by Michelangelo (Dacos and Furlan, Giovanni da Udine, pp. 154– 155, 295). By appreciating Giovanni da Udine’s work, Michelangelo implicitly praised the success of his own intervention in the palace.

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synonymous with fantasia.50 Reflections upon the imaginative power of man, its position and definition, the way it works, and how it interacts with its physical surroundings were important themes in aesthetic theory at the time. Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (nephew of the more famous uncle), for instance, wrote the treatise On the Imagination around 1500, asserting that the faculty which the Greek called fantasia (or ‘phantasia’) corresponds to what the Latins call imagination.51 Originally, fantasia meant ‘appearance’ or ‘appearing’.52 The interchangeability of fantasia with grotesques is implied by the association of grotesques with monstrosity, as etymologically based on verbs that signify warning and centre on something that is remarkable to sight.53 Grotesques were a field in which artists worked with sophisticated, personal, and inventive compositions and figurative elements. In the words of the articulate artist and art theorist Giovan Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1592), grotesques represented ‘all that could be found and imagined’ (tutto quello che si può trovare et imaginare).54 Their dependence on a strong artistic imagination and inventive power meant that grotesques were understood as the epitome of pictorial and figurative genesis. At the time, grotesques were sometimes referred to as ‘the dreams of painters’ (sogni de’ pittori) and even characterized as ‘the chaos of the brain’ (caos del mio cervello).55 Such statements indicate that the attractiveness of grotesques as works of imaginative invention could easily slide over into a repulsion occasioned by their disquieting phantasms.56 It is thus unsurprising that reflections upon artistic licence were often 50 Pinturicchio’s contract for the library at the Cathedral of Siena (1502) mentions ‘fantasie that today are called grotteschi’. Schmarsow, ‘Der Eintritt der Grottesken’, p. 133; transl. by David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, p. 103, on the association of imagination with grotesques, pp. 60–70, 134, and on the concept of fantasia, pp. 103–143; Serlio, On Architecture, I, IV.ix, p. 379, on grotesques, imagination, and artistic licence; Giovan Paolo Lomazzo, ‘Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura’, 1584, Book 6, Chapter xlviii, in: Barocchi, Scritti d’Arte, III, pp. 2692–2697; Vasari, Le vite, I, text, p. 143; Ligorio, ‘Libro dell’antichita’, the section on ‘Grottesche’, fols. 151–161 in: Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea, p. 163. 51 Pico della Mirandola, On the Imagination, p. 33: ‘It is that motion of the soul which actual sensation generates; that it is a power of the soul which out of itself produces forms; that it is a force related to all the powers; that it fashions all the likenesses of things, and transmutes the impressions of some powers to other powers; that it is a faculty of assimilating all other things to itself’; p. 37: ‘There exists a power of the soul which conceives and fashions likenesses of things, and serves, and ministers to, both the discursive reason and the contemplative intellect; and to this power has been given the name phantasy or imagination.’ 52 Bundy, The Theory of Imagination; Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, p. 104; Kemp, ‘From “Mimesis” to “Fantasia”’. On notions of phantasms and dreams, see Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, pp. 107–146; Fehrenbach, ‘Calor Nativus’, pp. 151–153; Fehrenbach, ‘Leonardo’s Dark Eye’; Scheuer, ‘Ex motu animalium’, pp. 175–180; Camille, ‘Before the Gaze’; Costa, ‘Love and Witchcraft’. 53 See above, Introduction, p. 24, note 42. 54 Giovan Paolo Lomazzo, ‘Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura’, 1584 in: Barocchi (ed.), 1971–1977, III, pp. 2694–2695; Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, pp. 62, 497, note 106. 55 Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius (1567), in: Barocchi, Scritti d’Arte, III, pp. 2634–2635; Anton Francesco Doni, third part of Disegno, Venice 1549, fols. 18–24v, in: Barocchi, Trattati d’Arte, I, p. 585. Interestingly, Albrecht Dürer chooses dreams as a metaphor for what are likely to be the grotesques he experienced on his trips to Italy, trawm werg (‘dreamwork’): see Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, III, p. 283. 56 Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, II.37–42, pp. 262–280.

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included in art-theoretical accounts of the subject.57 In a discussion that had been taken up again and again in the history of aesthetics from the time of Plato onward, two positions were argued – one accepting and admiring the artistic imagination and encouraging unrestricted artistic licence, and the other arguing the contrary. Hybrid creatures were repeatedly at the centre of attention within both lines of argumentation, making it clear that distinctions between grotesques, chimera, monsters, and similar categories are irrelevant in our context. Although Vitruvius and Horace, both from the first century BC, had launched influential criticisms of unnaturalistic strategies in visual art, the ancient reservations were also adapted into a defence of artistic freedom.58 A representative of this view is Cennino Cennini, who around 1400 observed that the painter, like the poet, ‘is given freedom to compose a figure, standing, seated, half-man, half-horse, as he pleases, according to his imagination’.59 Corresponding with a rhetorical tradition of praising or criticizing a phenomenon using similar lines of argumentation, both critics and admirers of grotesques focused on the same qualities (or problems) in this field of art.60 In the sixteenth century, Francisco de Hollanda could quote Vitruvius’s criticism of unnaturalistic frescoes ‘because it is impossible and fictive painting’ while continuing without hesitation to praise grotesque painting as ‘very ancient and elegant’, observing that the ‘best of these are the rarest and most fictive’.61 Apparently, Hollanda felt no need to explain the contradiction between Vitr­uvius’s criticism and his own appreciation of grotesques. Just as sixteenth-­ century artists chose to be blind or disobedient to ancient authorities’ cautious remarks on grotesque, hybrid, and ‘unnatural’ imagery, they apparently had no problem producing grotesques of their own – with the female monsters as one example of many – that were immensely more monstrous in their artful, unnatural juxtapositions of naturalistic elements than were any ancient compositions in, for example, the Domus Aurea.

57 Vasari, ‚Introduzione alle tre arti del disegno’, Chapter 27, in: Vasari, Le vite, I, pp. 143–145, and the lives of e.g. Morto da Feltre and Giovanni da Udine in: Vasari, Lives, I, pp. 924–926 and II, pp. 486–497; Serlio, On Architecture, I, IV.ix, 379; Lomazzo, ‘Trattato dell’arte’, 1584, in: Barocchi, Scritti d’Arte, III, pp. 2692–2694; Giovan Battista Armenini, ‘De’ veri precetti della pittura’, 1587, ibid., p. 2699; Ligorio, ‘Libro dell’antichita’, pp. 161–182; Danti, ‘Trattato delle perfette proporzioni’, 1567, in: Barocchi, Trattati d’Arte, I, pp. 235–236. 58 The criticism of Vitruvius and Horace is quoted and discussed in the Introduction to the present volume, pp. 26–27. 59 Cennini, Il Libro dell’Arte I, p. 2: ‘Al dipintore dato e liberta potere conporre una figura ritta, a sedere, mezzo huomo, mezzo cavallo, sic home gli piace, secondo sua fantasia.’ 60 O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome, pp. 36–76. 61 Hollanda, On Antique Painting, Book 1, Chapter XLIV, Part 1, p. 148. See the account of the changing attitudes to artistic licence in Summers, ‘Michelangelo on Architecture’ and Summers, ‘Contrapposto’, p. 343.

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Changing Concepts of Art Grotesques may appear astonishingly licentious to the present-day beholder, yet even those grotesques that from today’s perspective appear blasphemous, mocking those who commissioned the artwork, or sexually obscene (like the female monsters) were accepted and deemed appropriate. Their popularity in sixteenth-century visual culture cannot be separated from a view of the world and of nature that differs in important ways from our modern one. When the actual existence of the monstrous creatures was not really an issue, it corresponded with a world in which an animate nature was incontestable.62 This scopic regime, in which metamorphosis of visual phenomena played a strong part, was linked with the notion of nature as the creator of images, a notion rooted in the ancient Aristotelean and high medieval world view, which remained powerful at the time. But conceptions of nature, artistic invention, monsters, and – more generally – the reliability of perception and vision were changing. The sixteenth century was suspended between the old concepts of nature and art and developing modern ones.63 Preoccupation with and perhaps also pleasure in change and ambiguity were part of this. The still prevalent, conventional modes of perception coincided with an emerging awareness of the artificiality of art and the death of nature as an active force, along with an emerging concept of nature as passive and governed by natural laws to be revealed and subsequently controlled by man, notions which gradually became dominant from the seventeenth century onward. Over the course of the century, a scepticism developed concerning the old, commonly accepted knowledge, followed by new demands for ‘proof’ of the existence of, for instance, monstrous creatures. When grotesques of the kind that might showcase female monstrosities went out of fashion in the seventeenth century, this was linked to a growing disbelief in the reality of monstrous apparitions, resulting in a loss of their dual quality of attraction and horror. The decline of female monstrosities specifically and grotesques in general took place alongside a decline in the disquieting aspects of figurative genesis in favour of new, unequivocal, didactic imagery, which for instance the Church could use in its efforts to disseminate correct beliefs. Control and delimitation replaced the relativism and imagery of blurred borders typical of the sixteenth century. It is notable that the graffiti of artists and other visitors of the Domus Aurea practically ends in the late-sixteenth century, a tangible testimony of a pause in visits connected to the rather sudden lack of attraction of the grottoes’

62 Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East’; Große, ‘Am Rand’. 63 Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, pp. 93–112.

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monstrosity.64 Systematic excavations of the imperial palace and renewed studies of its frescoes were not initiated until the second half of the eighteenth century.65

Taming the Monsters Female monsters within the grotesques developed around 1500 in a period of great artistic licence. Yet toward the end of the sixteenth century, Counter-Reformation perspectives on art led to serious attacks on grotesque imagery as ambiguous, unnatural, and licentious. In continuation of discussions held at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), books were published that carefully discussed the potential problems with visual art, for instance Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano’s Dialogi degli errori della pittura (1564) and Gabriele Paleotti’s Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images (1582).66 Criticisms of grotesques launched by late sixteenth-century writers such as Paleotti sound very much like reiterations of the ancient and medieval topos of attacking hybrid figures in art.67 The ambivalence inherent in grotesques as figures of inventive, artificial composition was now rejected in favour of unequivocal messages transmitted through clear imagery, averting the risk of misunderstanding. By the late sixteenth century, the singular period of artistic licence which had characterized the previous 100 years was coming to a close, and within the new artistic atmosphere grotesques grew into naturalistically detailed decoration, devoid of their earlier creative inventions. With the progress of absolutist tendencies within culture and politics, the ambiguity of grotesques became increasingly untenable. Sixteenth-century grotesques had been both attractive and frightening. The female monsters within grotesques condense these properties, which are inextricably linked with the power of art. They represent the attraction, danger, and even repulsion of femininity, but also the creative potential implicit in composite hybrid creatures of art – celebrating artistic imagination and challenging a naturalistic one-to-one relationship between art and tangible reality. They embody the notion of ornamentation 64 Dacos, ‘Graffiti de la Domus Aurea’, p. 150. In his characterization of the ‘classical episteme’, Michel Foucault observes that it is as if phenomena that were previously objects of attention were now left out of consideration, as if people actually saw less, and, moreover (with illustrations in prints), their sight was so to speak abstracted or reduced to black and white. See Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 132–138. 65 The first large-scale pictorial reproduction of the Domus Aurea, by Ludovico Mirri (Le antiche camere delle Terme di Tito e le loro pitture), was published in Rome in 1776. 66 Tanner et al., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils; Gilio, ‘Degli Errori e degli Abusi’; Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images; Coffin, ‘Pirro Ligorio on the Nobility of the Arts’; Schreurs, Antikenbild. 67 Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, II.37–42, pp. 262–280; for a medieval example, see the famous criticism of hybrid monstrosity as ornaments of the cloister by Bernard de Clairvaux in: Davis-Weyer, Early Medieval Art, p. 170. Similar objections are found in the introduction to Pictor in Carmine, attributed to the Cistercian Adam of Dore from the twelfth century, condemning the ‘phantasmata’ of painters; in Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, p. 131. Compare also the Canterbury manuscript (Canterbury Cathedral Chapter Library Ms. D. 14), in: Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea, p. 133.

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as intrinsic to the work of art, linked with its potential for deceit or illusionism. Emptied of their monstrosity and tamed into unchallenging innocence, grotesques grew into a field of minor creative interest. Their character as ornamentation in the preand early modern sense, as colourful and variegated enlivenment of the artwork, was supplanted by a new sense of ornamentation as something additional to the main content and quality of image, as mere decoration, in terms of extrinsic, insignificant embellishment. A new scopic regime contributed to curbing the unpredictability that was constitutive of sixteenth-century grotesques and that had found one of its most poignant expressions in female monsters.

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David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 123–162. Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Du Masque au Visage: Aspects de l’Identité en Grèce Ancienne (1995) (Paris: Persée, 1996). Giovanni Andrea Gilio, ‘Degli Errori e degli Abusi de’ Pittori circa l’Historie’, in Due Dialoghi (Camerino: Per A. Gioioso, 1564). Ernst H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979) (Oxford: Phaidon, 1984). Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939), in Collected Essays and Criticism vol. 1, ed. by John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 5–22. Peggy Grosse, ‘Am Rand: Wundervölker zwischen Fantasie und Wirklichkeit’, in Monster: Fantastische Bilderwelten zwischen Grauen und Komik, ed. by Peggy Große and others (Nürnberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2015), pp. 227–249. Chris A. Hammeken, Unruly Ornament: On Artificial Moments in Sixteenth-Century Visual Art (Aarhus: ­University of Aarhus, 2016). Maria Fabricius Hansen, ‘Representing the Past: The Concept and Study of Antique Architecture in 15thCentury Italy’, Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, 36 (1996), pp. 83–116. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: ­Princeton University Press, 1982). Gustav R. Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth: Manier und Manie in der Europäischen Kunst. von 1520 bis 1650 und in der Gegenwart (Rowohlts Deutsche Akademie 50: Sachgebiet Kunstgeschichte) (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957). Francisco de Hollanda, Da Pintura Antiga (Lisbon: Livros Horisonte, 1984; originally published in Portuguese in 1548). Francisco de Hollanda, On Antique Painting, trans. by Alice S. Wohl (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). Horace, ‘Satires’, in Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica (1929) (Loeb Classical Library 194), trans. by Henry, R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 4–245. Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. by Stephen A. Barney and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Fredrika H. Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Roland Kanz, ‘Capriccio und Groteske’, in Kunstform Capriccio: Von der Groteske zur Spieltheorie der Moderne, ed. By Mai Ekkehard and Joachim Rees (Cologne: König Verlag, 1998), pp. 13–32. Roland Kanz, Die Kunst des Capriccio: Kreativer Eigensinn in Renaissance und Barock, (Kunstwissenschaftliche Studien 103) (Munich: Deutsche Kunstverlag, 2002). Martin Kemp, ‘From “Mimesis” to “Fantasia”: The Quatttrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts’, Viator, 7 (1977), pp. 347–398. Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (1981) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of ­Chicago Press, 1993). Alexandre Koyré, ‘Galileo and the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century’, Philosophical Review, 52, 4 (1943), pp. 333–348. Alexandre Koyré, Études d’Histoire de la Pensée scientifique (Collection Tel 2) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966). Alexandre Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution (London: Chapman and Hall, 1968).

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Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. by Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; originally published in French in 1993). Maria W. Stoop, Floral Figurines from South Italy: A Study of South Italian Terracotta Incense-Burners in the Shape of Human Figures Supporting a Flower, of the Fourth Century and the Hellenistic Period. Their Origin, Development and Signification (Archivum Archeologicum 2) (Assen: Royal van Gorcum, 1960). David Summers, ‘Michelangelo on Architecture’, Art Bulletin, 54 (1972), pp. 146–157. David Summers, ‘Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art’, Art Bulletin, 59 (3) (1977), pp. 336–361. David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Norman P. Tanner and others (ed. and trans.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990). Jocelyn M.C. Toynbee and J.B. Ward-Perkins, ‘Peopled Scrolls: A Hellenistic Motif in Imperial Art’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 18 (1950), pp. 1–43. Benedetto Varchi, Opere di Benedetto Varchi, ed. by Antonio Racheli and Giovanni B. Busini, 2 vols. (Trieste: Sezione letterario-artistica del Lloyd austriaco, 1858–1859). Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori: Nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. by Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini (Florence: Sansoni, 1966–1987). Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. by Gaston de Vere (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1996; originally published in Italian in 1550 and 1568). Jacob Wamberg, ‘Det Monstrøse’, in Monster, ed. by Ivar Tønsberg and Jacob Wamberg (Albertslund: Alberts­ lund Rådhus, 2002), pp. 7–43. Jacob Wamberg, ‘A Stone and Yet Not a Stone: Alchemical Themes in North Italian Quattrocento Land­ scape Imagery’, in Art and Alchemy, ed. by Jacob Wamberg (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2006), pp. 41–75. Jacob Wamberg, Landscape as World Picture: Tracing Cultural Evolution in Images, 2 vols. (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009). Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, Journal of the Warburg and ­Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), pp. 159–197.

About the author Maria Fabricius Hansen is an Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Arts and Cultural studies at the University of Copenhagen. She received a PhD from the University of Copenhagen in 1997 (on the imagery of ruins in fifteenthcentury Italian painting) and a DPhil from Aarhus University in 2005 (published as The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome (Rome: ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 2003)). Her primary field of research is art and architecture from late antiquity until c. 1600, with a focus on Italian art. Her recent publications include The Art of Transformation: Grotesques in SixteenthCentury Italy, Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, IL (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2018).

2. Dissonant Symphonies: The Villa d’Este in Tivoli and the Grotesque Luke Morgan

Abstract This chapter compares the architect and antiquarian Pirro Ligorio’s theoretical writings on the grotesque with the garden that he designed for the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, paying close attention to the figure of Artemis of Ephesus depicted in the frescoes of the villa’s interior and in the adjacent landscape where she appears as the Fountain of Nature. The fact that Ligorio was the author of an unusually detailed theory of grottesche and the designer of a garden that incorporates grotesque imagery makes his work an important case study of sixteenth-century attitudes towards ‘monstrous’ ornament in general and, more specifically, in landscape design. Keywords: grotesque, gardens, Pirro Ligorio, Villa d’Este, Artemis of Ephesus

In his 1587 discussion of grottesche (‘grotesques’), the artist and writer Giovanni Battista Armenini describes an ancient underground chamber, or grotto, in which he had seen three paintings each framed by festoons of coloured fruit. In the first painting, three little satyrs appeared, one of whom carried another on his horse’s back in ‘the way that children do in schools’.1 The third satyr was depicted beating the rider with a cabbage leaf.2 Another painting portrayed la Dea della Natura (‘the Goddess of Nature’) – a pictorial type derived from ancient cult statues of Artemis of Ephesus. Armenini writes that harpies were depicted in the third and final painting of the grotto’s vault, their breasts transforming into leaves.3

1 ‘Alla guisa che da’ fanciulli si suol far nelle scuole.’ Armenini’s treatise is De’ veri precetti della pittura. His discussion of grottesche appears on pp. 193–197. I have used the transcription in Barocchi, Scritti d’Arte. See p. 2701, for Armenini’s description of the three paintings. 2 ‘[I]l terzo d’essi lo veniva battendo con una foglia di cavolo rotunda, che teneva alta in mano’. Barocchi, Scritti d’Arte, p. 2701. 3 ‘Alcune Arpie, che dalle poppe in giù venivano a convertirsi in foglie.’ Barocchi, Scritti d’Arte, p. 2701. Hammeken, C.A. and M.F. Hansen (eds.), Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789462984967_ch02

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Paintings of this kind exerted a significant influence on sixteenth-century artists from the moment that they were rediscovered around 1480.4 They were soon referred to as grottesche owing to their discovery in what seemed to be subterranean caves or grottoes. The vast chambers of Nero’s Domus Aurea, for example, which contained extensive ceiling and wall decorations in the grotesque style, had been filled in with earth during Antiquity, forming the foundations of the Baths of Titus and other subsequent structures. From the late fifteenth century, artists and scholars lowered themselves into the underground rooms of the villa so that they could examine the hybrid figures and metamorphic motifs by torchlight. A satirical rhyme of the period described how they ‘descend the grottoes with picnics and, “piu bizarri alle grottesche” [‘more bizarre than the grotesques’], crawl along the passages with toads, frogs, owls and bats’.5 During the Renaissance, modern versions of ancient grottesche proliferated to a remarkable extent throughout the Italian Peninsula. Many images of the Dea della Natura appear within these decorative schemes, but perhaps the most influential were Raphael and his school’s multiple variations on the theme in the Vatican Palace: in the roundel depicting Philosophy above The School of Athens in the Stanza della Segnatura; in a window niche of the Stanza dell’Incendio; and in the Loggie, where the goddess is flanked by deer and grottesche. Grottesche are often found in liminal or parergonal spaces and situations. They are most frequently depicted in the borders and frames of narrative paintings (in architectural contexts as well as in illuminated and printed books); in the so-called applied arts from armour to candelabra; decorating the walls of palatial staircases, corridors, and vestibules; and in the ground-floor rooms and loggias of villas.6 Their hybrid and metamorphic qualities made them especially well-suited to places of transition and to thresholds between inside and outside (of framed paintings as much as of physical locales). Indeed, the fundamental subject of grotesque imagery in the sixteenth century is, in broad terms, the state of transition and its varied manifestations in the metamorphosis of matter, the hybridization of bodies, and the ludic interactions of art and nature. These themes were also typical of Early Modern landscape design in Italy, though the presence of the grotesque in sixteenth-century gardens has rarely been discussed by historians. To refer only to Armenini’s examples: a sculpture of a centaur (recalling the satyr with a horse’s body of Armenini’s description) appeared in the nymphaeum

4 Note that the rediscovery of the Neronian decorative style of the Domus Aurea and other Roman sites was not the sole contributing factor to efflorescence of grottesche in the sixteenth century. As Nicole Dacos has pointed out, Renaissance artists had also inherited a taste for the fantastic and the monstrous from the medieval period. See her Domus Aurea, p. viii. 5 See Antiquarie prospettiche romane composte per prospettivo Melanese depictore (c. 1500). Quoted in Guest, Understanding of Ornament, p. 536, n. 3. 6 Armenini writes that grottesche are particularly well suited to ‘loggias, libraries, gardens, bedrooms, courts, stairs, baths, conservatories, hallways, and every type of small room’. See Goodchild, ‘Theory of Landscape’, p. 146.

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Ill. 2.1: Gillis van den Vliete and Pirro Ligorio, Fountain of Nature, 1568. Villa d’Este, Tivoli. Photo: Luke Morgan.

of the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati. As early as 1524, Giulio Romano adapted the figure of Artemis of Ephesus to fountain design in an unrealized proposal for the garden of the Villa Madama in Rome. Soon afterwards, Niccolò Tribolo sculpted his Allegoria della Natura (1529), a version of the theme of the many-breasted goddess, for François I’s château at Fontainebleau. Another example of the Ephesian Artemis/

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Diana was conceived by the antiquarian and architect Pirro Ligorio for the garden of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, where it is known as the Fontana della Natura (1568) (Ill. 2.1). Harpies and other hybrid creatures were depicted in many gardens of the period, including those of the Villa d’Este, the colossal examples in the Sacro Bosco (Bomarzo), and the Fontane delle arpie (c. 1550) of the Boboli Gardens in Florence. When it has been noticed, the grotesque imagery of gardens, like that of art, has often been assumed to be purely decorative. During the sixteenth century itself, however, some key figures in the debate about the artistic legitimacy of grottesche contested this view. Notably, Ligorio believed that grottesche were symbolic forms which concealed moral meanings. As he wrote in his Libro dell’antichità (1570s): ‘the grotesque pictures of the pagans are not without meaning and are contrived with some fine philosophical skill and depicted poetically’.7 This chapter compares Ligorio’s theoretical writings on the grotesque with aspects of his landscape design for the Villa d’Este. The fact that Ligorio was the author of an unusually detailed theory of grottesche and the designer of a garden that incorporates grotesque imagery makes his work an important case study of sixteenth-century attitudes towards both ‘monstrous’ ornament in general and, more specifically, in landscape design. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the figure of Artemis of Ephesus at the Villa d’Este, on the basis of which it is argued that in sixteenth-century landscape design the grotesque is conceptually equivalent to the ‘monstrous’ in other fields.

Art into Landscape: The Grotesque from Vitruvius to Ligorio The most influential ancient texts for Renaissance ideas about the grotesque were Vitruvius’s De Architectura (c. 25 BCE) and Horace’s Ars Poetica (c. 19 BCE).8 In his concise history of mural painting (Chapter 5, Book 7), Vitruvius states that the principle that a ‘painting is an image of that which exists or can exist’ was once correctly observed but that this was no longer the case. Instead, artists of Vitruvius’s period demonstrated a ‘depraved taste […] For monsters are now painted in frescoes rather than reliable images of definite things.’9 Horace also denounced grotesque imagery. He writes that the only possible response to a painting of a composite figure with a human head, horse’s neck, feathers, an assortment of limbs and a fish’s tail is laughter. For him, such images resembled a ‘sick man’s dreams’ (aegri somnia).10 7 ‘[P]itture grottesche de gentili non siano senza significatione, et ritrouate da qualche bello ingegno, philosophico, et poeticamente rappresentate.’ The text, which remained unpublished in Ligorio’s lifetime, is from the Libro dell’antichità, VI, fols. 151–161, the manuscript of which is in Turin. I have used the complete transcription by Dacos: ‘Appendice II: Texte de Pirro Ligorio sur les grotesques’. See Domus Aurea, pp. 161–182. The translation here is from Coffin, ‘Ferrara’, p. 183. 8 See the Introduction of this book, pp. 26–27. 9 Vitruvius, Ten Books, p. 91. 10 See Summers, ‘Modern Grotesque’, p. 21, for a discussion of Horace’s phrase.

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In both cases, grottesche are condemned for their lack of naturalism and credibility. For Horace, they are simply laughable; but for Vitruvius they are – in a precedent of much later (twentieth-century) debates about ornament in architecture – ‘depraved’, that is, decadent or morally corrupt. Naturalism thus plays a similar role to that of transparency or truth-to-materials in the Modernist critique of nineteenth-century architecture and its legacy. Vitruvius’s anxiety about the ‘morality’ of grottesche becomes an important theme in the sixteenth-century debates about their legitimacy and value. The Renaissance discussion of grottesche also becomes entwined with that of other aesthetic concepts of the period, such as the role of licenzia (poetic licence) in art, the place of the artist’s fantasia (fantasy or imagination), and the appropriateness and limits of mescolanza (mixture or assemblage) in architecture. Some sixteenth-century writers endorsed the views of their ancient predecessors, while others argued in favour of grottesche.11 Cesare Cesariano, the translator of the first Italian edition of The Ten Books of Architecture (1521), approved of Vitruvius’s criticisms, stating that grottesche should be banished from contemporary painting.12 In his translation and commentary of 1556, Daniele Barbaro reiterated the Vitruvian definition of painting as an imitazione delle cose, che sono, ò che possono (‘imitation of things that are, or could be’). Naturalism and mimesis, in other words, are the cornerstones and principal objectives of art. In contrast to Cesariano and Barbaro, Sebastiano Serlio and Giorgio Vasari believed that grottesche liberated artists from the obligation to represent nature faithfully.13 Vasari argued that grottesche are expressions of poetic licence, or what from the end of the fifteenth century was often called the fantasia of the artist.14 Fantasia has a similar meaning here to invenzione (‘invention’), which Michelangelo (according to Francisco de Hollanda) equated with the monstrous: ‘This [a hybrid figure] may seem false but can really only be called well invented or monstrous.’ For Michelangelo, such manifestations of poetic licence required the ‘proper’ time and place, which implies that an artist’s decision to depict a ‘monstrosity’ rather than an ‘accustomed figure’ should be dictated by a consciousness of what is appropriate in each situation.15 In Michelangelo’s opinion, fantastic and grotesque imagery was perfectly acceptable in certain circumstances.

11 The most useful account of these debates remains Dacos, Domus Aurea. See, especially, Part 3: ‘Fortune des Grotesques au XVIe Siècle’, pp. 121–135, which I have relied on. See also Morel, Grotesques. 12 See Dacos, Domus Aurea, p. 123. 13 For Serlio, see his Cinque libri d’archittetura, Bk. IV, Chap. XI. Vasari devoted a short chapter to grottesche in the 1550 edition of his Lives of the Artists. See Vasari, Opere, vol. 1, pp. 193–194. 14 The best discussion of the concept of fantasia in cinquecento art theory is in Summers, Michelangelo, pp. 103–143. 15 See Summers, Michelangelo, pp. 135–136, for the remarks attributed to Michelangelo by Hollanda.

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These debates about grottesche were not confined to painting. Alina A. Payne has demonstrated that for ‘a Renaissance architect Vitruvius’ De architectura both vindicated mixtures [mescolanze] and offered the link to the monsters of classical literature’.16 The ‘monsters’ of the frescoes of his period were, for Vitruvius, an example of ‘bad’ mixtures. In contrast, the invention of the Corinthian capital was a story about the ‘good’ mescolanza that resulted from the sculptor Callimachus’s chance encounter with a young girl’s tomb marker with its mixture of disparate elements and materials.17 The Renaissance garden was also a mixture. As several sixteenth-century writers argued, it was the outcome of a collaboration between nature and art. In his description of a grotto in a garden near the Trevi Fountain in Rome, for example, the philologist Claudio Tolomei used the word mescolando (‘mixing’ or ‘mingling’). Tolomei writes that: ‘mingling [mescolando] art with nature, one does not know how to discern whether it is a work of the former or the latter; on the contrary, now it seems to be a natural artifice, then an artificial nature’.18 The concept of mescolando is relevant not only to the artificial grotto’s mimicry of natural caves, but also to the imagery of the garden. One of the distinctive features of late Renaissance landscape design is the recurring presence of hybrid or composite figures, which are the equivalents of Vitruvius’s painted ‘monsters’ (hybridity being a defining characteristic of the grotesque). During the sixteenth century, the grottesche migrate from the walls and ceilings of villas and palaces to designed landscapes, where they assume life-sized, three-dimensional form. The hybrid figures of the garden have two main sources: the fantasia of the artist or designer and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The four figures of the Fontane delle arpie around the Isolotto in the Boboli Gardens in Florence provide examples of the former. These creatures are not actually harpies, despite the title given to the fountains today (they are clearly male and lack talons as well as proper wings), but are hybrid figures with human heads and torsos, short, bird-like wings, scaly bipartite tails, and writhing snakes in place of hair (Ill. 2.2). They are invented composites with no specific referent, virtuosic demonstrations of the artist’s fantasy and, as Michelangelo reputedly argued, the legitimacy of poetic licence. There are many examples of the influence of the second main source of the hybrid figures of the garden – Ovid’s Metamorphoses – on sixteenth-century landscape design. John Dixon Hunt has even claimed that: ‘It is doubtful whether any garden of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries avoided some appeal, specific or general to Ovid’s poetic world.’19 His numerous examples include: the Walk of the Hundred 16 Payne, ‘Mescolare’, p. 285. 17 Vitruvius, Ten Books, p. 55. 18 ‘[M]escolando l’arte con la natura, non si sa discernere s’elle è opera di questo o di quella; anzi or altrui pare un naturale artifizio ora una artifiziosa natura.’ The translation is by Beck. See Taegio, La Villa, p. 61, for his discussion of this passage. 19 Hunt, Garden and Grove, p. 42.

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Ill. 2.2: School of Giambologna, Fountain of the Harpies. Boboli Gardens, Florence. Photo: Luke Morgan.

Fountains at the Villa d’Este, which once depicted in relief stories from Ovid; the figures of Atlas, the centaur, and others of the Water Theatre at the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati; Bernardo Buontalenti’s Grotta Grande in the Boboli Gardens, which takes its narrative from the Metamorphoses; and Giambologna’s colossal Appennino (1579) in the Medici villa garden in Pratolino, which may have been based on illustrated editions of Ovid, and which certainly recalls the passage in Book IV of the Metamorphoses where ‘Atlas was changed into a mountain as huge as the giant he had been.’20 20 Hunt, Garden and Grove, p. 55.

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Metamorphosis, leading to hybrid forms, is thus an equally important principle of both grottesche and the garden. Like most of the sixteenth-century trattatisti, Ligorio emphasizes the metamorphic quality of grottesche.21 In his text, he mentions Empedocles, Pythagoras, and Aesop, for example, whom he describes as poeti et da philosophi delle trasmutationi (‘poets and philosophers of transmutation’), and criticizes those moderns who fail to notice the influence of these authors on Roman painting, perceiving instead only fanciful, whimsical, and monstrous imagery.22 He also writes at length about the Ovidian legends of men and women who turn into animals, vegetables, and the elements, many of which were also depicted in late sixteenth-century gardens.23 He mentions, for example, Polyphemus (represented in the Orti Oricellari in Florence and at the Villa Aldobrandini), Galatea (depicted in a grotto of the Villa Medici in Pratolino), Diana (to whom a grotto at the Villa d’Este was dedicated), Pegasus (who appears in the Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo, in Pratolino, and in the garden of the Villa d’Este), Neptune (statues of whom appear in many gardens), the Muses (who were portrayed on a mount signifying Parnassus in Pratolino, in Bomarzo, and at the Villa Medici in Rome), and Vertumnus (whose presence is frequently signified by the motif of ivy-clad columns). These points underline the fact that the hybrid – or grotesque – figures of the garden inhabited the same conceptual and poetic territory as the painted grottesche of palaces and villas, at least in Ligorio’s estimation – a point that is obviously relevant to the interpretation of the garden that he designed in Tivoli. The theoretical positions discussed up to this point have been mainly focused on the acceptability and origin of grotesque images. Indeed, in the first half of the sixteenth century most contributors to the debate about grottesche were primarily concerned with questions of artistic style and creation. Many of the earlier (sympathetic) writers tacitly assumed that Roman grottesche comprised a system of ornamentation rather than of iconography, which led them to expend their energies on the attempt to reconcile the chimerical and hybrid motifs of its visual language with established concepts of naturalism and classicism. 21 Dacos thinks that Ligorio only unconsciously grasped the importance of the phenomenon of hybridization for the constitution of the grotesque, but this may well be a result of his general emphasis on questions of meaning rather than form. See Dacos, Domus Aurea, p. 132. 22 See Ligorio in Dacos, Domus Aurea, p. 163. ‘Sono stati alcuni moderni, che non sapendo la verità di tale pittura et la sua origine, l’ha chiamate grottesche et insogni et stravaganti pitture anzi mostruouse. Imperoché essi non si sono haveduti che vi sono gli iddi et le iddee, et le favole d’Esopo philosopho Phrygio. Et per quanto noi havemo osservato non sono state ritrovate accaso, ne a fantastico fine, nè per mostrare cose vitiose et pazze, per accommodare con la loro varietà et invaghire gli alloggiamenti. Anzi loro sono fatte per recare stupor, et maraviglia per dire cosi ai miseri mortali, per significare quanto sia possibile la gravidanza et pienezza dell’intelletto, et le sue imagination, che fu l’huomo erudite et dotto nelle scienze, et per sadisfare, et per mostrare l’accidenti per accommodare, la insatiabilità, delli varii et strani concetti cavati da tante varietà che sono nelle cose create.’ 23 See Dacos, Domus Aurea, p. 132, for this point. See Morel, Grotesques, pp. 94–95, for the importance of metamorphosis to Pirro’s interpretation of grottesche.

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Ill. 2.3: Il Sodoma, Grotesques and the ‘Marvels of the East’, 1505–1508. Fresco from the cloister of the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, Siena. Photo: Luke Morgan.

The pictorial language of grottesche remains figurative, despite the bizarre and composite character of its forms. Consequently, in those instances where the artist has incorporated identifiable subjects with established symbolic connotations, ‘meaning’ is generally readily accessible. In his grottesche for the cloister of the abbey at Monte Oliveto Maggiore in Asciano (1505–1508), for example, Il Sodoma (and his workshop)

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included representations of the so-called ‘Marvels of the East,’ or the monstrous races that, from Pliny onwards, were thought to inhabit the margins of the world (Ill. 2.3).24 Sodoma’s figures, which are closely based on those of The Nuremburg Chronicle (1493), were earlier depicted in medieval miniatures, prints, and sculpture, and can be identified as a Cynocephalus, a Cyclops, a Blemmyae, an Abarimon, a member of the Sciritae, an Anthropophagus, and an example of the Pandae.25 They are not, therefore, generic or invented monsters, but established legendary types whose characteristics were known. The effect of their inclusion is to associate a familiar tradition of the monstrous, which persisted throughout the medieval period, with the rediscovered grotesque style. Discrete figures and motifs such as conventionalized representations of the ‘exotic races’ could thus signify established concepts that would have been relatively easily grasped. Ligorio, however, believed that the grottesche of the ancient world concealed another, more profound, level of meaning.26 Ligorio relates grotesque images to ‘hieroglyphic letters’ and claims that they ‘present in this form moral aims, positive actions, the false, the true, the uncertain and the foreseeable, the phantasies of future things’.27 According to him, grottesche comprised a de facto iconological or pictographic symbolic language not unlike the visual emblems of Cesare Ripa (Iconologia, 1593) and Vincenzo Cartari (Le imagini de i dei de gli Antichi, 1556), or the ‘Egyptological’ writings of Horapollo and his Renaissance commentator Giovanni Piero Valeriano (Hieroglyphica, 1556).28 Each motif encoded a moral concept derived from ancient writers such as Aesop and others. For example, he draws attention to what he argues is the relationship between grotesque imagery and le favole d’Esopo philosopho Phrygio (‘the fables of the Phrygian philosopher Aesop’).29 24 On the ‘marvels of the east’, or Plinian monstrous races, see Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East’, pp. 159–197. See also Friedman, Monstrous Races, pp. 5–25. 25 See Morel, Grotesques, 167. 26 ‘Il a pour seule fonction de masquer le sens réel des grotesques en le dissimulant sous une forme fantastique.’ Dacos, Domus Aurea, p. 129. 27 ‘[T]utte poste in tra uaghi lauori di festoni et di legamenti di cose deboli et uariate: come per mostrare nel’figurato, le cose morali, le cose certe, le false le uere, la incertitudine, et le anteuedute le imagination del le cose future.’ See Coffin, ‘Ferrara’, p. 182, for the translation. Note that Lomazzo also believed grottesche to be a form of hieroglyphs. See Dacos, Domus Aurea, p. 130. 28 Coffin, ‘Ferrara’, p. 183, suggests that Ligorio’s interpretation of grottesche as ‘hieroglyphic’ was influenced by his reading of Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica sive de sacris aegyptiorum literis commentarii (Basel, 1556). Dacos is not, however, convinced. She believes that there is no direct influence from Valeriano or Cartari: ‘L’une de ses caractéristiques consiste néanmoins dans le recours simultané aux sources archéologiques et littéraires, qui le différencie des “iconologues” proprement dits que sont Cartari ou Valeriano. On ne distingue dans son étude aucune influence directe de ces auteurs. Certaines rencontres s’expliquent par l’exploitation des mêmes sources antiques, que très souvent Ligorio néglige de citer.’ Domus Aurea, p. 132. 29 Dacos, Domus Aurea, p. 163. See here Morel’s comment that: ‘Le nom d’Ésope prend une resonance particulière si l‘on pense à toutes les decorations de l’époque où les fables du poète grec et de son émule latin, Phèdre, sont mélangées à des grotesques, comme dans le stanzino d’Aurore à la villa Mèdicis (Zucchi, 1577), sous les fenêtres de la galerie Rucellai, dans un corridor et une sale du château Rossi de S. Secondo et surtout dans le salon du palais Santacroce-Altieri d’Oriolo Romano […] Leur fonction moralisante s’adpte tout particulièrement à l’interprétation allégorique que Ligorio donne des grotesques.’ Grotesques, p. 324, n. 29.

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Ligorio’s discussion of the meaning and symbolism of specific subjects makes clear his approach to grottesche as emblems or hieroglyphs. In every case, he emphasizes the moral or philosophical significance of the story. David R. Coffin has drawn attention to Ligorio’s comments about ‘the chariots of cupids drawn by animals: by lions, by tigers, by elephants, by dragons, by camels, by ostriches, by bears, by hedgehogs, by tortoises, and by every type of bird’ in his discussion of grottesche. Ligorio claims that: All show that a cupid is conqueror of each, and as each animal runs to his delegated goal and all live under the yoke of love, they are extended. At the end they are led under the palm and victory of Cupid, who carries away the crown of all.30

What this and other examples suggest is that, for Ligorio, the ornamental qualities of grottesche were of less significance than their iconographical meanings.31 He understood grottesche as a form of mythological painting and as a symbolic language, which must be read or deciphered. In fact, he barely distinguishes between the mythological paintings of Antiquity and those of grottesche: they are implicitly one and the same to him.32 In contrast to other participants in the debate about grottesche, Ligorio hardly touches on pictorial questions, convinced as he was that the grotesque is, first and foremost, a language of signification. He does, however, liken grottesche to symphonies, but ones that often appear to be dissonant.33 Ligorio verges here on formal analysis: ‘dissonant symphonies’ could almost be a definition of the grotesque decorative schemes of the sixteenth century. Those of Raphael, Giovanni da Udine, and Giulio Romano, for example (the only artists whose paintings Ligorio praises), are orderly, symmetrical, and carefully balanced despite their metamorphic and composite – or dissonant – forms. In a similar vein Ligorio elsewhere describes grottesche as ‘palinodes’. The subjects of ancient paintings ‘parallel one another’, he writes, ‘like a palinode of answers and harmonies’.34 A palinode is a recantation or retraction of some

30 ‘Li carri dell’amore tirati dalli animali, dalli Leoni, dalli tigri, dalli elephanti, dalli draconi dalli cambeli, dalli struzzi, dall’orsi, dalli spinose, delle testugini, et da ogni augello, che tutti fanno il figurate che d’ogni uno amore è vincitore et come ogni animale corre alla sua deputate meta et tutte sotto il giogo amoroso vivono, si propagano, et alfine si conducono sotto la palma et vittoria d’amore che di tutta ne porta la corona.’ Dacos, Domus Aurea, p. 171. The translation is from Coffin, ‘Ferrara’, p. 184. 31 Note Dacos’s comment that: ‘Il perd souvent de vue que l’objet de sa dissertation est la peinture, pour élaborer un véritable traité iconologique.’ Domus Aurea, p. 131. 32 See Morel, Grotesques, p. 94: ‘Ce qui est vrai pour la mythologie le deviant pour les grotesques.’ 33 According to him, they ‘fanno una symphonia, se bene pareno assymphoniche’. Dacos, Domus Aurea, p. 163. 34 ‘[S]ono paralelle à guise d’una palinodia per replicate et correspondenti.’ See Coffin, ‘Ferrara’, p. 183.

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earlier statement, suggesting that in grotesque painting something like the Hegelian process of sublation occurs: statement is followed by counter-statement and, presumably, ultimate resolution in a new unity. Something like this also occurs in landscape design during the same period. In sixteenth-century mythographical compendia, hybrid bodies, such as those of harpies, were literally monstrous and often fearsome. According to Natale Conti, for example, the ‘bodies of Harpies exactly expressed the souls of misers’. They are often associated with the deadly sin of Gluttony. For Ulisse Aldrovandi, the harpy signified rapacity, voraciousness, and filthiness.35 Yet, as has been mentioned, harpies and other hybrids are depicted in late sixteenth-century gardens (in the Boboli Gardens for instance), despite the longstanding assumption that gardens of the period were conceived as serene Arcadian refuges from reality. The presence of harpies and other hybrid creatures cannot be easily accommodated to the familiar concept of the garden as a locus amoenus (‘pleasant place’). Rather, the Renaissance garden, in addition to its characterization as a locus amoenus, may also (and simultaneously) have been conceived of as a locus horridus or ‘topos antagoniste’.36 This dramatic duality of pleasure and horror, in which the Arcadian delights of the landscape are heightened by occasional moments of fear or violence – however stylized or formulaic – recalls Ligorio’s characterization of grottesche decoration as a dissonant symphony. The garden may be a symphony or locus amoenus, but it is one in which there are moments of dissonance. The affinities and analogies between grottesche and landscape design, on both a conceptual and a poetic level, in the late sixteenth century suggest that Ligorio’s own distinctive ideas about the former have implications for the interpretation of his garden design for the Villa d’Este. The next section of this chapter will explore some of these implications through focusing on a single – grotesque – motif, which is depicted both in the frescoed decorations of the villa’s interior and in the statuary of the garden: the figure of Artemis of Ephesus.

The Grotesque in the Garden: Artemis of Ephesus at the Villa d’Este Coffin has argued that the interior decoration of the Villa d’Este and the symbolism of the garden form an integrated whole in which ‘single rooms or apartments are related to the different levels of symbolism that can be discovered in the gardens’.37 (Note that visitors to the Cardinal’s villa would have first entered the garden by way 35 Lazzarini, ‘Wonderful Creatures’, p. 155. 36 Brunon, ‘Songe de Poliphile’, p. 7. See Morgan, Monster in the Garden, for an extended discussion of the Renaissance garden along these lines. 37 Coffin, Villa d’Este, p. 83. Note that Coffin’s book remains the standard account of the Villa d’Este and its garden.

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of the lower entrance near the current location of the Fontana della Natura before making their way up the hillside to the ground floor rooms of the villa.) Two Latin poems by Cardinal Ippolito d’Este’s companion, the humanist Marc-Antoine Muret, reveal that the complex was dedicated to the Greek heroes Hippolytus and Hercules.38 These figures had personal meaning for the Cardinal: he was named after Hippolytus, and Hercules was the patron deity of both his family and of Tivoli itself. The dedication to Hercules is perhaps of most importance since it provides a key to the garden’s major themes – first, its identification as the Garden of the Hesperides and, second, its partial organization on the model of the Choice of Hercules (between Virtue and Vice). These subjects inform the imagery of both the villa and the garden. The motif of the golden apples is depicted in fresco, for example, in the Cardinal’s bedroom (guarded by the Este eagle rather than the dragon) on the piano nobile, and in the Room of Nobility on the ground level adjacent to the garden. The apples are also rendered in painted stucco above the internal rustic fountain (in the Salotto of the ground floor) and, originally, on the columns of the Fountain of the Owl and in the Grotto of Diana in the garden outside. Likewise, a statue of Hercules was intended to be installed at the centre of the garden.39 The grottoes of Venus (signifying Voluptas or Vice) and of Diana (Chastity or Virtue) would have been encountered at the extremities of the garden to the left and right of the figure of Hercules (which was never installed). That of Venus was located in the appealing surrounds of the Oval Fountain, ‘meant by its furniture and setting to convey the feeling of sensuous, relaxed enjoyment’.40 The Grotto of Diana, on the other hand, was located at the top of the right-hand path in a location comparatively devoid of interest, alluding to the necessary privations of the pursuit of virtue. The decorations of most of the rooms of the villa were also devoted to the theme of the choice between a life of virtue or vice, though only the virtues are depicted.41 Coffin’s hypothesis about the shared iconography of the gardens and the frescoed rooms is convincing, but he does not discuss the elaborate and extensive grottesche of the villa’s interior except in passing. His argument about the close relationship between the symbolism of the garden and the imagery of the rooms is focused on clearly identifiable subjects such as the female personifications of the Virtues in the personal apartment of the Cardinal and those of the Rooms of Nobility and Glory on the level below by the workshop of Federico Zuccari. Yet there are equally significant links between the painted grottesche of the villa’s interior and the grotesque motifs of the garden. 38 See Coffin, Villa d’Este, p. 78. 39 Coffin, Villa d’Este, p. 82. 40 Coffin, Villa d’Este, p. 83. 41 See Coffin, Villa d’Este, p. 83, for examples.

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Ill. 2.4: Workshop of Federico Zuccari, Rerum natura, Room of Nobility, Villa d’Este, Tivoli. Photo: Luke Morgan.

Armenini’s description of an ancient image of the Dea della Natura in the guise of Artemis of Ephesus was discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Artemis features in many grotesque pictorial schemes besides those of Raphael and his school, including that of the Room of Nobility in the Villa d’Este (by Zuccari’s workshop), where she is depicted in a cove as a personification of Rerum natura (Ill. 2.4). There is a clear relationship between this image and Gillis van den Vliete’s sculpted representation of the goddess in the garden (1568), which reflects the general principle of integration between the imagery of the villa’s interior and that of the landscape outside. The main difference is that, unlike the other figures of the room (personifying the virtues of Honour, Opulence, Immortality, Nobility, Liberality, and Generosity), the figure of Artemis belongs to the realm of the grotesque. In the fresco, the seated figure of Nature is identified as the Ephesian Artemis by the twelve breasts that protrude from her chest. She also holds a cornucopia to signify abundance. Her position at the centre of the composition of the cove suggests that the hybrid and ludic qualities of the grottesche that surround her have a natural origin; that they have been generated by Nature, personified as Artemis. The painting is not, however, as archaeologically accurate as Vliete’s sculpture, which implies

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the close involvement of Ligorio himself in the latter (given his deep knowledge of ancient statuary). For example, the figurines depicting bulls that in ancient cult statues of Artemis adorn the lower body of the goddess are, in the fresco, depicted as part of her headdress. In contrast, Vliete’s sculpture is based on the second-century Farnese Diana (now in the Museo Nazionale, Naples). Claudia Lazzaro has interpreted it as a representation of ‘the generative and fertile properties of nature’, which ‘are expressed through the nourishing sexual characteristic of the female form’.42 Indeed, Pirro himself described Diana of Ephesus as the ‘multimammary goddess and wet-nurse to all living beings’.43 The Fountain of Nature is, undoubtedly, a powerful image of fertility. (The flowing breasts of the figure may, in addition, symbolize the origin of rivers and streams in the bowels of the earth.44 Again, Pirro had written extensively on this theme in his treatise on rivers.) The Fountain of Nature is, on a literal level, a post partum figure, offering sustenance and participating in the life cycle. The Renaissance adaptation of the archaic, hieratic Ephesian Artemis to fountain design thus further animates her image, suggesting life, growth, and mutability. The representation of bodily fluids in the Fountain of Nature (and other figures of the garden) foregrounds the body as a living, breathing, organic entity – not unlike, in fact, the garden itself. Milk, vomit, urine, sweat, and tears were all depicted in gardens, most often in the medium of fountain design. They are signs of the body’s imperfection – its condition as a leaking, weeping, mortal vessel. These are also characteristics of the grotesque in art.45 In summary, at the Villa d’Este there are two images of Nature personified as Artemis of Ephesus, both of which are grotesque. The first, by the Zuccari workshop, is depicted in such a way that it appears to be generative of the grottesche decorations of the Room of Nobility, suggesting that the hybrid forms of the grotesque mode have 42 Lazzaro, Italian Renaissance Garden, p. 144. 43 Quoted in Barisi et al, Villa d’Este, p. 86. 44 Lazzaro, Renaissance Garden, pp. 144–145. Note also that Vincenzo Cartari described the goddess as covered with breasts, which, he added, signified that ‘the universe takes its nourishment from the earth’. See Lazzaro, ‘Gendered Nature’, p. 251. Cartari also quotes Macrobius as evidence that the ancients ‘liked to represent Nature with the traits of Isis-Artemis’, examples of which he claims to have seen himself. See Pietrogrande, ‘Generative Nature’, p. 190. See Nielsen, ‘Diana Efesia’, p. 466. 45 See, for example, Bakhtin’s comments on the grotesque body: ‘The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed, it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world […] This is why the essential role belongs to those parts of the grotesque body in which it outgrows its own self, transgressing its own body, in which it conceives a new, second body: the bowels and the phallus. These two areas play the leading role in the grotesque image, and it is precisely for this reason that they are predominantly subject to positive exaggeration, to hyperbolization; they can even detach themselves from the body and lead an independent life, for they hide the rest of the body, as something secondary. (The nose can also in a way detach itself from the body.) Next to the bowels and the genital organs is the mouth, through which enters the world to be swallowed up. And next is the anus. All these convexities and orifices have a

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their source in Nature (a point that is underlined by the inscription Rerum natura or ‘In the nature of things’ below the figure). The second, by Ligorio and Vliete, depicts the physiologically excessive body of the goddess as both mortal and monstrous. What of the meaning of these figures? Ligorio believed that grottesche comprised a symbolic language. He also wrote in the Libro dell’Antichità that the ‘mysterious veil and dark skin’ of Artemis of Ephesus ‘referred to her secrets’.46 It can be assumed, therefore, that the image of the goddess in the garden, if not necessarily that of the Room of Nobility, was intended to convey a message of some kind. Katherine Park has shown that in the sixteenth century, the old medieval idea of Nature as a dignified, tutelary figure of morality and law was superseded by a concept of Nature as indifferent to human needs – possessing her own indecipherable volition: Nature becomes a ‘wet-nurse’, in Ligorios’s apt phrase, rather than a benign mother.47 This new, enigmatic quality may be epitomized by the Fountain of Nature. If in the embryonic empirical science of the sixteenth century, nature was laid partially bare, as it were, but nonetheless continued to conceal her secrets, the seminaked but no less mysterious figure of the Ephesian Artemis was an appropriate choice for the personification of nature. The Artemis in the garden of the Villa d’Este can be regarded as a transitional or threshold figure. She is a revival of an ancient figurative type, but reimagined on the basis of the later period’s different concept of nature. In general terms, the sixteenth century was itself a period of transition from an animistic to a mechanistic worldview. In the garden, there is a comparable shift from the survival of an idea of the landscape as a giant body – nature as maternal anthropomorph perhaps – to Descartes’ comparison of the human body to the mechanisms of the grotto automata that he so admired.48 common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and interorientation. This is why the main events in the life of the grotesque body, the acts of the bodily drama, take place in this sphere. Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body – all these acts are performed on the confines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body. In all these events the beginning and the end of life are closely linked and interwoven.’ Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 317–318. 46 Nielsen, ‘Diana Efesia’, p. 466. It is worth mentioning that in the eighteenth-century edition of Ripa’s Iconologia, by George Richardson, the secrets of ‘Universal Nature’ represented, again, as Diana of Ephesus are emphasized: ‘Her head being covered with a veil, alludes to the opinion of the Egyptians, that the most important secrets of Nature are reserved alone to the Creator.’ See Richardson, Iconology, pp. 5–6. 47 ‘In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in contrast [to the medieval period], Nature’s body was exposed for all to see. But that body was itself opaque and difficult to interpret, like the alien, even grotesque, figure of Diana of Ephesus herself. Where Nature spoke explicitly, voluminously, and directly to medieval writers such as Alan of Lille in dreams and visions, she stood mutely before early modern naturalist inquirers or receded elusively from their grasp.’ Park, ‘Nature in Person’, pp. 71–72. 48 In his comparison of the human body to a machine, Descartes wrote that: ‘external objects […] are like strangers who, entering some of the caverns containing these fountains […] unwittingly cause […] a figure of Neptune to move towards them, threatening them with his trident.’ See Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, p. 64, for the translation. See my Monster in the Garden, for an extended version of this argument.

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Conclusion: The Monstrous In her book on the grotesque in modern art, Frances S. Connelly has argued that: ‘the grotesque is a boundary creature and does not exist except in relation to a boundary, convention or expectation.’49 The monstrous is also a ‘boundary creature’. Sixteenth-century writings on the grotesque in art can be compared with those of contemporary physicians, teratologists, and natural historians on what they regarded as monstrous births and bodies. If, for the Renaissance Vitruvians Cesariano and Barbaro, the grotesque was an unnatural deviation from an ideal, for the majority of writers in the fields of medicine, natural history, and law the figure of the monster was ‘against nature’. Yet monsters were frequently represented in gardens – the Early Modern artistic medium most directly concerned with nature. Towards the end of the sixteenth century there are increasing attempts to account for monsters within medical and proto-scientific categories. The French physician Ambroise Paré’s Des Monstres et prodiges (On Monsters and Marvels, 1573) exemplifies the attitudes of his period towards the monstrous.50 For Paré, as for earlier writers, the monster remains a portent or omen. But monsters can also be marvels or natural wonders, signs of the infinite creativity and variety of nature, and thus of the ‘Glory of God’. The artistic interest of Paré’s period in the grotesque and the hybridized is related to this concept of the monster as evidence of God’s status as the supreme Creator. Gardens may have been one of the most appropriate places for the display of the grotesque and the monstrous during the sixteenth century. The ongoing acceptability of the pagan imagery of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Counter-Reformatory Italy is indicative of the garden’s status as a privileged environment in this respect. The lack of effect of contemporary strictures and censoriousness on the garden can be explained to some extent by the Early Modern aesthetic doctrine of ‘decorum’ (decoro). To quote Ligorio: ‘lascivious things should be used or placed in locations which were not always seen, since they are not worthy of being permitted in every location’.51 His comment does not imply that lascivious things are always unworthy or indecorous, but, rather, that they are unworthy in certain situations. Even so, the freedoms of the garden were not infinite. Designed landscapes, like all works of art, reflect contemporary attitudes and socio-cultural conventions of thought. Although they may have been ideal locales for the display of fantastic, grotesque, monstrous, and even lascivious things, they were nonetheless inescapably constrained by contemporary mentalités. The sixteenth-century category of 49 Connelly, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. 50 Paré’s treatise has been translated into English by Pallister. See Paré, Monsters and Marvels. See pp. 3–4 for a succinct list of the ‘causes’. 51 Coffin, ‘Pirro Ligorio’, p. 200. On decorum in Renaissance art generally, see Ames-Lewis and Bednarek, Decorum.

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monstrosity, for example, was culturally produced rather than naturally given, as it is in any period. Like the grotesque, it required a normative standard against which monsters could be defined as deviating. On the first page of his treatise Paré writes that: Monsters are things that appear outside the course of Nature (and are usually signs of some forthcoming misfortune), such as a child who is born with one arm, another who will have two heads, and additional members over and above the ordinary. Marvels are things which happen that are completely against Nature as when a woman will give birth to a serpent, or to a dog, or some other thing that is totally against Nature.52

For Paré, the criterion was simply natural law; but this notion is, like every other historical conceptualization of nature, a product of its era. Paré’s conclusions are close to those of the trattatisti with regard to the grotesque. In both fields, of art theory and medicine, nature and the natural are implicitly normative. Like monsters, grottesche were for writers on one side of the debate ‘against nature’, and thus inadmissible. For others, however, the monstrous and the grotesque were evidence of the creative play of nature, which Paré calls the ‘chambermaid of the great God’ – a formulation that recalls Ligorio’s concept of Nature as a ‘wet-nurse to all living beings’.

Bibliography Francis Ames-Lewis and Anka Bednarek, eds., Decorum in Renaissance Narrative Art (London: Birkbeck ­College, 1992) Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna, 1587). Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W.J. [Walter John] Strachan (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1977). Isabella Barisi, Marcello Fagiolo, and Maria Luisa Madonna, Villa d’Este, trans. Richard Bates, Lucinda Byatt, and Anita Weston (Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2003). Paola Barocchi, ed., Scritti d’Arte del Cinquecento (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1977). Hervé Brunon, ‘Du Songe de Poliphile à la Grande Grotte de Boboli: la dualité dramatique du paysage’, Polia, Revue de l’art des jardins 2 (Autumn 2004), pp. 7–26. David R. Coffin, ‘Pirro Ligorio on the Nobility of the Arts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964), pp. 191–210. David R. Coffin, The Villa d’Este at Tivoli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). David R. Coffin, ‘Pirro Ligorio and Decoration of the Late Sixteenth Century at Ferrara’, Art Bulletin 37, no. 3 (1955), pp. 167–185. Frances S. Connelly, ‘Introduction’, in Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. Frances S. Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–19. 52 Paré, Monsters and Marvels, 3.

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Nicole, Dacos, La Découverte de la Domus Aurea et la Formation des Grotesques a la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969). John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Karen Hope Goodchild, ‘Towards an Italian Renaissance Theory of Landscape’, PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1998. Clare Lapraik Guest, The Understanding of Ornament in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2016). John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination 1600–1750 (London: Dent, 1986). Elena Lazzarini, ‘Wonderful Creatures: Early Modern Perceptions of Deformed Bodies’, Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 3 (2011), pp. 415–431. Claudia Lazzaro, ‘Gendered Nature and its Representation in Sixteenth-Century Garden Sculpture’, in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Sarah McHam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 246–273. Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden: From the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Phillippe Morel, Les Grotesques: Les figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 2011). Luke Morgan, The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design, Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Marjatta Nielsen, ‘Diana Efesia Multimammia: The Metamorphoses of a Pagan Goddess from the Renaissance to the Age of Neo-Classicism’, in From Artemis to Diana: The Goddess of Man and Beast, Danish Studies in Archaeology: Acta Hyperborea 12, eds. Tobias Fischer-Hansen and Birte Poulsen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009), pp. 455–496. Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Katherine Park, ‘Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems’, in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 254–271. Alina A. Payne, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, in Disarmonia, brutezza e bizzarria nel Rinascimento, Atti del VII Convegno Internazionale, Chianciano-Pienza, 17–20 luglio 1995, ed. Luisa Secchi Tarugi (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 1998), pp. 273–294. Antonella Pietrogrande, ‘The Imaginary of Generative Nature in Italian Mannerist Gardens’, in Clio in the Italian Garden: Twenty-First-Century Studies in Historical Methods and Theoretical Perspectives, eds. Mirka Beneš and Michael G. Lee (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2011), pp. 187–202. George Richardson, Iconology (London, 1779), vol. 2 (New York: Garland, 1979). Sebastiano Serlio, Cinque libri d’archittetura (Venice: 1540). David Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Modern Grotesque’, in Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. Frances S. Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 20–46. David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Bartolomeo Taegio, La Villa, trans. Thomas E. Beck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Giorgio Vasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanesi, vol. 1 (­Florence: Sansoni, 1981). Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), pp. 159–197.

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About the author Luke Morgan is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at Monash University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include Nature as Model: Salomon de Caus and Early Seventeenth-Century Landscape Design (2007) and The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (2016), both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

3. Outside-In: The Intrusion of Ornament into Sacred Narrative Tianna Helena Uchacz

Abstract In a little-known print series, painter-designer Marcus Gheeraerts radically upends the conventional distinction between inside and outside, narrative and ornament, and sacred and profane. His fourteen engravings depicting Christ’s Passion (c. 1580) apply the formal vocabulary and syntax of the grotesque in order to frame each print, provide a structural logic across the series, hierarchize narrative elements, register emotional tenor, and challenge conceptual divisions at play in the prints. The title page at once emphasizes the devotional subject matter and the engravings’ utility for designers working in a variety of media. The series raises questions about the nature of sacred images, the role of the grotesque, and the future of artistic enterprise in Antwerp, which had been traumatized by recent iconoclasms. Keywords: Beeldenstorm, narrative art, ornament, frame, Netherlandish grotesque, decorum

Sometime around 1580, the reform-minded artist Marcus Gheeraerts designed a remarkable yet little-known series of engravings depicting Christ’s Passion, framed and structured by an elaborate system of grotesque ornament. The series, the Passio Verbigenae, was published and perhaps also engraved by Jan Sadeler. It consists of thirteen prints and a title page, the latter featuring a six-line Latin text by the Antwerp physician and poet Hugo Favolius (Ills. 3.1–3.14).1 Architectural fragments, scroll- and strapwork, animal and vegetal elements, atmospheric effects, and supernatural motifs entwine and combine to envelop and order the Passion scenes. Critically, these prolific forms not only frame the biblical episodes from without but also 1 Ramaix, Johan Sadeler I, cat. nos. 7002.002–15; De Jong and De Groot, Ornamentprenten in het Rijksprentenkabinet, cat. no. 85; De Hoop Scheffer, Aegidius Sadeler to Raphael Sadeler II, cat. nos. 207–20; Döry, Katalog der Ornamentstich-Sammlung Hamburg, cat. no. 112; Katalog der Ornamentstichsammlung Berlin, cat. no. 230; Hollstein, ‘Marcus Gherards (Gheeraerts) I’, cat. nos. 87–99; Wurzbach, Niederländisches KünstlerLexikon, II, p. 539, no. 81; Guilmard, Les Maítres Ornamentistes, I, p. 483, no. 16; Nagler, Die Monogrammisten, IV, p. 486, no. 1571; Le Blanc, Manuel de l’amateur d’estampes, II, p. 398, no. 80. Hammeken, C.A. and M.F. Hansen (eds.), Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789462984967_ch03

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Ill. 3.1: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Title Page, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

extend themselves into and across the narrative field. This incursion enables the ornament to perform a variety of functions: it metamorphoses to become the setting; it organizes and hierarchizes episodes and symbolic elements; and it registers the arc and emotional tenor of the narrative. Most surprisingly, it even extrudes the bodies of protagonists who participate in the story, dehumanizing biblical figures by transmuting them into hybrid beings, half man, half ornament. These novel uses of the grotesque are, to some extent, logical extensions of Gheeraerts’s ongoing experiments in ornament design; they also aggressively underscore the status of the image

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Ill. 3.2: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Last Supper, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.3 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

as an artifice of the imagination and hand. By radically upending conventional distinctions between inside and outside – between narrative and ornament, sacred and profane – the series gives visual form to tensions surrounding the function and status of images in post-iconoclastic Antwerp. A key feature of the Passio Verbigenae is the confrontation it stages between religious narrative and grotesque ornament. Gheeraerts applies the formal vocabulary and syntax of the grotesque as it was used in contemporary design, yet he violates its status as something exterior and apart. The intrusion of ornament into the space of

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Ill. 3.3: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Agony in the Garden, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 15.9 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

the narrative thus reveals and challenges the distinction between these two categories. The grotesque, now something internal to the image and integral to the story, threatens the narrative representation as a bounded and authoritative entity, demystifying the religious image and any claim to inviolability and sacrality it might have. The tension between sacred and profane is already signalled on the title page of the series. Two texts, each pointing to a different tradition, bracket a representation of the instruments of the Passion in an emblem-like format (Ill. 3.1). The titular

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Ill. 3.4: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Arrest of Christ, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

inscription indicates the series’ religious content and devotional orientation: Passio verbigenae quae nostra redemptio Christi, nos ducit ad summi tecta paterna poli (‘The Passion of Christ, he who was born of the word, our redemption, leads us to the father’s house of the highest heaven’). The text below the image, however, implies a more practical and even secular function. Addressed explicitly to the viewer (Ad spectatorem), it praises the learned and immortal hand of the publisher, Sadeler,

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and advertises the series’ usefulness to the painter, the image cutter, the gold- and silversmith, the textile and tapestry worker, and the embroiderer.2 In other words, the engravings showcase models of ornamental design suitable for artistic work in a variety of costly mediums that typically relied on surface patterning to embellish largely planar supports. A detail from the Passio Verbigenae was taken up as ornament in at least one known instance: a soldier from the Arrest of Christ (see Ill. 3.4) was used to decorate a cabasset dating to the last decades of the sixteenth century (see Ill. 3.15).3 Gheeraerts may have deliberately cultivated this confrontation between sacred narrative and grotesque ornament as an ‘experiment in decorum’, a term that Koenraad Jonckheere uses to characterize one possible response of Netherlandish artists to the professional trauma of the Iconoclasm of 1566.4 Such experiments aimed to reassert the value of art and foreground its status as representation, and Gheeraerts’s adaptation of the fanciful grotesque to the most sacred story in Christendom is an example of this phenomenon. Gheeraerts, whose staunch reformist ideals shaped the course of his career, surely intended the more jarring effects of the Passio Verbigenae. These same effects likely would have attracted the opprobrium of Catholic image apologists and theorists such as Martinus Duncanus, Johannes Molanus, and Gabriele Paleotti. The Passio Verbigenae was one of seven print series Gheeraerts designed featuring grotesque ornament. None are dated, but most were likely made between 1577 and 1586, when the artist was resident in Antwerp after nearly a decade of religious exile in London. Gheeraerts was a native of Bruges. He joined the city’s Guild of St. Luke in 1558 at the age of 36; little is known of his prior training.5 He worked on a number of high-profile projects, including a large-scale, six-plate engraved map of Bruges, the tomb of Charles the Bold, the completion of a monumental triptych begun by Bernard van Orley, and a lavishly illustrated Dutch edition of Aesop. As an outspoken reformist who served on Bruges’ Calvinist Council, Gheeraerts was one of many who fled for London following the arrival of the repressive Duke of Alba in the Low 2 ‘Ad spectatorem. Aspice Sadleri Spectator provide quae sit docta manus, nulla quae peritura die. Utile pictori monumentum est, utile passim sculptori, aulaeis utile purpureis. Utile si nitido argentum perfuderis auro, utile si vestes purpura rubra notet’ (‘To the spectator. Behold, viewer of Sadler, foresee that hand is learned, which is to die on no day. The work is useful to the painter, useful everywhere to the image cutter, it is useful for purple hangings. It is useful if you would bathe silver with shining gold, useful if it inscribes robes with ruddy purple’). Aulaeis could refer to decorated hangings, curtains, canopies, and tapestries. I have translated sculptor as ‘image cutter’ to emphasize engraving and relief carving over the making of statuary. For the function of such title pages in prints after Hans Vredeman de Vries, see Zimmermann, ‘The Relation to Practice’. 3 The cabasset is dated c. 1589–1590 in Nickel, Pyhrr, and Tarassuk, The Art of Chivalry, p. 65, cat. no. 25. 4 Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm. See also Jonckheere, ‘The Power of Iconic Memory’. 5 For Gheeraerts’s biographical details, see especially Hearn, ‘Gheeraerts, Marcus, the Elder’; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary of London Painters’, p. 87. See also Schouteet, De zestiende-eeuwsche schilder en graveur Marcus Gerards; Hodnett, Marcus Gheeraerts.

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Ill. 3.5: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Christ before Caiaphas, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Countries in 1567, the year after the iconoclastic riots. This flight proved justified. On 1 December 1568, Gheeraerts was tried for heresy in absentia in Bruges; he was officially banned and his property confiscated. In London, he cultivated a successful career as a genre and portrait painter and designer of prints and illustrations.6 By 1577, he returned to the Southern Netherlands, joining Antwerp’s Guild of St. Luke and probably taking up residence in the city. He remained in the Low Countries until 6

For Gheeraerts’s work in England, see Town, ‘“A Fête at Bermondsey’.

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Ill. 3.6: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Flagellation, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

1586 at the latest, when he was in London again.7 All but one of Gheeraerts’s ornamental print series were likely produced during this Netherlandish period, when he easily could have encountered his collaborators Philips Galle, Gerard de Jode, and 7 The dates of Gheeraerts’s arrival in and departure from Antwerp are unclear. The Pacification of Ghent on 8 November 1576 led to the suspension of Alba’s anti-Calvinist placards, prompting many religious exiles to return to the Low Countries. Gheeraerts appears in the registers of Antwerp’s Guild of St. Luke in 1577. See Rombouts and van Lerius, De Liggeren, p. 263. He paid the annual fee of 5 stuivers for guild membership according to accounts which run from 26 September 1585 to 30 September 1586; ibid., p. 302. He was in London

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Ill. 3.7: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Crowning with Thorns, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Jan Sadeler in Antwerp.8 Significantly, these were the same years when Antwerp was governed as a so-called Calvinist Republic – a period which ended with the decisive fall of the city to Catholic Spain in 1585.9 During this uncertain time, the city’s by 14 August 1586 at the latest, when he served as godfather at the baptism of a son of Emmanuel van Meteren. Gheeraerts was dead by 26 October 1589, when his son Marcus the younger was recorded living in London with his widowed mother. See Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary of London Painters’, p. 87. 8 Sadeler was still living in Antwerp in the late 1570s. He and his family would move to Cologne by 20 May 1580; Kreyczi, ‘Urkunden und Regesten’, p. LXXX, no. 11938; p. CXII, no. 12138. Sadeler made regular trips to Antwerp until 1586. See Ramaix, Les Sadeler, pp. 9–14; Ramaix, ‘Les Sadeler’, pp. 10–14. 9 Marnef, ‘Political Change under the Calvinist Republic’.

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Ill. 3.8: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Ecce Homo, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

artists were innovating approaches to art that could meet a range of confessional demands.10 Gheeraerts’s troubling of the boundaries between inside and outside, thing enframed and frame itself, was an experimental accommodation of his repertoire and skill to the overlapping demands of various artistic, religious, and political communities.

10 Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm.

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The Passio Verbigenae The Passio Verbigenae is both a storehouse of fragments and an example of how they might be creatively used.11 In the Last Supper (Ill. 3.2), the main scene is divided from a subsidiary one below (in which Judas receives the 30 pieces of silver) by schematically depicted stairs that span the central field. The internal grotesque frame is composed of cherub heads, winged putti, scroll- and strapwork, vegetal motifs, decorative puffs of smoke, swags of fabric, and a canopy of honour. In the Agony in the Garden (Ill. 3.3), such ornamental fragments form an elaborate indication of setting, with scroll-rooted trees merging into metal-like bars and animal parts, compartmentalizing the visual field into distinct if ambiguously related spaces. The grotesque acts as both a conceptual structure and a physical barrier; Judas and the guards enter the scene at the bottom centre and climb over the fence-like strapwork into the garden. In the Arrest of Christ and Christ before Caiaphas (Ills. 3.4 and 3.5), the internal frame becomes more effusive, still dividing space and hierarchizing episodes, with Christ’s trials taking place in larger spaces above those of Peter. New motifs appear, such as garlands of fruit and curvilinear fragments that terminate in monstrous masks. The following scenes – Flagellation, Crowning with Thorns, and Ecce Homo (Ills. 3.6–3.8) – continue to use the grotesque as an assemblage of fragments, largely architectural, to scaffold and compartmentalize the narrative field. The Carrying of the Cross (Ill. 3.9) marks a turning point in the series. First, it is the only print to include an inscription – a cryptic proverb uttered by Christ in Luke 23:31: ‘For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?’.12 Second, the prints that follow it use the grotesque to signal the climax of the narrative. The internal ornamental armature becomes less architectural, more animate – monstrous, even – reflecting the emotional register of the Passion and Christ’s proximity to death. It is useful to speak of both a religious and an ornamental narrative here, a dual structure that is presaged by the texts of the title page. As Ethan Matt Kavaler has argued of architectural ornament, ‘the progression of decoration could confirm arch narratives in the culture’, and Gheeraerts uses the grotesque to this effect.13 In the climactic sequence, the ornamental narrative reflects the intensity of the religious one through the enlivenment of the components framing the primary scene. In Christ Disrobed (Ill. 3.10), two corrupt angel bodies bracket the episode, holding a canopy above Christ’s head. In Crucifixion (Ill. 3.11), the angels are replaced by the 11 For the use and recombination of ornamental motifs, see Heuer, The City Rehearsed, 99–135, esp. 114–23. 12 The proverb is generally interpreted in one of two ways: 1) if the innocent Christ meets such a fate, then the guilty will surely meet a worse one still; or 2) if this is how humans behave in the presence of Christ, then it will surely be worse when he is gone. The former is echoed in 1 Peter 4:17–18, cited in the margins of Luke 23:31 in many editions of the Vulgate as well as the reform-minded vernacular Biestkens Bible (1560) and Deux-Aes Bible (1562). See also Erasmus, Paraphrase on Luke: 11–24, 216, esp. n. 35. 13 Kavaler, ‘Renaissance Gothic in the Netherlands’, p. 3.

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Ill. 3.9: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Carrying of the Cross, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.3 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

figures of the two thieves on either side of Christ. These bodies, too, are corrupt. They are not full figures, but extrude from bloom-like protrusions on the inside of the frame. In Lamentation (Ill. 3.12), two large angel grotesques flank the scene again, this time making devotional gestures and ‘holding’ instruments of the Passion in their prehensile, scrollwork tails. In the penultimate scene, Harrowing of Hell (Ill. 3.13), the fragments of grotesque ornament are entirely substituted with writhing demon forms and smoke from the hell-fires, all configured to form a giant hell-mouth. Astonishingly, the overall recombinatory logic of the framing seen in the rest of the series is preserved despite the radical change in constituent forms. Finally, in Resurrection

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Ill. 3.10: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Christ Disrobed, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

(Ill. 3.14), the ornamental narrative resolves itself again, returning to the more architectural order of the early scenes, albeit in a triumphantly exuberant way. As Passion scenes, these prints are extraordinary and unprecedented for the way the framing devices encroach upon the narrative. Indeed, cycles of single-scene Passion prints were seldom designed with frames at all.14 However, it would be disingenuous to regard the Passio Verbigenae as passion prints tout court. Most museums, in 14 For an exception, see Schuckman, Maarten de Vos, cat. nos. 460–81.

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Ill. 3.11: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Crucifixion, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

fact, have not catalogued them as religious narratives. As the title page to the series indicates, the prints were meant to resonate within another image tradition – that of artistic design work, and of grotesque ornament in particular – which had become an established image category open to inventive elaboration.

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Ill. 3.12: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Lamentation, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Ill. 3.13: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Harrowing of Hell, from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.0 x 11.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Netherlandish Grotesque By the time the Passio Verbigenae appeared, the design of grotesque ornament had been a flourishing artistic speciality in the Low Countries for decades.15 Netherlandish experiments in the application of antique ornamental motifs had multiplied from

15 See Hedicke, Cornelis Floris, pp. 234–351; Jessen, Der ornamentstich, pp. 83–101.

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Ill. 3.14: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Resurrection, print from the series Passio Verbigenae, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 16.1 x 11.3 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

the 1510s onward, a local expression of a pan-European development.16 Such experiments in ornament – whether visible in isolated fields in devotional paintings, in fictive, ephemeral, or micro-architectural constructions, or in the borders of printed books and manuscripts – built upon local artistic traditions that privileged invention 16 For the history of the grotesque and its conceptual varieties, see Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture. For its reception and place in early modern art, see Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea; Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Grotesque’. See also Guest, The Understanding of Ornament, Chapters 11–12; Morel, Les grotesques. For antique ornament in Netherlandish architecture and decorative art, see Vos and Leeman, Het nieuwe ornament.

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in the margins.17 The ongoing practice of design in the Gothic mode, for instance, used peripheral micro-architectural fields and frames – such as balustrades, vaults, and portals – as places to display elaborate ornamental conceits.18 The development of grotesque ornament as a container or something to be contained, a playful boundary or a bounded field of play, thus found fertile ground in the Low Countries, where design traditions privileging virtuosity met a new receptiveness to antique forms. By the 1540s and 1550s, Netherlandish engravers and publishers were capitalizing on a thriving European market for ornament prints, disseminating the designs of Cornelis Metsys, Cornelis Bos, Cornelis Floris, Jacob Floris, and Hans Vredeman de Vries, among others.19 These artists elaborated idiosyncratic fantasy forms to cover the surfaces of sword hilts, plates, and pilasters, and to contain and embellish narrative and allegorical images and texts as well as civic ceremonies (Ill. 3.15). As Christopher P. Heuer has noted, few craftsmen drawing on these printed patterns reproduced the models with exactitude; ornament designers often stressed such prints as points of departure for their fellow artists.20 Throughout the rest of the sixteenth century, Netherlandish experiments with the grotesque continued to be an enterprise of elaborating fields and frames, and Marcus Gheeraerts began to design both types from the late 1570s onward. In three of his series, each published by Philips Galle, a dense system of spindly grotesques fills a wide space around a central, allegorical figure or narrative vignette – crucially, without encroaching upon it (Ill. 3.16).21 In another series, The Four Holy Days, designed in collaboration with Jan Sadeler, Gheeraerts confines the grotesque within a thick framing band to organize subsidiary religious episodes around a principal one (Ill. 3.17).22

17 On medieval marginalia, see Camille, Image on the Edge. See also Hamburger, ‘Michael Camille’. For borders in Flemish manuscripts, see for instance, Hunt, Illuminating the Borders of Northern French and Flemish Manuscripts; Nijs, ‘Typology of Border Decoration’; Goehring, ‘Taking Borders Seriously’. 18 Kavaler, ‘Renaissance Gothic’. 19 Van der Stock, Cornelis Matsys, cat. nos. 56, 67–9, 101–9; Schéle, Cornelis Bos, pp. 165–90; Huysmans, Cornelis Floris, 37–69, cat. nos. 119–94. For Jacob Floris, see Collijn, Katalog der Ornamentstichsammlung zu Stockholm, cat. nos. 60–63 and De Jong and Groot, Ornamentprenten in het Rijksprentenkabinet, cat. nos. 80– 83; Borggrefe et al., Hans Vredeman de Vries, pp. 51–68; and Heuer, The City Rehearsed, pp. 99–135. 20 Heuer, The City Rehearsed, pp. 99–100, 118–23. 21 For Gheeraerts’s The Four Elements, The Four Continents, and the unnamed series of ornament designs within geometric shapes, see De Jong and De Groot, Ornamentprenten in het Rijksprentenkabinet, cat. nos. 86–88; Hollstein, ‘After Marcus Gherards (Gheeraerts) I’, cat. nos. 44–51. 22 De Hoop Scheffer, ‘Johannes Sadeler I’, cat. nos. 141–4. Each of the four prints bears a variation on the inscriptions ‘Ioan. Sadler inuen. et excud.’ and ‘M.G. Figur’. The term figur(avit) was typically used to denote the draughtsman, but it could also distinguish responsibility for part of a print’s design. The named artist often had designed the main figure or portrait, while the rest, a frame or landscape for instance, was added by another hand. See Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, pp. 413–14, 417; Griffiths, The Print before Photography, p. 83. The convention appears to be reversed in this series.

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Ill. 3.15: Cabasset, c. 1580–1590. Steel, gold, copper alloy, 25.4 x 23.2 x 33.5 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund 1904.

Gheeraerts also designed a set of cartouches, the Diversarum protractationum quas vulgo compartimenta vocāt, published by Gerard de Jode around 1565.23 The series reflects a larger vogue for ornamental frame design. Antwerp publishers, Hieronymus Cock and Gerard de Jode especially, issued numerous such series featuring symmetrically arrayed arabesques, geometric bandwork, illusionistic strapwork, and all manner of whimsical hybrid forms. Such frames often surrounded a bounded central field either left blank or filled by pithy epigrams, landscapes, or stock figures and narratives (Ill. 3.18).24 These series explicitly marketed their grotesque designs as models for decorative work across a range of media; for instance, the title pages of Cornelis Floris’s Veelderleÿ niewe inuentien (1557), with its zeer fraeÿe grotissen en compertimenten, and Hans Vredeman de Vries’ Grottesco: in diversche manieren (1565–1571) declare their usefulness for image cutters, carvers of antique ornament, painters, glass engravers, or simply lovers of the antique.25

23 Collijn, Katalog der Ornamentstichsammlung zu Stockholm, cat. no. 64. 24 Hedicke, Cornelis Floris, pp. 252–3. See also Van Grieken, Luijten, and Van der Stock, Hieronymus Cock, pp. 36–41. 25 See Rijksmuseum, inv. nos. RP-P-OB-6081 and RP-P-1973-95. The title pages to such series often characterize their contents as comparitmenta (Latin) or compertimenten (Dutch), underscoring their function as containers.

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Ill. 3.16: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Aqua, from the series The Four Elements, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 19.8 x 13.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The Netherlandish vogue for elaborate, ornamental frames had been somewhat anticipated by French prints from the 1540s after the innovative framing devices of Rosso and Primaticcio at Fontainebleau, in which the central image was replaced by a landscape or left blank, underlining what Clare Lapraik Guest describes as ‘the inessential relation

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Ill. 3.17: After Marcus Gheeraerts and Jan Sadeler, Resurrectio, from the series The Four Holy Days, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 28.0 x 22.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

of frame and framed image’.26 The growing fungibility of central images undermined their semantic priority, and the increasing emphasis given to the ornamental frame suggests that it was gaining the potential to take on greater significance than whatever might eventually be enframed.27 Moreover, the monochrome of print helped to level material and ontological distinctions between inside and outside.28 Gheeraerts pushed 26 Guest, The Understanding of Ornament, p. 482. Compare, for example, Fantuzzi and Du Cerceau’s prints after the framework of Ignorance Defeated in Byrne, Renaissance Ornament Prints and Drawings, cat. nos. 160–61. 27 I am grateful to Ethan Matt Kavaler, whose ideas and generous conversation have shaped my understanding of this topic. 28 Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, p. 164.

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Ill. 3.18: Johannes or Lucas van Doetechum after Hans Vredeman de Vries, Cartouche with Venus on a Wagon, from the series Grottesco: in diversche manieren, 1565–1571. Etching, 15.6 x 20.7 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

this design logic to its ultimate conclusion in the Passio Verbigenae, creating a frame that intrudes into the space of the narrative, overtaking the literal and figurative centre. Gheeraerts seems to have come gradually to the specific innovations of the Passio Verbigenae. Their closest parallel within his oeuvre is found in the Life of Hercules series, published by Gerard de Jode.29 While the chronological relationship of these two undated series is uncertain, there are reasons to see the Passio Verbigenae as a more developed instance of ideas that appear in the Hercules.30 Both draw on a shared formal repertoire of grotesque elements, and both feature relatively large, volumetric, narrative figures set within an overall oval frame (Ill. 3.19).31 In the Hercules, the representations of the hero and his trials are spatially distinct from the grotesque framing devices; that is, narrative and ornament do not interact in any meaningful

29 De Jong and De Groot, Ornamentprenten in het Rijksprentenkabinet, cat. no. 84; Hollstein, ‘After Marcus Gherards (Gheeraerts) I’, cat. nos. 66–77. 30 Carsten-Peter Warncke dates the Hercules series and the Passio Verbigenae to the 1570s, dating the latter specifically around 1575. See Warncke, Die ornamentale Groteske in Deutschland, I, n. 147. 31 The full series is available in the British Museum, inv. nos. 1917, 1208.4544–4549.

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Ill. 3.19: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Hercules Slays the Hydra, from the series The Life of Hercules, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 11.4 x 8.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

way. There is, however, a significant exception to this rule. In the scene of Hercules Strangling Snakes in his Crib (Ill. 3.20), the grotesque frame extends across the narrative field to partition it in two: above, Amphitryon and Alcmene rise from their bed in surprise as the heroic infant strangles Juno’s snakes in his crib below. This singular departure from the grotesque’s strict use as an external framing device seems to hint toward the novel role it would assume in the Passio Verbigenae as an elaborate scaffold used to structure yet trouble the relationship between image and frame, depth and plane, and real and pictorial space.

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Ill. 3.20: After Marcus Gheeraerts, Hercules Strangling Snakes in his Crib, from the series The Life of Hercules, c. 1577–1586. Engraving, 11.4 x 8.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Monstrous Relations In the early modern period, grotesque designs were virtuoso demonstrations of the artist’s phantasia and were appreciated for their novelty, variety, and surprising hybrid forms. They were often understood in terms of the monstrous, a category capacious with meaning.32 Monsters, as strange things of the natural world, were marvellous prodigies, evidence of nature’s abundance and endless capacity to generate particulars. Sources of wonder shaded with delight or horror, they could be divine portents – though by the later sixteenth century they were increasingly viewed with repugnance 32 Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Grotesque’; Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, pp. 115–18.

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as errors of nature.33 Despite shifting meanings, the monstrous had – and has – a consistent cultural function. It signals disruption in systems of order, whether natural, moral, or aesthetic, making itself ‘known through its effect, its impact’, as Asa Mittman argues.34 So too the grotesque, which Frances Connelly asserts as significant for what ‘it does, not what it is. It is an action, not a thing – more like a verb than a noun.’35 The grotesque and the monstrous perform the action of category (de)construction. They help define notions of the non-grotesque, non-monstrous world as they themselves are under definition, revealing the shapes, assumptions, and rules governing a culture and its conventions. The prodigious forms of the Passio Verbigenae highlight and problematize the boundaries between a number of significant categories of sixteenth-century and modern concern, including the arbitrary and ordered, the alive and dead, the human and inhuman, and art and its history. The series thus provides insight into the concerns and values underlying Netherlandish culture during a period of political and religious crisis, as well as those underlying art history as a discipline. Gheeraerts exploits the metaphoric value of grotesque elements to explore notions of stability and order. The architectural fragments of the ornamental scaffold and its thick, sharp-edged bars and straps reminiscent of metalsmiths’ work lend the framing devices the impression of structural integrity. In The Harrowing of Hell (Ill. 3.13), however, any pretence to solidity or fixity is denied. Rippling and writhing demons replace the more stable forms the viewer has come to expect. These monstrous fragments preserve the framing logic of the series – their entwining hybrid forms define an internal armature for the narrative, albeit one which cleverly resolves itself into a hell-mouth. The print thus playfully shifts attention from the arbitrary forms of the ornamental scaffold to its governing principle. Gheeraerts’s play with the stability of the grotesque frame situates the Passio Verbigenae in relation to Netherlandish artworks that since the 1550s had begun to reflect a growing preoccupation with notions of order, whether social, political, or natural. Social unrest had begun to foment in response to the grain crisis of 1556–1557, while subsequent controversial Habsburg policies on taxation, the persecution of heresy, and the reorganization of the Church dioceses in the Low Countries provoked further agitation: the unrest would culminate in the Wonderjaar (Year of Wonder) of 1566, with its iconoclastic riots, and catalyse the ensuing Dutch Revolt. Paintings, prints, and rederijker dramas registered the growing tensions, drawing increasingly on subjects that thematized hubris and the dangers of challenging the status quo, such as the Fall of the Giants, the Fall of the Rebel Angels, and the story of Icarus.36 33 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, pp. 173–214. 34 Mittman and Dendle, Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, p. 6 (emphasis in original). 35 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, p. 2; Guest, The Understanding of Ornament, pp. 2–3, 495–9. 36 Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel, pp. 64–64; Meganck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Fall of the Rebel Angels, pp. 136–38. The literature on the Dutch Revolt and its causes is vast. See especially Van Nierop, ‘De Troon van Alva’.

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Gheeraerts’s monstrous grotesques, produced some two decades later in equally uncertain political circumstances, extend this preoccupation with order from the thematic to the formal. The artist establishes a regular use for the grotesque – as scaffold – then substitutes demons for its structural components. While this playful move is momentarily destabilizing, it also draws attention to a base-level system governing the logic of the grotesque ornament, reassuring the viewer of a fundamental stability behind the superficial chaos, a consoling metaphor in a period of outright war. In the four climactic prints of the Passio Verbigenae (Ills. 3.11–14), the grotesque probes the boundaries between life and death though the progressive animation of the frame and unsettling distortions that render angelic and human bodies into monsters. There was a long literary tradition of monstrous beings occupying the liminal spaces between existential realms – a phenomenon in classical works like the Aeneid and later ones like Dante’s Inferno.37 The hell-mouth in the penultimate print, a common feature of Netherlandish hell scenes, marks out such a liminal space. It also evokes the notion of hell as a real and bounded place that Christ plundered for souls between his death and resurrection, a doctrine debated by Catholics and Protestants in this period.38 Gheeraerts uses the characteristic features of the grotesque, its liminality and metamorphic drive, to map Christ’s unusual transition from life to death and back again. The closer Christ passes to death, the more the largely architectural grotesques come to life, participating in the narrative as Christ’s body loses its human agency. Most disturbingly, however, Gheeraerts’s grotesques threaten the distinction between human and inhuman. In the Crucifixion (Ill. 3.11), the bodies of Dismas and Gestas, the two thieves crucified alongside Christ, emerge from bloom-like protrusions on the frame, their arms tied to the thin oval around the scene which substitutes for their absent crosses. The thieves occupy an ontological status somewhere between protagonist and ornament. Their strange hybridity renders unaccountable the humanity of two men attested in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.39 According to American philosopher Stanley Cavell, this inscrutability is a hallmark of horror, which he defines as: The perception of the precariousness of human identity, […] that it may be lost or invaded, that we may be, or may become something other than we are, or take ourselves for; that our origins as human beings need accounting for, and are unaccountable.40

37 Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Grotesque’, p. 28. 38 Marshall, ‘The Reformation of Hell?’ 39 Matthew 27:38, 27:44; Mark 15:27, 15:32; Luke 23:33, 23:39–43. The apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus or Acts of Pilate expands on the narrative of the two thieves. This gospel also describes Christ’s descent into hell. 40 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp. 418–19.

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Ill. 3.21: Marcus Gheeraerts, Composite Rotting Head of a Monk Representing an Allegory of Iconoclasm, 1560–1570. Etching, 43.5 x 31.5 cm. London, British Museum. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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The need for such an account was of particular concern in this period, as overseas exploration and domestic warfare raised profound ethical and ontological questions about what it meant to be human. From reports of monstrous peoples in distant lands to animal satire and animal trials at home, tensions surrounding the boundaries of the human were expressed and channelled in a variety of ways.41 Gheeraerts himself produced satirical etchings that cast Catholic figures and practices in animal and monstrous terms, such as his depiction of Brother Cornelis as a wolf and his Composite Rotting Head of a Monk Representing an Allegory of Iconoclasm (Ill. 3.21).42 Thus, in the Passio Verbigenae, Gheeraerts’s dehumanization of the thieves and his enlivening of the grotesque frame may have relied on the monstrous mode to express ongoing tensions, particularly those surrounding the place of the human in the order of nature and the relationship of the human to the divine and God’s revelation. The blurred lines between quasi-structural, narrative bodies and animated ornamental frames challenge the notion of the grotesque as something emphatically apart, supplemental, or even non-human.43 Such entanglements between otherwise distinct categories raise an unsettling possibility: as the ensouled grotesque encroaches upon the centre, takes on narrative functions, and distorts and calcifies the limbs of men and angels, this invasion might effectively transform the episodes of Christ’s Passion from sacred narrative into ornament. Art historians, in some measure, seem to have thought so. Gheeraerts’s experimental Passion series has been largely overlooked for its resistance to categorization. Despite its unmistakable New Testament subject matter, most collections have opted to classify the engravings as ornament prints, thereby privileging the longer text of the title page, which emphasizes the prints’ usefulness for artists and designers, over the titular religious inscription. While this decision may have enabled print room visitors to more easily consider the novelty of the engravings within the tradition of Netherlandish ornament design, it necessarily distanced the series from other Passion prints. Thus, the exigencies of museum practice – the practical need to store the prints in one location – may have inadvertently obscured a crucial part of the Passio Verbigenae’s context as a religious image cycle designed by an openly Calvinist artist working in a post-Tridentine and post-iconoclastic milieu.44 41 Davies, ‘The Unlucky, the Bad and the Ugly’, 63–71; Davies, Renaissance Ethnography; Van Bruaene, ‘Revolting Beasts’. 42 Marcus Gheeraerts, Brother Cornelis as a Wolf, before 1568, etching, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, inv. no. AM 375-1980. 43 Gheeraerts’s grotesque ornament undermines Kant’s well-known assertion that ornament is an extrinsic supplement (parergon) to the work (ergon), an assertion that does not seem to hold for the Passio Verbigenae and that has been challenged, most notably by Derrida. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 72; Derrida, The Truth in Painting, pp. 37–82, esp. 59–61. 44 Some scholars have sought to identify Gheeraerts as a Familist. The arguments are summarized in Webster, ‘Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder and the Language of Art’, pp. 30–34. The challenges brought about by museum categorization are increasingly mitigated by public-facing digital databases.

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The conceptual difficulty the prints pose is not exclusive to museum practice. Gheeraerts scholar Edward Hodnett packaged the art historical problem thusly: ‘The combining of natural biblical characters with arabesques is a mélange de genre that reflects the bad taste of earlier Antwerp Mannerists.’45 Hodnett’s judgement suggests two failures for Gheeraerts and the Passio Verbigenae: 1) an aesthetic failure, which Hodnett wraps in the fraught historiography of the term ‘mannerism’ and its relationship to the normative aesthetic of classicism as well as the modernist mistrust of ornament; and 2) a failure of decorum, predicated on the conventional boundaries between two genres arguably as distinct in the sixteenth century as now.46 As David Summers notes of the early modern grotesque, a ‘brilliance of invention was allowed in frames and pilasters that would not have been acceptable in narrative scenes or religious images’.47 The pictorial record itself confirms the implicit historical boundary between ornament and narrative – especially sacred narrative – and Hodnett’s evaluation of the Passio Verbigenae demonstrates the persistence of the division. What Hodnett dismissed as a mélange de genre, monster theorist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen might have described in more active terms as a ‘disturbing hybrid’ of category, ‘a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions’.48 The Passio Verbigenae, which calls any number of categories into question, is an assault on artistic convention by visual means, an iconoclasm of sorts. What is at stake, however, is not simply the authority of narrative as a means of encoding social and cultural values and the corollary function of ornament as something that signals meaningful content from without; rather, Gheeraerts’s monstrous ornament questions the relationship between mimesis and truth. Gheeraerts demands that the message of salvation be divorced from mimetic presentation without giving up entirely on the figurative as a means to signal verity.

Gheeraerts and Art Christ’s Passion was the central narrative of Christianity. It was highly codified, and it supported little artistic licence. And yet the Passio Verbigenae takes unprecedented liberties with the story through its radical use of the grotesque. The proper representation of sacred imagery was a matter of theological and popular discussion during Gheeraerts’s lifetime. Catholic apologists like Johannes Molanus looked to standardize sacred images, particularly those relating to the infancy and Passion of 45 Hodnett, Marcus Gheeraerts, p. 61. 46 For Antwerp Mannerism, see Brink, ExtravagAnt! The literature on Mannerism is vast; see especially Shearman, Mannerism. A key text for modernist attitudes toward ornament is Adolf Loos’s lecture ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’ given in 1908 and first published in 1913 in French. See Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’. 47 Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Grotesque’, p. 22. 48 Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, p. 6.

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Christ, while reformers sought to purge sacred spaces of religious ‘idols’, even by violent means.49 In the turbulent times engulfing Antwerp, from the iconoclastic riots of 1566 and the subsequent onset of the Dutch Revolt, through the Spanish Fury and the Pacification of Ghent (both 1576), to the silent iconoclasm (1581) of the so-called Calvinist Republic and the decisive Fall of Antwerp to the Spanish Habsburgs in 1585, art – especially religious art – found itself under siege. Antwerp’s artists sought ways to navigate this professional crisis, giving rise to ‘experiments in decorum’ that could satisfy particular or overlapping confessional demands.50 Gheeraerts’s Passio Verbigenae was one such experiment that seems to have engaged directly with questions surrounding the value of verisimilitude in religious imagery. Moral objections to the grotesque had long centred on its falsity, a problem that preoccupied the ancients as much as it would early modern image theorists. Horace and Vitruvius considered the monstrous hybrids of ornament to be void of substance, irrational, and beyond the bounds of nature.51 Vitruvius especially objected to the popular esteem for such ‘falsehoods’, declaring that ‘pictures cannot be approved which do not resemble reality’.52 This popular esteem was partly due to the grotesque’s sensual appeal, which made it an attractive and compelling force that threatened to overwhelm the power of reason in the service of a false truth.53 Such concerns persisted into the early modern period and would become central to the image debates, affecting the reception of works like the Passio Verbigenae. Gheeraerts’s interpolation of the monstrous into sacred narrative would have bristled against a theological preoccupation with the legitimacy of religious images and their claim to truth through mimesis. His unusual spatial layouts and hybrid forms undermined the ability to read iconic Christian subjects as verisimilar representations of historical moments. Such licence had been condemned by the Council of Trent in its 1563 pronouncement on images, which stipulated that ‘no representation of false doctrine […] be exhibited’ and ‘nothing may appear that is disorderly or unbecoming and confusedly arranged, nothing that is profane, nothing disrespectful’.54 While the grotesque was not explicitly addressed in this decree, its characteristic features made it implicitly suspect. It would be directly discussed in terms of its falsity, profanity, and seeming disorderliness in the works of Counter-Reformation authors, many of whom were likely known to Gheeraerts and his circle of erudite and politically engaged friends, patrons, and collaborators. 49 Even the placement of the good thief on Christ’s right and the bad on his left merited a chapter in Molanus’s De picturis et imaginibus sacris of 1570, as did the need to show the thieves nailed to the cross rather than tied—a requirement that Gheeraerts seems to flout. See Molanus, Traité des Saintes Images, I, pp. 504–7. 50 Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm. 51 Horace, Ars poetica, Book 1, ll. 1–13, in Satires, Epistles, The Art of Poetry, 450–51. Vitruvius, De architectura, Book 7, Chapter 5, 3–4 in On Architecture, I, pp. 104–5. See also the Introduction of this book, pp. 26–27. 52 Vitruvius, On Architecture, I, p. 104. 53 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, pp. 26–31. 54 Schroeder, ‘On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images’, p. 217.

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In the wake of Trent, Catholic apologists continued to make the truth of mimesis a focal point of the image debates.55 Accordingly, grotesques, monsters, and fanciful hybrid forms were expressly denied any place in sacred art. Netherlandish theologian Martinus Duncanus would argue for verisimilitude in Een cort onderscheyt tusschen Godlyke ende afgodissche beelden (A brief distinction between divine and idolatrous images, 1567). For Duncanus, a truthful image was ‘a figure or sign of a thing, which sign or signified thing is also in nature’.56 Thus, the lions on Solomon’s throne were truthful images since lions were found in nature; however, he notes, had they been fashioned with the hinds of lions, the bodies of birds, and the heads of pigs, they would have been false.57 The Louvain theologian Johannes Molanus echoed the opprobrium against curious and hybrid representations in his De picturis et imaginibus sacris (1570). In a chapter entitled ‘That nothing profane should be mixed into sacred images, neither in churches nor monasteries’, he invoked the well-known arguments of Bernard which questioned the utility of ridiculosa monstruositas (‘ridiculous monsters’) in devotional contexts.58 Similar objections would be made by the Italian cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, who dedicated no fewer than six chapters of his Discorso intorno alle imagini sacri e profane (1582) to the problem of the grotesque, declaring ‘if art imitates nature, then grotesques fall outside the bounds of art’.59 He prefaced these chapters with a discussion of the monstrous, which ‘sets out to depict [what] is not true by nature’ and is thus as reprehensible as the grotesque.60 Monsters […] are bodies, whether of men or brute animals, that are against the order of nature. This mainly occurs in two modes, with respect to the limbs and parts of the body in itself and with respect to the natural relationship that is supposed to obtain among them.61

For Paleotti, monsters and grotesques were both false images attempting ‘to recount [narrare] something that clashes not only with the truth of facts but even with what is possible in nature: this one does not find either with good poets or with good painters’.62 55 Jonckheere, ‘Images of Stone’, pp. 118–24. 56 ‘Een oprecht en(de) warachtich beelt is een figuere oft teecken van eenich dinck / welck teecken en(de) beteeckende dinck also in der natueren is.’ Duncanus, Een cort onderscheyt tusschen godlyke ende afgodissche beelden, p. C iii r. 57 ‘Hadde hy die leewen ghemaect dat mense soude gehoude(n) hebben als goden / en(de) dat mense ghelijck God soude aengebeden gebben / oft had hyse achter ghemaect als leewen / int middel als vogels / aent hofft als verekens / soo en warent gheen warachtige beelde(n) geweest / maer loghenachtighe beelden.’ Ibid., p. C iii r–v. 58 See Chapter XXX in Molanus, De picturis et imaginibus sacris, pp. L2r–L5r, esp. L3v–L4r. For a modern French edition, see Molanus, Traité des Saintes Images, Book 2, Chapter 38, pp. 231–4, esp. 233. 59 Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, p. 274. 60 Ibid., p. 260. 61 Ibid., p. 258. 62 Ibid., p. 279.

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Gheeraerts’s grotesques, and particularly his distortions of bodies in the climactic episodes of the Passion, work against verisimilitude and thus Catholic image doctrine. They cast the religious representation not as a truthful reportage guaranteed by mimesis but as an image – that is, an artifice of the human hand. Despite this, the series does not entirely resist devotional apprehension, for its figures and fragments retain a mimetic appeal. Nevertheless, a variety of strategies counteract habits of devotional viewing, including boundary breaches, monstrous imagery, and the conventions of the artist’s ornamental model book. Most significantly, Gheeraerts establishes the grotesque not simply as anti-mimetic but as a barrier between the viewer and the represented story – a barrier that the protagonists themselves are made to struggle with, such as the soldiers who climb over, reach around, and teeter upon the sharp strapwork scaffold, or the damned souls who contend with the animate and ever-shifting ground of hell. By foregrounding struggle, Gheeraerts primes the viewer for the tension of the viewing experience; no sooner does one slip into a devotional mode of seeing, facilitated by the familiar story and passages of credible figures and fragments, than one is jarred back to the surface of the image by their unusual arrangement within a planar ornamental system that works against sustained penetration and meditation.63 By making it difficult to intuit and navigate through the narrative/grotesque binary, Gheeraerts gives visual form to the longstanding notion that the poet or artist could be an oracle to a higher truth encoded in a challenging and otherwise impenetrable form.64 The prominent appearance of Gheeraerts’s name and that of Sadeler on all thirteen passion prints helps to situate these artists as guides through the core of Christian mystery, a mystery announced on the title page. Yet in spite of this lofty spiritual goal, in the Passio Verbigenae, Gheeraerts’s means and message verge on the iconoclastic. He uses ornament to confound the claim to truth of mimesis, revealing the religious image as an artifice and thus a hollow substitute for an imperfectly materializable divine.65 The Passio Verbigenae’s more radical challenges to Catholic image doctrine were enabled by the political climate in Antwerp following the Pacification of Ghent, when Gheeraerts was likely resident in the city. The artist clearly feared no rebuke from Catholic authorities at this time. Not only does Gheeraerts’s name appear on the prints but also part of his personal device seems to have found its way into the final engraving of the series, Resurrection (Ill. 3.14). The motif of the S-form snake entwined with the globe, seen atop the tomb at the centre of the print, is a central component of the artist’s personal emblem as he drew it in the alba amicorum of a number of prominent individuals, including Abraham Ortelius, Johannes 63 Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Grotesque’, pp. 25–6. 64 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 65 See Heuer, ‘Ornamental Defacement and Protestant Iconoclasm’.

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Ill. 3.22: Marcus Gheeraerts, inscription on fol. 45r of the Album Amicorum of Johannes Vivianus, 30 January 1578. Coloured drawing on paper, 7.5 x 9.6 cm. The Hague, Royal Library. Photo: Europeana.

Vivianus (Ill. 3.22), Marie van Marnix, and (presumably) Emmanuel van Meteren.66 This potential reference is subtle enough not to overwhelm the Passio Verbigenae’s 66 Ortelius, Album amicorum, fol. 66. Gheeraerts’s entries in Vivianus’s and Van Marnix’s alba are reproduced in Martens, Bruges and the Renaissance, cat. no. 129 and Willem van Oranje, cat. no. A 33 respectively. Gheeraerts appears in the index of Van Meteren’s album, but the relevant page (fol. 17) is missing. See Rogge, ‘Het Album van Emanuel van Meteren’, p. 22.

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Resurrection with Gheeraerts’s personal branding; but it might have provoked a knowing smile among his circle of intimates, a group of free-thinking artists and intellectuals that included not only the above-mentioned owners of the alba amicorum but also his printmaking collaborators Philips Galle, Gerard de Jode, and Jan Sadeler, the physician Hugo Favolius, the artist and antiquarian Hubrecht Goltzius, the publisher Christopher Plantin, the poets Lucas de Heere, Eduard de Dene, and Jan van der Noot, the Bruges mint-master Cornelis van Hooghendorp, and the wealthy merchant Jacques Hoefnagel.67 For an erudite and engaged audience like this, as well as for those artists who would draw on Gheeraerts’s inventions, the prints of the Passio Verbigenae must have been received as a signature-like mark of inspired virtuosity. More broadly, they may also have been interpreted as an ideological statement. Gheeraerts’s immediate departure from the Low Countries following the Fall of Antwerp to Catholic Spain likely reflects not only the change in the city’s religio-political circumstance but also its potential to recast his work from the experimental toward the heretical. Given his prior conviction for heresy, such caution would have been understandable. The title page of the Passio Verbigenae clearly signals its twofold religious and artistic orientation through its framing texts; for those who look closely, however, the more provocative ideological leanings of the series and its most significant formal innovations are already there on display. A central, pictorial field bounded by an oval frame contains the instruments of the passion, styled as ex hoste trophaea (‘trophies from the enemy’). The ornament of the frame is elaborated within the pictorial field, its strapwork and scrollwork extending into the space of the image and supporting the display of the arma Christi, which hang from, weave through, and rest upon its spiral forms. Significantly, mask-like faces extrude from the scrollwork to mock and spit at the vera icon of Christ – one of the most significant relics of St. Peter’s in Rome and one imbricated with the Reformation flashpoints of indulgence granting and image veneration.68 This detail of the masks is easily intuited and even dismissed as a way of anchoring the figures of Christ’s tormentors, who are often shown as disembodied, free-floating heads in other representations of the arma Christi. However, by making the tormentors a part of the ornamental armature and having them directly confront a paradigmatic symbol of the image controversy, Gheeraerts presages one of the most innovative aspects of the series – that grotesque ornament might become a participant in sacred narrative and, by extension, the image debates themselves.

67 For Gheeraerts’s social networks, see Dewilde, ‘Het sociaal kapitaal van Marcus Gerards’; Town, ‘A Fête at Bermondsey’. 68 Vanhaelen, The Wake of Iconoclasm, pp. 50–56.

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Maximiliaan P.J. Martens, ed., Bruges and the Renaissance: Memling to Pourbus (Bruges: Stichting Kunstboek, 1998). Tine L. Meganck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Fall of the Rebel Angels: Art, Knowledge and Politics on the Eve of the Dutch Revolt (Milan: Silvana, 2015). Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013). Johannes Molanus, De picturis et imaginibus sacris, liber unus, tractans de vitandis circa eas abusibus ac de earundem significationibus (Louvain, 1570). Johannes Molanus, Traité des saintes images, 2 vols. (Paris: Cerf, 1996). Philippe Morel, Les grotesques: les figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1997). Georg Kaspar Nagler, Die Monogrammisten. Reprint of edition Munich: G. Franz, 1858–1879 (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1966). Helmut Nickel, Stuart W. Pyhrr, and Leonid Tarassuk, eds., The Art of Chivalry: European Arms and Armor from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: An Exhibition (New York: The Federation, 1982). Greet Nijs, ‘Typology of the Border Decoration in Manuscripts of the Ghent-Bruges School’, in Als Ich Can: Liber Amicorum in Memory of Professor Dr. Maurits Smeyers, edited by Maurits Smeyers, Bert Cardon, Jan van der Stock, Dominique Vanwijnsberghe, and Katharina Smeyers, II (Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2002), pp. 1007–1036. Abraham Ortelius, Album amicorum, edited and translated by Jean Puraye (Amsterdam: A.L. van Gendt & Co., 1969). Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012). Isabelle de Ramaix, Johan Sadeler I, The Illustrated Bartsch 70 (Supplement) (New York: Abaris Books, 1999). Isabelle de Ramaix, ‘Les Sadeler: de demasquinerus à Graveurs et Marchands d’estampes. Quelques documents inedits’, Le Livre et l’estampe 131 (1989), pp. 7–46. Isabelle de Ramaix, Les Sadeler: graveurs et éditeurs (Bruxelles: Bibliothèque royale Albert Ier, 1992). H.C. [Hendrik Cornelis] Rogge, ‘Het Album van Emanuel van Meteren’, Oud Holland 15, no. 3 (1897), pp. 159–92. Philippe Rombouts and Théodore van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde onder zinspreuk ‘Wt ionsten versaemt’, 2 vols. Reprint of edition Antwerp and The Hague:Baggerman, 1864 (Amsterdam: Israel, 1961). Sune Schéle, Cornelis Bos: A Study of the Origins of the Netherland Grotesque (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1965). Albert Schouteet, De zestiende-eeuwsche schilder en graveur Marcus Gerards (Bruges: Gidsenbond, 1941). H.J. Schroeder, trans., ‘On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images’, in Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1978), pp. 214–17. Christiaan Schuckman, Maarten de Vos, edited by Diewke De Hoop Scheffer, Hollstein’s Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, c. 1450–1700, XLIV – XLVI (Amsterdam: Van Gendt, 1980). John K.G. Shearman, Mannerism: Style and Civilization (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Ad Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, 1400–2000: A History of the Development of Manual Intaglio Printmaking Processes (Houten, Netherlands: Archetype Publications in association with HES and DE GRAAF Publishers, 2012). David Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Grotesque’, in Modern Art and the Grotesque, edited by Frances S. Connelly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 20–46. Edward Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary of London Painters, 1547–1625’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 76 (2014), pp. 1–235. Edward Town, ‘“A Fête at Bermondsey”: An English Landscape by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder’, The Burlington Magazine 157, no. 1346 (2015), pp. 309–17. Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, ‘Revolting Beasts: Animal Satire and Animal Trials in the Dutch Revolt’, in The Anthropomorphic Lens: Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism, and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts, edited by Walter S. Melion, Bret Rothstein, and Michel Weemans, Intersections: Yearbook for Early Modern Studies 34 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 23–42.

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Jan Van derStock, Cornelis Matsys, 1510/11–1556/57: œuvre graphique: catalogue d’exposition (Bruxelles: Bibliothèque royale Albert Ier, 1985). Joris Van Grieken, Ger Luijten, and Jan Van der Stock, eds. Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2013). H.F.K. Van Nierop, ‘De Troon van Alva: Over de Interpretatie van de Nederlandse Opstand’, BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 110, no. 2 (1995), pp. 205–23. Angela Vanhaelen, The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). Vitruvius, On Architecture, translated by Frank Granger, 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library 251, 280 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Rik Vos and Fred Leeman, Het nieuwe ornament: gids voor de renaissance-architectuur en -decoratie in Nederland in de 16de eeuw (The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij, 1986). Carsten-Peter Warncke, Die ornamentale Groteske in Deutschland, 1500–1650 (Berlin: Verlag Volker Spiess, 1979). Erin Lynnette Webster, ‘Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder and the Language of Art: Images with Text in the Elizabethan Renaissance’, PhD thesis (Case Western Reserve University, 2001). Willem van Oranje: om vrijheid van geweten. Tentoonstelling, 28 september – 9 december 1984, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1984). Alfred von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon; auf Grund archivalischer Forschungen bearbeitet (Leipzig: Halm und Goldmann, 1906). Petra Sophia Zimmermann, ‘The Relation to Practice in the Publications of Hans Vredeman de Vries’, in Hans Vredeman de Vries and the Artes Mechanicae Revisited, edited by Piet Lombaerde, Architectura Moderna 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 15–31. Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

About the author Tianna Helena Uchacz is a Postdoctoral Scholar on the Making and Knowing Project and Lecturer in the Department of History at Columbia University. She received a PhD in Art History from the University of Toronto in 2016 and has held fellowships at Utrecht University, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, and the Science History Institute. Her research on the Netherlandish nude has appeared in the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (2017) and Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century (Brepols, 2018). She has contributed to edited volumes on digital pedagogy (forthcoming) and is co-authoring an article on the materials and making of ephemeral art in early modern Europe. She is a Senior Editor of Craft and Science: From the Workshop to the Laboratory. A Digital Critical Edition and Translation of BnF Ms Fr 640 (2019).

4. ‘That savage should mate with tame’: ­Hybridity, Indeterminacy, and the ­Grotesque in the Murals of San Miguel Arcángel (Ixmiquilpan, Mexico) Barnaby Nygren

Abstract The murals that line the walls of the Augustinian convent church of San Miguel Arcángel in Ixmiquilpan (Hidalgo) together constitute one of the most important pictorial ensembles of early colonial Mexico. While these paintings have been understood both as a visual record of the voices of the subaltern and as a tool to aid Christian evangelization and conquest, the function of the grotesque in these works has been largely ignored. Drawing on period and modern understandings of the style, this chapter argues that, while the grotesque was used at Ixmiquilpan as a way to classify, control, and marginalize native culture, it simultaneously gave pictorial form to the unresolved, unclassifiable, dangerous, and protean realities of Christian evangelism in the New World. Keywords: Mexico, evangelization, hybridity, New World, Augustinian, painting

The former Augustinian convent church of San Miguel in Ixmiquilpan (Hidalgo) is known for the sixteenth-century murals that decorate the lower walls of the nave. Located about 150 kilometres north of Mexico City, the church was constructed between 1550 and 1560 under the Augustinian prior Andrés de Mata, and the nave murals were painted by indigenous artists most likely in the late 1560s or early 1570s.1 Covered up at a later date, the murals were discovered in the late 1950s and subsequently have generated considerable scholarly attention.

1

Estrada de Gerlero, ‘El friso’, p. 17; Pierce, ‘The Sixteenth-Century’, pp. 1, 87–88, 158.

Hammeken, C.A. and M.F. Hansen (eds.), Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789462984967_ch04

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Iconography and Context The murals, which are located slightly above eye level and are over 2 metres in height, originally covered both sides of the nave and underchoir. Drawing on European decorative prints, they use the unifying motif of grotesque-inspired scrolling acanthus vines to depict a battle that pits figures with bows, centaur-like beings, dragons, and other fantastical creatures against warriors with shields and obsidian-edged clubs (Ills. 4.1 and 4.2).2 The latter are sometimes dressed in jaguar, coyote, and eagle costumes, the dress of the native warrior classes that continued to be worn during colonial festivals.3 Given the references to native warfare, the fantastical creatures, and the absence of obvious Christian content, questions of iconography have dominated the literature. Most now agree that the work presents a psychomachia, a moralizing battle between good and evil.4 In such a reading the fantastic figures and warriors with bows represent the forces of evil, while the costumed figures and their allies embody the forces of good. Moreover, it is also generally accepted that the work is a recasting of the struggle between the sedentary and Christianized Indians of the area, particularly the Otomí, and the nomadic Chichimecs to the north.5 The conflict between the Chichimecs and the Spanish, and their indigenous allies, intensified around 1550 with the discovery of silver in Zacatecas.6 Typified by their nudity and use of the bow, the Chichimecs were cast in universally unfavourable terms both by other indigenous groups and by the Spanish, and were frequently identified with the animalistic, the demonic, and the monstrous.7 The Chichimec War directly involved both the Augustinians, who in 1569 helped provide a theological justification for this war and who were also engaged in evangelization in the north, and the Otomí, who played an important role in the fighting.8 Given the likely date of these murals, it has been suggested that they functioned as political propaganda, honouring Otomí involvement and encouraging future participation by casting the conflict in moralizing terms.9 2 Estrada de Gerlero, ‘El friso’, p. 10; Pierce, ‘The Sixteenth-Century’ pp. 145–146; Ballesteros García, San Miguel Arcángel, pp. 33–39. 3 Pierce, ‘Identification’, pp. 6–7. 4 Carrillo y Gariel, Ixmiquilpan, p. 24. 5 Estrada de Gerlero, ‘El friso’, pp. 15–18; Pierce, ‘Identification’, pp. 3–7; Pierce, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Murals’, pp. 31–45; Vergara Hernández, Las pinturas, pp. 181–188. 6 Powell, Soldiers, Indians and Silver, pp. 3–52, 105–178. 7 Powell, Soldiers, Indians and Silver, pp. 2–54; Pierce, ‘Identification’, pp. 2–5; Solís de la Torre, Bárbaros, pp. 37–38. 8 Pierce, ‘The Sixteenth Century’, pp. 57–58, 89–105; Vergara Hernández, Las pinturas, pp. 77–80, 107–156; Debroise Curare, ‘Imaginario fronterizo’, pp. 160, 165–168. See also Abel-Turby, ‘New World Augustinians and Franciscans’. 9 Pierce, ‘The Sixteenth Century’, pp. 105, 108–113; Vergara Hernández, Las pinturas, pp. 185–186; Jackson, Conflict and Conversion, pp. 12, 147–149.

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Ill. 4.1: Anonymous painters, Coyote Warrior from north nave wall, San Miguel Arcángel, Ixmiquilpan (Hidalgo, Mexico), c. 1568–1572. Photo: Barnaby Nygren.

Tied to the work’s iconography are additional questions about the presence and function of pre-Hispanic indigenous elements. Such hybridity was ubiquitous in early colonial art, dance, music, and theatre, all of which contained elements that hybridized the Christian with pre-Conquest forms in order to encourage native participation in the rituals of the Church.10 Still, while the friars often encouraged the use of native dances and performances for evangelical purposes, there was a persistent concern that such rituals might perpetuate native beliefs and practices.11 Scholars have found a host of indigenous symbolism in the murals, including references to the solar cult and to the gods Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca.12 The unusually strong colours of these paintings also had indigenous associations, as the

10 See Burkhart, ‘Pious Performances’; Harris, The Dialogic Theatre, pp. 65–81; Breining, Dramatic and Theatrical Censorship, pp. 128–129, 161–162. 11 Breining, Censorship, pp. 94–95. 12 See Alboronoz Bueno, La memoria del olvido, pp. 43–125; Guerrero Guerrero, Murales, 51–60. See also Wright Carr, ‘Sangre para el Sol’, pp. 73–78; Wake, ‘Sacred Books’, pp. 103–108.

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Ill. 4.2: Anonymous painters, Centaur Figure from south nave wall. San Miguel Arcángel, Ixmiquilpan (Hidalgo, Mexico), c. 1568–1572. Photo: Barnaby Nygren.

figures of the gods, the temples, and the celebrants in native rituals would have been brightly painted.13 Also significant are the murals’ allusions to sacred warfare and indigenous notions of the paradisiacal ‘flowery death’ bestowed upon warriors who died in combat.14 This pre-Hispanic symbolism has been seen both as a marker of native agency and resistance and an attempt on the part of the friars to exploit similarities between Christian and native beliefs for evangelical purposes.15 Thus, while the scrolling acanthus designs derive from European prints, they might also recall

13 For colour symbolism see Wake, Framing, pp. 109–110, 128–129, 176–177. 14 See Gruzinski, ‘Entre monos’, pp. 357–358; Wake, ‘Sacred Books’, pp. 103–108; Wright Carr, ‘Sangre para el Sol’, pp. 74–78, 86–89. 15 Carrillo y Gariel, Ixmiquilpan, p. 25; Albornoz Bueno, La memoria del olvido, pp. 27–30; Wright Carr, ‘Sangre para el Sol’, pp. 90, 92; Gruzinski, ‘Entre monos’, pp. 357–358; Wake, ‘Sacred Books’ pp. 108–115.

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both pre-Conquest beliefs and the floral elements that were incorporated into the religious rituals and visual art of New Spain in order to evoke both Christian and indigenous ideas about gardens and paradise.16 In terms of the paintings’ political function, the murals certainly drew on pre-Hispanic traditions of sacred warfare in order to encourage the Otomí to view the war with the Chichimecs in traditional religious terms.17 At the same time, the presence and the movement of the figures, many of whom are depicted with ‘song scrolls’ coming from their mouths, evoked the performances of the period involving dance, song, and traditional costume, which, while transformed to serve Christian ends, continued to reference pre-Hispanic beliefs and histories.18 It is clear then that these hybrid paintings were the product of a complex cultural negotiation between the native painters and the Augustinians, as these works both possessed pre-Hispanic meanings and enacted a Christian psychomachia directed at encouraging colonial military action and aiding evangelization. However, the existing scholarship largely ignores the important question of why the Augustinians would have endorsed the painting at scale of such a grotesque-inflected work. Already by the middle of the century concerns were being raised about the decorum of the performances that were occurring inside the churches in Mexico.19 While the periodic attention to this issue suggests that these problematic performances continued, unlike the murals, such performances did not permanently introduce incongruous elements into the church itself. Still, the Augustinians certainly must have approved the decorative programme; by 1539, and again with the First Mexican Council of 1555, procedures were in place for insuring that native-painted images passed doctrinal muster.20 While the Augustinians, who took no vow of poverty, had a predilection for novel iconography, this alone does not explain why they approved the grotesque as the key organizing feature of this unprecedented programme.21 This chapter will attempt to answer this question.

16 See Burkhart, ‘Pious Performances’, pp. 357–368; Burkhart, ‘Flowery Heaven’; Peterson, The Paradise Garden, pp. 83–142; Wake, Framing, pp. 203–205, 235–253. 17 Vergara Hernández, Las pinturas, pp. 181–188; Gruzinski, ‘Entre monos’, pp. 357–358; Wright Carr, ‘Sangre para el Sol’, p. 90. 18 Wake, ‘Sacred Books’, pp. 104–116. 19 Breining, Dramatic and Theatrical Censorship, pp. 76–80. 20 Estrada de Gerlero, ‘Apuntes’, pp. 178–179. 21 Peterson, The Paradise Garden, p. 17.

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The Grotesque in Mexico The grotesque was quite common in sixteenth-century Mexico.22 Derived from illustrations in books, it appears regularly as a frieze or border in both domestic and monastic contexts.23 The use of the grotesque owes much to the popularity of the style in Europe, but it has also been suggested that native painters may have embraced the form because the Spanish viewed the grotesque as a frame without meaning; thus the grotesque could be used by the indigenous artists to include, under a decorative and classicizing guise, iconographical and formal elements that might otherwise be prohibited.24 This finds confirmation in the insertion into grotesque borders of Aztec speech scrolls and plants and animals with pre-Hispanic significance.25 Moreover, Bernardino da Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (1569) describes the native painter/scribe as one who ‘draws gardens, paints flowers, creates works of art’; this association between flowers and painting, and hence the grotesque, is reinforced in an image elsewhere in the text that shows a flower collector arranging flowers in a grotesque-like design.26 This linkage between painting and flowers referenced Aztec notions of paradise and constructed the post-Conquest art of grotesque painting as a continuation of Aztec ideals.27 Even the grotesque’s flowing patterns of movement echoed the formal properties inherent in indigenous songs and dances, and might have also embodied native ideas about the motile nature of the universe.28 Finally, at Ixmiquilpan the monumental grotesque functions as a very convenient organizing principle, creating a sense of order and movement without the use of a formalized narrative structure. However, while significant, the indigenous significations of grotesque do not entirely account for the presence of the style, since such explanations leave unaccounted for the Augustinians’ presumed endorsement of its use. Moreover, there are sequential depictions of figural groups, albeit ones involved in more orderly processions, in Huejotzingo and San Juan Tietipac that do not use the grotesque and are instead naturalistic in appearance.29 Likewise, if, as has been suggested, the murals at Ixmiquilpan were inspired by European prints showing Old Testament battles and by an emerging tradition of colonial battle painting, these sources similarly lack any use of the grotesque as an organizing feature.30 Thus it seems that the meaning of the 22 Estrada de Gerlero, ‘Apuntes’. 23 Estrada de Gerlero, ‘Apuntes’, pp. 165–169; Wake, Framing, pp. 177–78, 252–254; Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind, pp. 82–84. 24 Fraser, ‘Ixmiquilpan’, p. 15; Gruzinski, ‘Entre monos’, pp. 367–370. 25 Wake, Framing, pp. 177–178, 252–254. 26 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, XI, p. 28; XII: Fig. 740. 27 Estrada de Gerlero, ‘Apuntes’, p. 155. 28 Debroise Curare, ‘Imaginario fronterizo’, pp. 164–165; Gruzinski, El águila, pp. 85, 164–165; Wake, Framing, pp. 200, 203–205, 248–254; Edgerton, Theaters of Conversion, pp. 167, 170. 29 See Webster, ‘Art, Ritual, and Confraternities’. 30 Pierce, ‘The Sixteenth-Century’, pp. 132–140; Pérez Flores and González Varela, ‘Los murals’, pp. 130–140.

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grotesque as form in the European outlook of the Augustinians must be examined, particularly as it is possible that Andrés de Mata, the prior at Ixmiquilpan, worked as a painter before coming to New Spain.31

The Grotesque in Europe Such an inquiry is problematized, however, as our works were painted when there was a growing tendency to critique this popular form of decoration on both artistic and religious grounds.32 From an artistic perspective such criticisms were rooted in Horace’s Ars poetica and Vitruvius’s De architectura. The latter criticized artists who had turned away from ‘imitations based on reality’ in order to make ‘monsters rather than definite representations taken from definite things’.33 Horace too disapproved of painters who depicted a ‘lovely woman [who] ends below in a black and ugly fish’.34 Such things, he argued, were ‘like a sick man’s dreams’ and pushed pictorial creativity beyond its reasonable, mimetic, and natural bounds ‘so […] that savage should mate with tame [and] serpents couple with birds, lambs with tigers’.35 Often referencing these sources, Counter-Reformation artistic theorists turned against the unnatural aspects of the grotesque. In his Commentarios de la pintura (1563) Felipe de Guevara drew on the ideas of Horace and Vitruvius when he defined painting as fundamentally mimetic.36 Unsurprisingly, Guevara strongly objects to the grotesque, even asking God to pardon the artist who introduced this new style in Spain.37 He does, however, admit that that such unnatural forms could be valid, but only in demonic depictions like those of Hieronymus Bosch.38 This mimetic and literal attitude is more fully elaborated just a few years later, albeit after the likely date of our murals, in Gabriele Paleotti’s Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582). While Paleotti permitted fierce and horrendous pictures when they amplified virtue or condemned sin and allowed for fantastical monsters when sanctioned by scripture or saintly revelation, these were exceptions to a definition of painting based on naturalism and decorum.39 Obviously, the grotesque falls outside these limits, and Paleotti spends considerable time addressing the style. 31 Estrada de Gerlero, ‘El friso’, p. 17. 32 For Italian theoretical responses to the grotesque see Morel, ‘Il funzionamento simbolico’. For Spain and the New World see Estrada de Gerlero, ‘Apuntes’. 33 Vitruvius, De architectura, VII, 5, 3–4. Translation from Vitruvius, On Architecture, II, p. 105. See Introduction, p. 26. 34 Translation from Horace, Satires, p. 451. See Introduction, p. 26-27. 35 Horace, Satires, pp. 451, 479. 36 Guevara, Comentarios, p. 91. 37 Guevara, Comentarios, p. 100. 38 Guevara, Comentarios, pp. 126–127. 39 Paleotti, Discorso, pp. 207–213. See Introduction, p. 29.

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Paleotti begins his account with an investigation into the origins of the grotesque, which he ultimately locates in underground pagan temples dedicated to false and infernal gods.40 He claims that these temples were decorated with monstrous paintings appropriate to the sacrificial rituals, fantastical creatures, and fables of transformation that were associated with these sites.41 As Paleotti’s arguments for the subterranean, pagan origins of the style might suggest, he believes that ‘grotesques should not be painted anywhere today, least of all in churches’.42 Yet the concerns that such images were necessarily pagan and infernal are only some of Paleotti’s many objections. Drawing again on Horace and Vitruvius, he describes the grotesque using a host of negative terms that evoke the untruthful, unnatural, obscure, and deceptive nature of the style, and expresses the worry that, while beneficial pictures can aid devotion, the grotesque will ‘entangle the minds of simple folk in infinite errors’ and compromise art’s educational function.43 Significantly, however, Paleotti also associates the grotesque with wonder and even, indirectly, the New World. He notes that some have claimed that the grotesque had its roots in the desire of the Romans to depict the ‘strange animals and monsters seen in the conquered lands’. He also acknowledges that, in the case of ‘the recently discovered lands, anyone can, without criticism, paint the various monsters both human and animal described by the writers that live in those places’.44 As part of his strongly worded critique of the grotesque Paleotti also presents, and defeats, the counter-arguments of his adversaries. These arguments include its classical origins, its delightful aspects, the inventive freedom it provides, and, potentially at least, its allegorical meaning.45 While Paleotti finds none of these explanations convincing, many of these ideas can be traced in the not inconsiderable literature of the period that defended the grotesque. The classical origins of the style were, of course, a recurring motif in its defence, as was visual pleasure. In many accounts, the association of the grotesque with artistic creativity and neo-Platonic furore plays a particularly important role. For example, Anton Francesco Doni in his Disegno (1549) defends the grotesque by emphasizing its connections to neo-Platonic artistic invention and, thus, positively constructs the presence of the fantastic, the imaginative, and even the chaotic.46 Others highlighted the symbolic or allegorical function of the grotesque. Pirro Ligorio’s Libro dell’antichitá (c. 1575) provides a symbolic justification for the style, claiming that such paintings presented profound, if hidden, moral ideas and should be associated with Ovid 40 Paleotti, Discorso, pp. 214–224. 41 Paleotti, Discorso, pp. 221–224. 42 Paleotti, Discorso, pp. 226. All translations by the author unless otherwise indicated. 43 Paleotti, Discorso, pp. 226–228. 44 Paleotti, Discorso, pp. 211, 218. 45 Paleotti, Discorso, pp. 229–233. 46 Doni, Disegno, pp. 22–23.

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and other poets and philosophers of transformation.47 In his Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scultura, et architectura (1584) Gian Paolo Lomazzo also argues for the allegorical nature of the grotesque, which, when properly executed, functions similarly to cyphers or hieroglyphs, ‘expressing things and concepts, not with the things themselves, but in other forms’.48

Problems of the Mexican Grotesque While some of these defences of the grotesque might be operative here, it is hard to see how they provide much immediate traction. Aspects of classicism, popularity, pleasure, and delight might explain the ubiquity of grotesque borders in the cloisters, but such concerns have no place in the church, particularly at scale. Appeals to individual invention or furore are suspect given the native origins of the painters and recurring concerns of hidden pagan content. Similar objections can be raised against allegorical readings of the grotesque. Even if one grants that grotesques held allegorical meaning, then these obscure meanings were highly problematic in a missionary context.49 Instead it is the criticisms of Guevara and Paleotti that appear to be most significant. Their critiques emphasized both naturalism and the function of painting as an aid to devotion and instruction. Thus the extravagant, unnatural, and confusing nature of the grotesque would necessarily disqualify it from serious consideration as an artistic form, unless in the context of the representation of hell and its horrors. Moreover, the infernal and pagan origins of the grotesque, at least as later described by Paleotti, would have further compromised the style. Any concerns about the infernal, subterranean practices of the ancient Romans must have been magnified when considering the similarly idolatrous, demonic, and sanguinary rituals of Mexico. In fact, one can see traces of this critical attitude in the sculptural decoration of the open chapel at San Luis Obispo in Tlalmanalco, State of Mexico (Ill. 4.3). Carved by native artists around 1565, the open chapel features a recessed central arch topped by a small relief of Christ accompanied by angels, a motif that recalls the Last Judgement.50 The five arches that serve as a screen to this altar niche are heavily encrusted with fantastic and diabolic grotesque forms designed to contrast with the visual and eschatological simplicity of Christ and the angels behind.51 The arrangement here 47 Ligorio, Libro, p. 163. 48 Lomazzo, Trattato, pp. 367, 369. 49 For a possible link between Ixmiquilpan and Ligorio’s allegorical grotesque see Estrada de Gerlero, ‘Apuntes’, p. 170. However, according to Paleotti, Discorso, p. 232 such allegorical images are now unnecessary, since ‘the sun of [Christian] truth’ has eliminated the need for ‘such fables or inventions’. 50 See Curiel, Tlalmanalco, pp. 75–187. 51 Curiel, Tlalmanalco, pp. 144–145.

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Ill. 4.3: Anonymous sculptors, detail of open chapel, San Luis Obispo, Tlalmanalco, State of Mexico, c. 1565. Photo: Barnaby Nygren.

echoes the works of Guevara’s Bosch, where the contrast between the obvious, hellish, grotesque foreground scenes and the subtle, less immediately visible scenes of salvation is central to the rhetorical functioning of the image.52 The possibility that the murals in Ixmiquilpan might have been connected to a now destroyed image of the Last Judgement on the apse wall must be acknowledged.53 However, this possibility seems remote; and, even if this organization was present, the problem of why monumental, hybrid grotesques were painted in the nave is in no way resolved, since the visual dominance of these images problematizes their presence and again forces us to question their inclusion within the church. To understand this inclusion one must consider the reality that the Augustinians found themselves facing even 50 years after the Conquest. In the early 1570s Ixmiquilpan, an important centre of trade and Augustinian education, was involved in the conflict with the nomadic Chichimecs in the High Sierra to the north.54 Both sides in this conflict were brutal in their actions, with the Chichimecs practising human

52 Lara, City, Temple, Stage, pp. 85–86. On Bosch see Silver, ‘God in the Details’. 53 Pierce, ‘The Sixteenth-Century’ p. 157. No physical or documentary evidence supports this claim, and Pierce’s use of Santa Maria Xoxoteco and Actopan as comparative examples is problematic given that those two sites are open chapels. 54 Pierce, ‘The Sixteenth-Century’, pp. 48–57. Ixmiquilpan was attacked in 1570. See Estrada de Gerlero, ‘El friso’, p. 17.

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sacrifice and the Spanish enslaving the women and children of the Chichimecs, whom, as a group, they accused of being inspired by the devil.55 That their actions were seen as demonic is symptomatic of a broader Spanish understanding of the natives of New Spain and of the untamed spaces that the Chichimecs occupied. A key recurring motif in the writing of the monastic evangelists of the period was the concern that the devotional practices of the supposedly Christianized Indians were in fact pagan. Many writers emphasized that their protoanthropological investigations were designed to expose and eliminate the continuing existence of such practices. Bernardino de Sahagún made this motivation explicit in the prologue to the Florentine Codex: ‘Through [our] lack of knowledge […] they perform many idolatrous things in our presence without our understanding it.’56 Most importantly, previous practices and their continuation into the colonial period were universally understood in demonic terms. Bernardino de Sahagún regularly uses the term ‘devil’ when describing the Aztec religion.57 Diego Durán argues that men who smeared themselves with pitch during Aztec rituals became ‘wizards or demons, and saw and spoke with the devil’.58 Fray Motolinía describes the world of the Aztec as ‘a transplanted hell’ full of devil worship.59 Finally, Diego Valadés in his Rhetorica Christiana (1579) also references the demonic nature of such worship and the use of magic to make pacts with demons.60 The monastic writers similarly discovered the action of the devil post-Conquest. Jerónimo de Mendieta narrates examples of demons who interrupt the evangelization efforts of the friars.61 The Augustinian Juan de Grijalva treats this issue at length, telling stories that document the desire of the devil to defeat the monks and return to his old state of power.62 He also describes the Sierra Alta in barbaric and demonic terms, characterizing it as full of primitive Indians, wild beasts, and demons and thus highly resistant to Christianization.63 This link between the natives, beasts, landscape, and demons is further reinforced in his extensive treatment of the idea that native sorcerers transformed into the deadly animals that occupied these wild spaces.64

55 Powell, Soldiers, Indians and Silver, pp. 35–7, 50; Schuessler, Foundational Arts, pp. 110–111; Solís de la Torre, Bárbaros, p. 39. 56 Translation from Sahagún, Florentine Codex, I, p. 45. 57 Todorov, Conquest of America, p. 232. 58 Durán, Historia, I, p. 52. 59 Motolinía, Historia, p. 125. 60 Valadés, Retórica, pp. 387, 401, 403, 491. 61 Mendieta, Historia eclesiastica, pp. 96–97. For a period visual representation of this idea see Muñoz Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala, folio 239v, which shows demons, some dressed in native costume, being driven off by a cross erected by the first twelve Franciscan missionaries. 62 Grijalva, Croníca, pp. 78–88. 63 Grijalva, Croníca, pp. 109–113, 24. 64 Grijalva, Croníca, pp. 112–117.

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Ill. 4.4: Anonymous painters, Thebaid Scene from convent of San Nicolás de Tolentino, Actopan (Hidalgo, Mexico), c. 1570. Photo: Barnaby Nygren.

Such ideas about the dangerous and demonic aspects of the Mexican wilderness found expression pictorially in thebaid images (Ill. 4.4). These paintings of desert hermits in a wild environment were a common feature of Augustinian monastic imagery in Mexico, where they served to contextualize the monks’ experience by combining a pre-existing European iconographic tradition with geographic features inspired by the sites in which these images were painted.65 These wild spaces were also shown as populated by demons and dangerous beasts as in the thebaid images in Zacualpan and Actopan.66 Augustinian concerns about these dangerous and demonic wild spaces were, however, simply the darker side of the general Spanish sense of wonder in the New World. From the very early moments of discovery this wonder was conveyed by writers such as Columbus, Vespucci, Bernal Díaz, and Cortés.67 Among the physical manifestations of this were the fantastical stage sets that were adopted from Aztec into Christian theatre. The descriptions of these sets by monastic writers seem to capture 65 Jackson, Conflict and Conversion, pp. 51–56; Rubial García, ‘Hortus’; Olmedo Muñoz, ‘La visión’, p. 41. 66 Peterson, ‘Image/Texts’, pp. 13, 17; Edgerton, Theaters of Conversion, pp. 215–218. 67 The letters of Columbus and Vespucci frequently evoke the Ovidian Golden Age. On the responses of Cortés and Díaz, see Todorov, Conquest of America, pp. 128–129.

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the wonder both of the sets themselves and the Mexican environments and peoples that they presented. Motolinía describes one such set, used during the feast of Corpus Christi in Tlaxcala, marvelling at its artificial hills covered with trees, birds, animals, and even ‘some very well hidden [Chichimec?] hunters, with their bows and arrows’.68

Ixmiquilpan and Its Environs All of these concerns connect to Ixmiquilpan and Augustinian activity in the mountainous areas to the north. The Augustinians founded numerous missions in these rugged lands in the period between 1551 and 1575.69 Depending on location, these missions ministered to either the Otomí, who were often viewed as less civilized than the Mexicans, or the Chichimecs.70 While Ixmiquilpan was not located in the mountains, it was sometimes raided by the Pames (one Chichimec group) and was also, after 1572, a centre of Augustinian training and education.71 Both the lands and the people that these missions served made evangelization difficult. The Otomí often lived in dispersed settlements, while the Chichimecs were nomadic.72 The Augustinians judged both groups to be difficult to evangelize due to native resistance, both passive and bellicose, and the multiplicity of languages and dialects.73 These issues were further complicated by topography. Many of the missions had numerous visitas (‘chapels’) in locations that were frequently characterized as forbidding and difficult to navigate.74 A vicar, Gaspar de Valdés, writing in 1569, complained that, because ‘one has to walk in a circle, making many turns, it is impossible for me to say in what direction each village is located’.75 The inhospitable and untamed quality of the land was linked by Grijalva to the inhabitants themselves as he describes ‘the difficulty of the language, the rude nature of the people [and … ] the roughness of the hills that are rugged, mountainous, and rainy to the extreme and adding to this the great number of wild beasts’.76 Elsewhere Grijalva makes it 68 Motolinía, Historia, p. 194. Some of the effect of this set might be recaptured in the cloister murals in the Augustinian cloister in Malinalco 69 Rubial García, El convento, pp. 118; Jackson, Conflict and Conversion, pp. 10–12, 45, 162–163. 70 Gibson, Aztecs, pp. 10, 116; Vergara Hernández, El infierno, pp. 122–123, 128. 71 Rubial García, El convento, p. 141; Pierce, ‘The Sixteenth-Century’, pp. 81–82. 72 Powell, pp. 32–55; Solis de la Torre, p. 39. 73 Rubial García, El convento, p. 149. Vergara Hernández, El infierno, pp. 122–128, 149; Galinier, The World Below, pp. 17–23, 35. 74 See Rubial García, El convento, p. 150; Solís de la Torre, Bárbaros, p. 50. 75 Quoted and translated in Galinier, The World Below, p. 15. 76 Grijalva, Croníca, p. 112. See also Camelo Arredondo, ‘Historiografía’, pp. 73–79. A 1579 map of Xilitla depicts bow-carrying Chichimec warriors in the hills around the town; see Vergara Hernández, El infierno, pp. 133–135.

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clear that he sees the caverns and other features of this area as populated by demons and associated with pagan worship.77 Thus a picture emerges of how the Chichimec, the pagan, the demonic, and the uncivilized landscape were linked discursively and seen as resistant to control and Christianization. This division between the civilized and the wild would have been more obvious after 1569 when the meeting to justify the war against the Chichimecs drew a clear dividing line between those Indians who might be integrated into colonial culture and those who could not.78

Anxieties of Classification and Control It is in this context that we can finally understand what might have led the Augustinians to endorse the use of the grotesque as an organizing principle in the murals, namely that the complex and multivalent visual and conceptual functions of the grotesque allowed for the expression of the uncertainties and indeterminacies endemic to the evangelical project itself. Since, as Paleotti was later to assert, the grotesque was associated with the pagan and demonic, it might have seemed an appropriate way to pictorially classify aspects of pre-Conquest survival; it would have allowed for the conceptualization and control of the pagan unknown via pre-existing structures, both visual and conceptual. As Ernst Gombrich has noted, in drolleries, and by extension the grotesque, the ‘potential threat’ posed by the creatures depicted therein is ‘neutralized by the interlace or by the dramatic device of representing the creature[s] locked in combat with others’ as to create a ‘balance between the pattern and the license’.79 Likewise, Wolfgang Kayser, while he characterizes the grotesque as evoking the powers of ‘the estranged world’, also sees it as ‘an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world’.80 It does this in part in the way that Gombrich suggests, by ordering the disordered, but it also functions by introducing the comic alongside the monstrous.81 This sense of control, together with the traditional marginality of the grotesque, should be seen as a response to the uncertainty of the Chichimec border lands; but the murals also address these concerns by transforming the strange rituals of the natives into a classicizing construct.82 They do this both via the classical origins of the grotesque itself and by the apparent references to classical mythology implied by the centaurs and other elements. Such classical forms gave the Europeans a way to 77 Grijalva, Croníca, pp. 108–110, 124. 78 Debroise Curare, ‘Imaginario fronterizo’, p. 160. 79 Gombrich, The Sense of Order, pp. 273, 279. 80 Kayser, The Grotesque, pp. 186, 188. 81 Kayser, The Grotesque, p. 31. 82 Todorov, Conquest of America, p. 231 finds this in Sahagún’s writings. See Perez Flores and Gonzalez Verela, ‘Los murals’, p. 129 on the Augustinian evangelical use of classical comparisons.

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categorize the culture with which they were presented, even sometimes classifying Mexican glyphic writing as analogous to the hieroglyphs with which Lomazzo had associated the grotesque.83 Moreover, the grotesque can be understood as characterizing both the native artists and the figures they represented. The friars never fully accepted the natives as Christians, calling them ‘New People’ or ‘New Christians’ and seeing their love of pageantry as a sign of the sensuality, worldliness, and external faith commonly attributed to heathens, children, and the lower classes.84 The Third Mexican Council of 1585 later categorized the natives as rudes, a theological term for those capable of mastering only the rudiments of faith—a view also used to justify the richness of ornament in church decoration.85 This too was part of the function of the grotesque, characterizing the natives and their artistic production as essentially other, while also reducing the dangerous other to a type of childish play and in this way controlling, albeit only in part, the fear and wonder endemic to this border area and the Christianizing project. Yet the need to control and defuse suggests the presence of something frightening, uncontrollable and, in a Foucauldian mode, unclassifiable. It is hard to view these paintings even today and not sense in the murals and their monstrous, protean forms some of this danger. Thus the use of the grotesque should be read as an attempt to contain the unknown within known structures, while simultaneously acknowledging the precariousness of this positioning. Such an interpretation calls on the simultaneous presence of fear, delight, and incomprehension found in John Ruskin’s account of the grotesque. The grotesque, he explains, can present ‘a healthful but irrational play of the imagination […] an irregular and accidental contemplation of terrible things [...and] the confusion of the imagination by the presence of truths which it cannot wholly grasp’.86 The first two categories are in his view always intertwined and for Ruskin this hybridity of the playful and the terrible gives the grotesque a unique power ‘to set forth an otherwise less expressible truth’, not symbolically or allegorically, but rather in a way tied to Romantic notions of intellectual indeterminacy.87 In his analysis of the grotesque in art and literature Geoffrey Galt Harpham similarly argues that the style ‘[calls] into question our way of organizing the world’.88 He finds that the grotesque vacillates between attraction and repulsion, meaning and nonsense, the archaic and the advanced, and the natural and the civilized.89 As such 83 Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind, pp. 117–120; Lomazzo, Trattato, p. 369. See also Domíngez Torres, ‘Negotiating Identities’, pp. 601–602. 84 Burkhart, ‘Pious Performances’, pp. 369–370. 85 Burkhart, ‘Pious Performances’, p. 370. 86 Ruskin, Modern Painters, III, p. 92. See Wamberg this volume, p. 251. 87 Ruskin, Modern Painters, III, p. 93; Ruskin, The Stones, III, pp. 126–127. 88 Harpham, On the Grotesque, p. 3. 89 Harpham, On the Grotesque, pp. 9–11.

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it makes the terms of these binaries present, but, due to its deconstruction of ontological hierarchies, defies classification and synthesis.90 It is therefore highly resistant to closure particularly, as at Ixmiquilpan, when it displaces the unitary centre with the confusion of the margins, ‘implying coherencies just out of reach, metaphors or analogies just beyond our grasp’.91 Thus the grotesque allows the frightening and the protean to be present, partially controlled and understood, and yet unresolved. In the case of our paintings, it works to acknowledge the danger (and wonder) of the Chichimecs, the border lands, and the demonic unknown, while containing this threat in the known matrix of the grotesque, understanding it via the classical, and trivializing it through the sense of play associated with the style. Yet, as both its period supporters and critics agreed, the grotesque was also a style that inevitably evoked the Ovidian transformations that lurked beyond the civilized in the New World accounts of Grijalva and others.92 When Mikhail Bakhtin later connects the grotesque to ‘the so-called “Indian Wonders”’ including ‘devils spitting fire […], enchanted woods […], fantastic beasts, [and ...] extraordinary human beings’ – and further notes that the grotesque developed ‘in a period of the radical breaking up of the world’s hierarchical picture’ – he recognizes that the style was linked to the cognitive challenges associated with discovery, colonization, and evangelization.93 While Bakhtin’s well-known focus on the counter-cultural implications of the grotesque is perhaps most obviously applicable to the hidden voices of the native artists, one might also consider if the same notion might be applied to the patrons, allowing the grotesque to be read as expressing concerns beyond accepted and expected discourse. Its use in Ixmiquilpan might then be understood as offering a disguised, unofficial response to the cognitive tensions raised by the Augustinian enterprise of evangelization in a rugged, demonic, and dangerous land. Such an idea would seem to find confirmation in the work of Tzvetan Todorov and the cognitive dissonance and tensions that he discovers in the writings of the monastic authors. He finds, for example, that even someone as suspicious of syncretism as Diego Durán was forced to resort to analogies between the Christian faith and that of the native Mexicans.94 This same dissonance causes him to praise things—their use of flowers—that he suspects to be idolatrous and might otherwise censure.95

90 Harpham, On the Grotesque, pp. 3–4. 91 Harpham, On the Grotesque, pp. 32, 40, 43. 92 Gruzinski, ‘Entre monos’, pp. 358–365; Gruzinski, El águila, pp. 46, 85–87. Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind, pp. 25–29, 115. 93 Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 273, 344–345, 426. 94 Todorov, Conquest of America, pp. 207–208. 95 Todorov, Conquest of America, pp. 211–212, 218.

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The cognitive dissonance that causes Durán to adopt an ambiguous and conflicted view of what he finds in the New World is analogous to the tensions expressed in the murals via the grotesque. These tensions were prompted by the protean dangers of the Gran Chichimeca itself, and at Ixmiquilpan these threats and indeterminacies led the Augustinians to allow the native painters to adopt the grotesque as an organizing form for violent scenes of native, mythological conflict. While the grotesque might have been attractive to the native painters for many reasons, for the Augustinians it was the admixture of fear, laughter, control, transformation, danger, and incomprehension inherent in the style that made its use particularly apposite. With this in mind we might now return to Horace and the idea that in the grotesque the ‘savage should mate with tame’ and see this quote not as criticism, as Horace intended, but rather as a diagnosis of the inherent cognitive tensions found in both the grotesque and the Augustinian experience in New Spain.

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Samuel Y. Edgerton, Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001). Elena Isabel Estrada de Gerlero, ‘Apuntes sobre el origen y la fortuna del grutesco en el arte novohispano de evangelización’, in De arquitectura, pintura y otras artes: homenaje a Elisa Vargaslugo, ed. by Cecilia Gutiérrez Arriola and María del Consuelo Maquivar (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004), pp. 155–182. Elena Isabel Estrada de Gerlero, ‘El friso monumental de Itzmiquilpan’, in Actes du XLII Congrés International des Americanistes, 10 vols. (Paris: Société des Américanistes, 1979), X, pp. 9–19. Valerie Fraser, ‘Ixmiquilpan: From European Ornament to Mexican Pictograph’, in Altars and Idols: The Life of the Dead in Mexico (Colchester, UK: University of Essex, 1991), pp. 13–16. Jacques Galinier, The World Below: Body and Cosmos in Otomí Indian Ritual (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004). Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (­Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1964). Ernst H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in The Psychology of Decorative Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell ­University Press, 1979). Juan de Grijalva, Croníca de la orden de N.P.S. Augustin en las provincias de la Nueva España (Mexico City: Imprenta Victoria, 1924). Sergio Gruzinski, El águila y la sibila: frescos indios de México (Barcelona: M. Moleiro, 1994). Sergio Gruzinski, ‘Entre monos y centauros: los indios pintores y la cultura del renascimiento’, in Entre dos mondos: fronteras culturales y agentes mediadores, ed. by Berta Ares Quieija and Sergio Gruzinski (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1997), pp. 349–372. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind, trans. by Deke Dusinberre (New York: Routledge, 2002). Raúl Guerrero Guerrero, Murales de Ixmiquilpan (Pachuca, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Hidalgo, 1992). Felipe de Guevara, Comentarios de la pintura, ed. by Rafael Benet (Barcelona: Selecciones Bibliófilas, 1963). Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). Max Harris, The Dialogic Theatre: Dramatizations and the Conquest of Mexico and the Question of the Other (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929). Robert H. Jackson, Conflict and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Central Mexico (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. by Ulrich Weisstein (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968). Jamie Lara, City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). Pirro Ligorio, ‘Libro dell’antichità VI (Selections)’, in Nicole Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques a la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969), pp. 161–182. Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scultura, et architectura in Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, ed. by Roberto Paolo Ciardi, 2 vols. (Florence: Centro Di, 1974), II, pp. 8–589. Jerónimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesiastica indiana (Barcelona: Linkgua Ediciones, 2008). Philippe Morel, ‘Il funzionamento simbolico e la critica delle grottesche nella seconda metà del Cinquecento’, in Roma e l’antico nell’arte e nella cultura del Cinquecento, ed. by Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1985), pp. 147–177. Toribio de Motolinía, Historia de los indios de la Nueva España, ed. by Georges Baudot (Madrid: Clásico Castalia, 1985). Diego Muñoz Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala (Mexico, 1585). Glasgow University Library, Sp Coll MS Hunter 242 (U.3.15). Martín Olmedo Muñoz, ‘La visión del mundo agustino en Meztitlán’, Anales del Institututo de Investigaciones Estéticas, 31, no. 94 (2009), pp. 27–58.

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Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane, ed. by Gian Franco Freguglia (Vatican City: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 2002). José Luis Pérez Flores and Sergio González Varela, ‘Los murals del Convento de Ixmiqilpan, México, y la imagen de guerra occidental’, Colonial Latin American Review, 22, no. 1 (2013), pp. 126–147. Jeanette F. Peterson, ‘Image/Texts in Sixteenth-Century Mexican Murals (A Devil in the Details)’, in Sources and Methods for the Study of Postconquest Mesoamerican Ethnohistory, ed. by James Lockhart, Lisa Sousa, and Stephanie Wood (Eugene: University of Oregon Wired Humanities Project, 2010), http://whp.uoregon.edu/ Lockhart/Peterson.pdf (accessed, 6 July 2016). Jeanette F. Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). Donna L. Pierce, ‘Identification of the Warriors in the Frescoes of Ixmiquilpan’, Research Center for the Arts Review, 4, no. 4 (1981), pp. 1–8. Donna L. Pierce, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Nave Frescoes in the Augustinian Mission Church of Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, Mexico’ (PhD Diss., University of New Mexico, 1987). Philip Wayne Powell, Soldiers, Indians and Silver: The Northward Advance of New Spain, 1550–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952). Antonio Rubial García, El convento augustino y la sociedad novohispana (1533–1630) (Mexico City: ­Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1989). Antonio Rubial García, ‘Hortus eremitarum: las pinturas de tebaides en los claustros agustinos’, Anales del Institututo de Investigaciones Estéticas, 30, no. 92 (2008), pp. 85–105. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1890). John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 3 vols. (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1894). Bernardino da Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, ed. and trans. by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 13 vols. (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1982). Michael Karl Schuessler, Foundational Arts: Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in New Spain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013). Larry Silver, ‘God in the Details: Bosch and Judgment(s)’, Art Bulletin, 83, no. 4 (2001), pp. 626–650. J. Jesús Solís de la Torre, Bárbaros y ermitaños chichimecas y agustinos en la Sierra Gorda siglos XVI – XVIII (Querétaro, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, 1983). Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). Diego Valadés, Retórica Cristiana, trans. by Tarsicio Herrera Zapién and others (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). Arturo Vergara Hernández, El infierno en la pintura mural agustina del siglo XVI Actopan y Xoxoteco en el estado de Hidalgo (Pachuca, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, 2008). Arturo Vergara Hernández, Las pinturas del templo de Ixmiquilpan: ¿evangelización, reivindicación indígena o propaganda de guerra? (Pachuca, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, 2010). Vitruvius, On Architecture, trans. by Frank Granger, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931). Eleanor Wake, Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Early Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). Eleanor Wake, ‘Sacred Books and Sacred Songs from the Former Days: Sourcing the Mural Paintings at San Miguel Arcángel’, Estudio de cultura nahuatl, 31 (2000), pp. 95–121. Susan Verdi Webster, ‘Art, Ritual, and Confraternities in Sixteenth-Century New Spain: Penitential Imagery at the Monastery of San Miguel, Huejotzingo’, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 19, no. 70 (1997), pp. 5–43. David Charles Wright Carr, ‘Sangre para el Sol: las pinturas murales del siglo XVI en la parroquia de Ixmilquilpan, Hidalgo’, Memorias de la Academia Mexicana, 41 (1998), pp. 73–103.

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About the author Barnaby Nygren received his doctorate from Harvard University and his MA from the Courtauld Institute. He is currently Associate Professor of Art History at Loyola University Maryland. His publications on Italian Renaissance topics – including perspective, iconography, humour, and Filippo Lippi – have appeared in Studies in Iconography, the Oxford Art Journal, and elsewhere. His current work often engages with issues of artistic and cultural interchange between Europe and America, as in his article on the open chapel at Tlalmanalco, Mexico in the forthcoming volume Between Allegory and Natural Philosophy from the University of Toronto Press.

5. Decoration in the Desert: Unsettling the Order of Architecture in the Certosa di San Martino Maria-Anna Aristova

Abstract This chapter examines the early-seventeenth-century decoration of Cosimo Fanzago at the Carthusian monastery of San Martino, Naples. Mixing classical architectural vocabulary and strange, organic flourishes, Fanzago’s work is powerfully suggestive, yet never settles down into recognizable elements. This chapter considers how such monstrous, non-figural ornament might be interpreted without recourse to iconography. Fanzago’s doorways both question the limits and celebrate the potential of classical architecture. Their fluid, polymorphous forms echo contemporary anxieties about architecture’s monstrous productivity. The unsettling, unravelling decoration furthermore questions the nature of monastic enclosure. Through comparison with a Carthusian book of emblems, the chapter reconsiders the space of retreat, and argues it is Fanzago’s exploitation of the productive potential of the gap that makes his strange decoration fit for a Carthusian cloister. Keywords: decoration, ornament, monastic architecture, Carthusians, Cosimo Fanzago

The whitewashed walkways of the Great Cloister at the Certosa di San Martino in Naples (Ill. 5.1) do not feature grotesques or beasts. Yet in Cosimo Fanzago’s carved marble door surrounds (Ill. 5.2) in the four corners of the walkway, one is confronted with architecture that is disconcertingly fluid, polymorphous, unsettling (Ills. 5.3 and 5.4). Split between presenting doors and presenting busts, the surrounds impinge upon the viewer’s attention and trouble the distinction between content and framing. Fanzago’s flourishes evoke elements of classical architectural vocabulary, yet the forms are in a constant state of flux, twisting, turning, deforming, and appearing in strange places. Although powerfully suggestive of monstrous creatures or faces, they never quite coalesce into fin, face, or tendril.

Hammeken, C.A. and M.F. Hansen (eds.), Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789462984967_ch05

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Ill. 5.1: Great Cloister, Certosa di San Martino, Naples. Photo: Maria-Anna Aristova.

This chapter considers how these difficult forms might be interpreted. The nonfigural nature of the decoration makes it particularly challenging in the context of one of the most austere monastic orders. Neither here nor there, the forms escape definition. This chapter considers how Cosimo Fanzago’s ornament troubles architecture and how its monstrous character taps into wider architectural discourses. In avoiding too literal a view of monstrosity, however, this study also aims to draw out the potentialities of ornament which become obscured by an iconographic approach, and which allow decoration to be considered a crucial, constructive component of the functioning of architecture. The door surrounds were produced as part of a wider campaign of redecoration, started in the 1580s by the prior Dom Severo Turboli.1 It included the Gothic church, the sacristy, treasury, chapter house, lay brother’s choir, and parlour. The Great Cloister was also enlarged to double the number of monks, and equipped with a white marble colonnade running around the four sides (carried out by Giovan Antonio Dosio in the early stages of the project). The spectacular door surrounds, as well as a cemetery enclosure decked with hanging bones and carved skulls (Ill. 5.1 foreground), 1

The most recent overview of decoration at the Certosa di San Martino is Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament.

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Ill. 5.2: Great Cloister, Certosa di San Martino, Naples. Corner door surround. Photo: Maria-Anna Aristova.

were added after 1623 as part of the decorative contributions of Cosimo Fanzago, the most prolific architect-sculptor of Baroque Naples.2 John Nicholas Napoli has suggested that the monastery exhibits a remarkable degree of visual coherence, despite a decorative campaign spread across two centuries, indicating that the Carthusian monks were canny and demanding patrons.3 Fanzago’s workshop practice also meant that his motifs appeared across spaces as diverse as the entrance atrium,

2 3

For a timeline of interventions at San Martino, see Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament, Appendix 1. Ibid., p. 5.

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church, cloister, and even stairs to the gardens below.4 Some of his most striking decorative contributions at the Certosa di San Martino will be the subject of this chapter. Already in the seventeenth century, Fanzago’s work at San Martino was celebrated as something of a marvel. Carlo Celano, in his guide to the remarkable sights of Naples of 1692, recommends the cloister as a ‘machina worthy of being seen’.5 Celano’s word for the ensemble evokes complex contraptions, suggesting a view of the cloister as an elaborate orchestration, imbued with a sense of movement and the temporary.6 It is thus worth considering the decoration of the cloister as part of a complex play of architectural artifice.

Unsettling the Classical Language of Architecture Cosimo Fanzago’s work in the Great Cloister offers a remarkable interpretation of the classical language of antique architecture. Throughout, the familiar forms of consoles, brackets, pilasters, and scrolls are suggested. In the entablature separating the two stages of the composition (Ill. 5.3) mouldings and edges multiply. The relentless play of plane, edge, void, and projection recalls especially plates from the architectural treatises of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura, 1562), Andrea Palladio (I quattro libri dell’architettura, 1570), and Vicenzo Scamozzi (L’idea della architettura universale, 1615), where the question of invention was inextricably linked to the issue of ornament, according to Alina Payne.7 The problem of creativity coupled with reverence for authority is at the forefront of such explorations. In coping with the fragmentary legacy of classical antiquity, ‘the agglomeration of profiles into an architectural member – of astragals, crown moulds, cyma reversa and recta, volutes, modillons, brackets into a cornice or an entablature – displayed the architect’s juggling act with the virtually infinite possibilities ruins offered’.8 Indeed, Michael J. Waters has argued that the normative rhetoric of the printed treatises should be approached with scepticism.9 Loose, single-sheet prints of architectural elements testify to the continuity of old workshop practices of copying, pasting, and recombining that framed classical architectural language as a riche trove of possibilities.

4 On Cosimo Fanzago’s industry, see Chapter 4 in Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament. 5 Celano, Notizie del bello, V, tome 1, p. 688: ‘Dalla stanza del capitolo, si passa al chiostro, machina degna d’essere veduta’. 6 In the Vocabolario della Crusca, the word is associated with complex buildings and war machines, as well as the totality of the universe. 7 Payne, The Architectural Treatise, pp. 1–33. 8 Payne, ‘Creativity and Bricolage’, pp. 21–22. 9 Waters, ‘A Renaissance without Order’.

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Ill. 5.3: Great Cloister, Certosa di San Martino, Naples. Detail of door surround entablature. Photo: Maria-Anna Aristova.

Fanzago’s doorways bring to the fore the fluidity of this creative process. At the Certosa, great skill and expense was lavished on the classical elements – the columns, arches, consoles, and brackets were clearly considered key aspects of the cloister’s overall effect. It is these marble elements – still easily picked out in the architectural fabric – that are enumerated, over and over again, in various bills, appraisals, and litigation documents that remain from Fanzago’s work at the monastery and the subsequent legal dispute between him and the Carthusian monks.10 The lure of the line and plane of a classical profile on the page of an architectural treatise seems translated into white marble in the dense ornament of Fanzago’s doorways. Yet the ornamental forms are also remarkably elusive.11 No element is quite ‘correct’, or would align easily with the components valorized by the treatises. The capital-like brackets (edges of Ill. 5.3) are doubled, recalling the suggestion that a freestanding column should be matched on the wall by a corresponding pilaster, and guttae-like pyramidal shapes cling to the outer surface of these brackets. The central console, itself a supporting element, is buttressed by two scrolls, which introduce yet more profiles into the assemblage. Most blatantly, space is opened up between the top of the door and the superimposed entablature, which bows upward under the tension as tongues of marble lap up and down. 10 See Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament, Chapter 3 and Appendices 5–7. 11 See Anthony Blunt’s efforts to describe the composition of the doorway, as well as Helen Hills’s discussion: Blunt, Neapolitan Baroque, p. 74 and Hills, ‘Architectural History’s Indeterminacy’, pp. 54–56.

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Sebastiano Serlio’s Libro Extraordinario (1551) offers a particularly striking parallel to Fanzago’s treatment of monstrous ornament, not least because it is a book of door designs.12 Marked out by its title, the book is signalled as standing outside of Serlio’s main architectural project, his seven books of architecture, of which the first two (Parts IV and III) were published in 1537 and 1540.13 As has been noted, the 30 designs of rustic doorways, and further 20 ‘delicate’ ones, push the limits of acceptable artistic licence.14 In two dedicatory letters, one to the King and one to the readers, Serlio aims to explain his transgressions against the rules of architecture. In the first letter, he suggests that the ‘extraordinary’ book of architecture was inspired by his solitude during the sojourn at Fontainebleau, conceived in a moment of architectural frenzy and responding to the wild setting, inhabited by beasts more than men.15 Yet Serlio also offers another, more specific explanation for the licentiousness of his inventions: namely, all the varied demands of patrons, who might wish to insert coats of arms, inscriptions, busts, emblems, or narrative reliefs into their buildings.16 It is these elements which interrupt or alter the pristine ‘first form’ of rule-following architecture.17 While Serlio’s engagement with monstrosity in this book has generally been interpreted as a question of artistic licence, the introduction also hints at the parameters under which architecture’s expressive potential might stretch beyond the familiar. Serlio’s imagery is vivid and pictures the menace of architecture coming under pressure from external factors, be they questions of location or the insistent intrusion of other artistic media. The discourse of autonomous invention is thus confronted with a work that locates the process of creation somewhere beyond the control of the architect. In Fanzago’s doorways, the meticulously worked ornament of the surrounds seems everywhere just about to settle down into conventional form. Yet at the same time, it is forever opening up: doubling, multiplying, one form changing into another. This ornament refuses to take shape, resists resolution into the familiar. It evokes the lure of the fragments of antique architecture as described by Payne, their fetishistic piling-together. At the same time, strange and volatile strips of matter intrude, pushing in between neatly aligned elements. The tongues, scrolls, and flourishes question their innocent fitting-together; they suggest cracks between the smooth profiles and planes. Monstrous ornament insinuates itself into architectural order, highlighting the arbitrary stitching-together of disparate elements. Here, ornament imagines architectural order as unstable, brings to the surface its turmoil, and embeds deformity in its very language. 12 I use Alina Payne’s short version of the book’s title. 13 Payne, The Architectural Treatise, pp. 113–143. 14 Ibid., pp. 116–122. 15 Serlio, Extraordinario libro, dedication to the King, n.p. 16 Ibid., dedication to the readers, n.p. 17 This is a very intriguing area of crossover between Serlio’s book and the work at San Martino, but demands extended discussion which would go beyond the bounds of this chapter.

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Monstrous Architecture The decoration at the Certosa di San Martino elucidates how the productive potential as well as limitations of classical architecture could produce fantasies of buildings as strange and alien. Here the challenge to the stability and conventionality of architectural order allows the potentially troubling aspects of architecture to surface. This is often achieved through small and unobtrusive flourishes, like the corners next to the springers of the first walkway arches (Ill. 5.4). The smooth surfaces of the cornice recall the lines of architectural treatises; insignificant in themselves, they contribute to an overall sense of correctness, proportion, and rule. Yet the lowest, concave element of the cornice (just above the collar of the springing block, bottom right in Ill. 5.4; also visible on the right in Ill. 5.2) conveys the geometrical smoothness of the mouldings above it downward, elongating, becoming thinner and more layer-like to terminate finally in three licks of curl, squeezed into a corner. This surface mediates a transition between two quite different visions of architectural surface. Above is the block-like solidity of the mouldings, the side profile suggesting tectonic volume and depth. Below, a much thinner, two-dimensional surface: like wall-dressing, it presents architecture as a matter of layering and superimposition.18 The thickness of a layer also suggests discontinuity. The upward curl in the corner reveals more finger-like forms pushing out from under what a few inches above is a placid surface. The smooth and untroubled gives way to something concealed and perhaps unknown. The calm planes of the classical orders are shown to fray at the edges. Decoration peels back and reveals the orders’ potential creativity, their possibility of becoming, of transforming. The alien productivity emerging from within architecture might evoke the distant, pagan roots of classical architecture. The excavation of the Domus Aurea of Nero in the late fifteenth century made such questions impossible to ignore. Here was a hidden, underground architecture – secret and sealed – coming to light. The pristine white marble of the temples was juxtaposed with the vividly coloured underground caverns populated by bizarre creatures. It is worth considering here the concept of the uncanny, examined first by Sigmund Freud in an eponymous essay of 1919, and more recently explored by Anthony Vidler and Mark Wigley.19 Already in his seminal essay, Freud noted that the uncanny (unheimlich in German) arose from the coming-to-light of something secret (a valence of the word heimlich or homely) that should have remained hidden.20 The homely and familiar is constructed precisely through the suppression of some 18 The emphasis on layer and surface recalls the motif of strapwork, ubiquitous at the time. 19 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’; Vidler, Architectural Uncanny; and Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, pp. 106–121. 20 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 225.

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Ill. 5.4: Great Cloister, Certosa di San Martino, Naples. Detail of the springing block of the first arch. Photo: Maria-Anna Aristova.

originary secret or sacrifice, its burial in the heart of the house. In a modern context, Vidler and Wigley stress the deeply architectural nature of the uncanny. The concept of the house or home, understood in the broadest philosophical terms, is for them an effect of the concealment and domestication of a deeper unease, of the unfamiliar. Their insights help bring into focus the ambivalence of classical architecture in the Early Modern period – its secret and hidden past populated by the bizarre and unfamiliar, unknown and possibly barbaric. Architecture’s transgressions make an insistent appearance in late sixteenth-century print culture. Published in 1598, Wendel Dietterlin’s Architectura sets up an extraordinary interrogation of the limits and possibilities of the five orders. Architectura brings to the fore the uncanny quality of classical architecture’s productive

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Ill. 5.5: Wendel Dietterlin, Architectura, 1598. Plate 24: Tuscan portal. Heidelberg University Library, 83 B 945 RES, t_024.

potential. Dietterlin begins with familiar gestures towards mathematical proportions as guiding principle (see Plate 4 in his book). However, the opening plates for each order eloquently suggest the direction of travel.21 The left-most column of the plate is entirely dematerialized into a mesh of geometrical relationships. The next column rehearses the move from outline to solid shape, and the following columns 21 See the example of the Tuscan order available in Heidelberg University Library digital collections: http:// digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/dietterlin1598/0007/image.

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push further, their physicality taking on the form of human bodies, both encased in and presented as architecture. In subsequent pages, masonry, strapwork, ornamental flourishes, and all manner of creatures overwhelm the clean lines and proportions set out at the beginning, blurring boundaries between elements and layering up into writhing masses. Plate 24 (Ill. 5.5), representing a Tuscan portal, envisages architecture under assault. The doorway is assembled out of rough stone precariously put together, and functions as a kind of vision of the origins of architecture presented by Vitruvius’s De Architectura. Vitruvius imagines the origins of architecture to lie in primitive building that made use of the natural shelter of groves and caves.22 Dietterlin’s structure, however, is not so much emerging from nature as being reclaimed by its wild forces. Animals claw, climb, and paw at the stonework, and seem to meld with the ornament (see the bat in the keystone, or the way the antlers of the deer appear to complete the capitals of the two columns). A family reclining over the pediment parodies architectural sculpture. The stonework seen through the opening is in a yet more precarious state, subverting the permanence of architectural structure; the riot of violent bodies questions its ability to shelter or protect.23 Dietterlin’s inventions undermine the canonical treatises’ claim to the clarity and authority of classical architecture. Its creative capacities are indissolubly welded to its nightmarish potential. The pointed ordering of the plates throughout the book communicates uncanny origins. A relatively tame and tectonic Doric doorway (Plate 67), the opening shut and reinforced, seems to enclose within it the previous plate (66): a rough wooden construction of tree boughs, branches still on. The latter’s strange and violent spectacle serves as predecessor to the more properly ‘architectonic’ doorway of the following plate.24 In Plate 32, a mythical struggle with a dragon at a stream serves as the introduction for a series of fountain designs (33–34). In Plate 35, goats, satyrs, and grapes decorating a water basin hint at Bacchic rituals. These mystical origins allow Dietterlin to spectacularize architecture’s creative potential, but they also produce an anxiety about its ability to slip from the grip of human control, to bring unexpected visitors.25

22 Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book II, Chapter 1. 23 See also Plate 66 in the same book – a Doric portal presented as a ramshackle, temporary wooden construction, with a prone body in the doorway. The rhetorical use of recession deserves further attention. 24 Plates 66 and 67 are the first and second plates of Doric doorways respectively; 66 thus ‘opens’ the topic. 25 For a different take on the relationship between wild ornament and architecture, see Carpo, La maschera.

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Caught in Time: The Architecture of Solitude Dietterlin’s images showcase an architecture straining under the pressures of time. It already holds within itself a potential for decay, undoing, and being overtaken just as it emerges from a distant, primordial past. The ornament at San Martino seems to draw on contemporary anxieties about the temporalities of architecture, seen in the work of Sebastiano Serlio and Dietterlin. Fanzago’s decoration responds to two temporal pressures in particular: architecture’s relationship to Heavenly Jerusalem, and the question of Carthusian vocation adapting to changing times. I will now examine some of the difficulties that an architecture of the desert encounters. In Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood highlight the problematic temporalities of architecture, especially in a religious context, through the concept of ‘anti-architecture’: ‘In biblical tradition, a principle of anti-architecture is assigned a role, an agency as an equal and necessary counterpart to architecture, at least until secular time is superseded in the heavenly Jerusalem, where there is no physical temple.’26 The progress of earthly time inevitably leaves its destructive marks on worldly architecture – a sign of the vanity of human labours. Thus, in Renaissance Nativity scenes, crumbling classical remains are juxtaposed with simple, primitive structures: confronted with the start of a new era, ‘[a]dvanced architecture is brought low, and the history of architecture reverts to its beginnings’.27 The moment of Christ’s birth represents the limit of architecture’s power to endure; the unfolding of architectural time towards ever greater sophistication is reset, and building returned to its makeshift roots. Indeed, in the monstrous ornament of the Certosa di San Martino, time can become exceedingly tangible. Cosimo Fanzago’s decorations are the result of over 30 years of activity at the monastery. The complex planes and curls of his ornament collect dust; pieces are wont to break off.28 Moreover, the limits of earthly dwelling are celebrated in the striking decoration of the cemetery enclosure in the Great Cloister (Ill. 5.1 in the foreground). Celano lauds the balustrade as a masterpiece of virtuosity: ‘[It] is surrounded by marble balusters and piers in the corners, and in the middle there are trophies of death, like skulls, stripped bones and other, so carefully worked by Cavalier Cosimo that he could not have done better had he worked them in wax.’29 The enclosure mimics in miniature the shape of the cloister. It rehearses a kind of macabre, second cloister, paced by 26 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, pp. 301–312. Quote from p. 302. 27 Ibid., p. 300. 28 The archives of the monastery held at the Archivio di Stato Napoli list expenditure on the cleaning of marble; see Archivio di Stato Napoli, fondo Corporazione Religiose Soppresse, busta 2142, sheet marked 253. 29 Celano, Notizie del bello, V, tome 1, p. 688: ‘sta cinto tutto di balaustri di marmo e da pilastri negl’angoli, e di mezzo vi vengono alcuni trofei di morte, come calvarie, ossa spolpate et altro, così delicatamente lavorati dal cavalier Cosimo che più non ci haveria potuto fare se lavorati l’havesse in cera.’

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the rhythm of the bare skulls placed on the railing. It reinforces the message of life’s impermanence; however many monks may pass through the cells and walks of the cloister, they all finish here. In tandem with the graveyard, the unravelling, provisional character of Fanzago’s decoration in the doorways seems to stage the conflict between ‘false permanence’ and ‘eternal, immaterial architecture’ noted by Nagel and Wood.30 Interpretations of Carthusian architecture commonly revolve around the duality of eremitic and cenobitic life in the monastery.31 The Great Cloister mediates between communal and solitary life, its passageways leading from individual cells to the monastic church and adjacent spaces. The Carthusian cell is seen as a determining factor: to protect silence and solitude, each choir monk usually lives in a small house, complete with workroom and garden, arranged around the perimeter of the Great Cloister.32 Giovanni Leoncini suggests: to grow in devotion to the love of God, rather than the world, early Carthusians’ dedication ‘required its own place, a garden, that would protect it, and this place, this garden, was the monastery, the garden of delights, paradisus voluptatis, earthly paradise’.33 The idea of paradise is central to Maria Adriana Giusti’s conception of a Carthusian monastery as a means of controlling the relationship between the wilderness beyond the walls of the enclosure and the hortus conclusus within.34 The corrupt nature of the world post-Fall is kept out, while the monastic garden becomes a space in which something of the perfection of Paradise can begin to be reclaimed. Similarly, Dennis D. Martin emphasizes the role of spatial and temporal control in early Carthusian monasticism: ‘The monk knows he is unable to cope with the addictive power of sin in his life and enters a structured, rule-bound setting in order to gain an extrinsic crutch that will help him convalesce.’35 These perspectives imagine architecture as protecting and containing: the cloister becomes a space of retreat, restraint, removal of worldly things. Yet how might the unsettling decoration of Cosimo Fanzago come into contact with, and require reassessment of, Carthusian ideas of the cell, or monastery, as privileged, sustaining space? In recent readings of the Certosa di San Martino, emphasis is often placed on what the decoration can secure or convey. The revetted marble decoration of the church broadcasts the magnificence of its patrons; the Carthusians’ 30 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 305 (regarding Sodoma’s Adoration of the Magi): ‘Primitive, provisional architecture leads away from false permanence altogether, offering an improbable bridge to an eternal, immaterial architecture.’ 31 See Lorenzi, ‘Finalità e vita quotidiana’ and Leoncini, ‘Il monastero certosino’. 32 This arrangement was changed at San Martino in the course of the 1580s’ renovations, to double the number of monks. Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament, p. 55. 33 Leoncini, ‘Il monastero certosino’, 48: ‘Per crescere e svilupparsi, questa pianta necessitava di un luogo proprio, di un giardino, che lo custodisse, e questo luogo, questo giardino, era il monastero, giardino di delizie, paradisus voluptatis, paradiso terrestre.’ 34 Giusti, ‘Giardini del Medioevo’, pp. 79–88. 35 Martin, Carthusian Spirituality, p. 7. See also p. 4: ‘Thus the austere liturgy served the same purpose as the immense and strictly enforced enclosure: to preserve the monk from any sort of distraction.’

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spiritual authority as inhabitants of a veritable Heavenly Jerusalem is underscored in the apocalyptic imagery of the sacristy and the jewel-like interiors; the layout and paintings of the church nave and choir celebrate the privileged bodies of the monks.36 Spaces such as the Great Cloister, however, pull in a different direction. The monstrous, strange ornaments of the door surrounds, as well as those on the church facade (Ill. 5.6), and elsewhere in the monastery, resist the narrative thrust of figural imagery. Their functioning is harder to verbalize than visual references to saints revered by the order, or virtues pertinent to the monk. Indeed, I would like to propose that the monastery encompasses a collection of artworks with contrasting, heterogeneous agendas. How might contemporary anxieties about the stability, security, and enduring power of architecture challenge an idea of monastic enclosure, the monastery as safe haven? Indeed, the question of change and continuity was a fraught one for the Carthusians. As Dennis Martin suggests, the order often emphasized the strictness and continuity of their observance.37 On the other hand, Dom Innocent le Masson, a formidable legislator and historiographer of the order, makes allowances for changing needs and realities in his reflection on the discipline of the Carthusians in 1687.38 He suggests, for instance, that the original limit to the size of a Carthusian community had to be adjusted to take account of houses located next to great cities such as Naples.39 The seventeenth-century decoration of the Certosa di San Martino suggests an alternative vision of architecture – one not merely of containment, but also of unravelling. I will now consider a different artwork from the Carthusian milieu that poses a challenge to ideas of Carthusian flight from the world, of the monastic desert as radically apart. It offers an alternative way of viewing artefacts and images, which reveals how the monstrous decoration of Cosimo Fanzago might ‘fit’ in a Carthusian cloister.

Alternative Visions of the Desert: A Carthusian Book of Emblems Jean Martin’s Paradis terrestre ou les emblemes sacrez de la solitude (1655) was most likely created by a Carthusian monk, and features letters of dedication to the order, the prior of the Grande Chartreuse, and to the prior of the Paris Chapter House.40

36 On magnificence, see Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament, pp. 33–89; on Heavenly Jerusalem, Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, pp. 138–153 and Napoli, Ethics of Ornament, pp. 254–260; on the celebration of the monastic body, Dragani, Between Heaven and Earth, especially Chapters 3–4. 37 Martin, ‘Carthusians during the Reformation Era’. 38 Le Masson, Disciplina. On the issue of changing saeculum, see also Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament, pp. 251–254. 39 Le Masson, Disciplina, p. 143. 40 Martin, Le Paradis terrestre. For brief discussion and context, see Saunders, The Seventeenth-Century French Emblem, pp. 201–245, especially 211–213; and Russell, ‘The Emblem in France’.

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It contains 20 full-page emblems, each followed by a French title, Latin motto and couplet, and a meditation on the significance of the image in French. Rather than simply a collection of moral messages, the book performs as a kind of earthly paradise itself. The frontispiece of the book is sharply divided into two sections by what looks like a garden wall: the fallen world into which Adam and Eve are being driven by a sword-wielding angel (in the foreground), and, beyond, the wilderness of solitude. A curtain hanging in the opening seems to designate what lies beyond as ‘Le Paradis terrestre de la solitude’. The angel’s slight parting of the curtain invites the reader into the sanctified space beyond, and simultaneously, deeper into the book. The emblems are held within oval frames, as if windows opening onto the varied sights of earthly paradise.41 Throughout, the book plays with tropes that emphasize its garden-like nature. In the dedication to the prior of the Charterhouse of Paris, the author describes the work as ‘a bouquet of different flowers’, gathered in the monastery and now returned to their place of origin.42 Many meditations close with small images of bunches of flowers, or baskets of fruit – produce of sacred soil. As noted in the secondary literature, for the most part the Paradis does not use explicitly religious motifs.43 Instead, Jean Martin’s earthly paradise sketches out the parameters of an elite (land-owning) lifestyle: gardens and cascades, elegant fireplaces, and porcelain.44 Its enclosure admits much that is decorative, ornamental, and artful. Indeed, it is rather well furnished. This demands a reconsideration of the Carthusian attitude to ‘the good things’ of earthly life.45 Dennis Martin’s study of Carthusian spirituality suggests that much of the early Carthusians’ commitment to solitude was connected to a flight from inappropriate attachment to earthly things, an abhorrence and denial of their attraction.46 Yet the vision of Carthusian devotion presented in Paradis develops a rather different relationship to that which is beautiful, remarkable, and artful on earth. In this, Paradis is remarkably attuned to themes that Chandra Mukerji has explored in the wider context of the French nation-state in the seventeenth century.47 Mukerji suggests that the tradition of estate-management in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an effort to re-present land as a resource to be managed, improved, and employed.48 Artfulness – an attentive and careful engagement with the things of the earth – could become a mode of spiritual devotion and attention to God’s creation.49 41 The predominance of landscape and nature imagery heightens this sense. 42 See third dedicatory letter in Martin, Le Paradis terrestre: ‘C’est vn bouquet de diuerses fleurs que j’ay cueillies dans vostre jardin, & ainsi elles doiuent retourner à leur origine, comme les riuieres qui partent de la Mer, retournent dans son sein.’ 43 Saunders, The Seventeenth-Century French Emblem, p. 213. 44 See Martin, Le Paradis terrestre, emblems 12, 14, 11, and 5 respectively. 45 Martin, Carthusian Spirituality, pp. 5–6. 46 Ibid. 47 See Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions. 48 See for instance Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, pp. 147–197. She also highlights the promotion of domestic luxury industries as part of the project – Martin’s porcelain, silkworms, and fireplaces offer a striking echo. 49 For the spiritual aspect, see especially Mukerji, ‘Material Practices of Domination’.

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In Paradis, the author is especially attuned to matters of manufacture and artifice: he follows poetically the processes of the casting of a church bell, the production of a vase, the cultivation of a silkworm. The processes of transformation, labour, and work are particularly valorized.50 Jean Martin’s writing teases out ways of reading and interacting with ‘the good things’, without succumbing to vanity and passions, but rather putting them to spiritual uses. His paradise-desert therefore – far from enforcing boundaries between the claustrum and the world – appears porous, receptive. Here is a vision of paradise for a modern, seventeenth-century urban Charterhouse like that of Paris – or, for that matter, of Naples. The decorations of Jean Martin’s earthly paradise, furthermore, are mutable, fluid objects. The religious significance of the emblems is again and again shown to lie in a process of re-looking. Considering the prickly chestnut tree (emblem 8), Martin asks: ‘Do you not think that it is for this reason [its hostile spines] that it has been relegated to the depths of an thick forest, like a wild and useless tree?’51 Yet he immediately continues: ‘Do not stop however at this rough and frightful exterior; on the contrary, draw from these signs the necessary conclusion that what is hidden inside must be very precious, since Nature has armed it so powerfully against all sorts of assault.’52 Here, as elsewhere in the book, the reader is presented with surfaces that reveal the unexpected upon careful consideration, their first appearances peeled back to reveal a deeper truth.53 Indeed, Martin endows the solitary with the ‘eyes of the lynx’, uniquely qualified to intuit what lies beneath.54 Under the wrong gaze, the emblems take the shape of the earthly accoutrements of a comfortable life: gardens, cascades, pearls and vases, fireplaces, agricultural crops and mining enterprises, waterfowl hunting. The gaze of the solitary, however, shifts them and transforms them (just as the bell of the first emblem is melded together from base metals). The emblems become models for the solitary, indeed akin to the solitary: like the porcelain vase or the bouquet of flowers gathered in the garden, they are taken out of the earthly economy of things and lifted into the heavenly realm, to decorate the side-boards of the eternal dwelling of God.55 50 The Carthusian, as the porcelain vase, must undergo a long process of gestation before becoming a precious vessel for God, worthy of display on the dressers in the Palace of Glory; see Emblem 5 in Paradis. The question of changing times is also signalled in Martin’s first sentence here: he notes the ancients’ ignorance of porcelain. 51 Martin, Le Paradis terrestre, p. 29: ‘Ne iugez-vous point que c’est pour cette raison qu’il a esté relegué dans le fonds d’une épaisse forest, comme un arbre sauuage & inutile?’ 52 Ibid.: ‘Ne vous arrestez pas pourtant à cét exterieur rude & affreux; au contraire, tirez de ces indices une consequence necessaire que ce qui est caché au dedans, doit estre bien precieux, puis que la Nature l’a si puissamment armé contre toute sorte de violences.’ 53 See Martin, Le Paradis terrestre, emblems 6, 11, 12, and 13 for similar exhortations to go beyond appearances. 54 Ibid., p. 50. 55 See ibid., p. 18 for the vase and p. 45 for the bouquet.

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Paradis terrestre is a book about images. Its title equates the emblems of solitude with an earthly paradise. The emblems operate both as windows onto the world of this imaginary paradise and as tableaux, as points of meditation in a devotional percorso, often echoed in contemporary gardens.56 The ornaments of the desert are possessed of a miraculous fertility, hiding under the surface. Throughout the text, Martin encourages the reader to gaze upon the images, but also to re-look in order to uncover a different point of view, a deeper understanding of what is before him or her. As if to encourage a similar handling, various objects are arrayed in the foreground field of the emblems, beyond the oval frame: oak branches, fruit, ingots of metal, seashells. The edges of the frames curl, flake, and flare, hinting at a state of flux, at their potent capacity for transformation. It is through this process – in this process – that the devotee himself might be transformed, just as the porcelain vase is, and transported (if even temporarily) to the threshold of eternity.57 An idea of layering, and of potentiality, governs the earthly paradise that Martin’s book conjures up. The contemplative approach of the text evokes the value of an image that is unstable, unfurling, always emerging – just like the strange forms of Fanzago’s decoration.

Ornament in the Gap The broad lines of Fanzago’s door surrounds offer interesting parallels to Jean Martin’s emblems. They conjure similar oval openings, with the busts of Carthusian worthies set on pedestals; yet here the frame seems to take over. The relationship of saintly body to frame is convoluted and the busts strain free of their boundaries, their gesturing hands and flowing garments trespassing over the edges of the ovals. Although the door surrounds appear to present the busts, this presentation is compromised somewhat by the fact that the latter do not carry inscriptions and cannot be definitively identified.58 The restless transformations of the non-figurative decoration heighten the fluidity of the monks’ identities. The busts erupt out of their architectural framing, yet also seem caught in the middle of a process of transformation, lacking finality. A gap thus opens between the figures and the architectural framework that should accommodate them, between the figurative and the unnameable. In her study of the grotesque as a transhistorical artistic category, Frances S. Connelly emphasizes the acuteness of John Ruskin’s perspective on the genre: 56 Such as the garden of the Jesuit novitiate on the Quirinal Hill in Rome; see Fagiolo and Giusti, ‘Giardini come esercizi spirituali’, pp. 121–124. This is a quality that could be extended to Fanzago’s doorways. 57 See Martin, Carthusian Spirituality, esp. pp. 7–8 and 25–47 on Carthusian anagogic contemplation, and the affective upsurge to mystical union. 58 Napoli, Fashioning the Certosa di San Martino, pp. 244–246 for a discussion of the uncertain identities of the busts.

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A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself only; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character.59

Grotesque as a move, rather than a style or iconographic motif, Connelly argues, draws on the collision of the known and the unknown, and opens up room for play between boundaries.60 The idea of an interpretive gap, or a space that is resistant to linear verbal explanation, is exactly what Fanzago’s decoration insists must be kept in mind. The challenge with thinking monstrosity and ornament together is that just as the concept of monstrosity draws attention to the un-nameable and opens a discussion, it can simultaneously work to postpone the acuteness of encounter with the inexpressible. The idea of the gap and the leap thus offers one of the most useful means of bringing together Cosimo Fanzago’s strange, un-nameable decoration and the priorities and values of the San Martino Carthusians. Its insistence is at its most literal in the architrave that separates the two registers of the door surrounds (see Ill. 5.3). Strange form forces its way out, makes space, between the lines that strain to order and arrange, to separate and give appropriate place to door, bust, archway. Furthermore, at the Certosa, the monstrous flourishes of Fanzago’s ornament occupy areas of transition. In the entrance courtyard, a large wave-like scroll (Ill. 5.6) tops the triumphal-arch motif of the church facade. The lines of the frontispiece, picked out in contrasting colours, evoke a sense of ceremonial entry and signal the importance of the space beyond. Yet the mask-like ornament works to agitate this boundary line. Fin- or gill-like curls emerge from under the flat band of white marble that frames the regular geometries of the space between arch, pilaster, and cornice. From under familiar architectural members emerge elements that are suddenly almost anthropomorphic, almost significant. But at the same time, they refuse to coalesce into a stable, recognizable form. The decorative flourishes break over, fold over, bend over the rectilinear framework, break out of the conventional language of architecture. In material form, they suggest an analogy to the qualitative change one must undergo to cross the boundary between courtyard and church, between the external world (overlooked by the looming Castel di Sant’Elmo, redolent of secular power) and the House of God.

59 Ruskin, quoted in Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art, p. 12. 60 Thus not simply transgression, but requiring a certain openness and fluid nature; Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art, pp. 1–23.

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Ill. 5.6: Entrance courtyard, Certosa di San Martino, Naples. Detail of facade and entrance archway. Photo: ­Maria-Anna Aristova.

In the Great Cloister, the artifice of Cosimo Fanzago’s machina lies in orchestrating different modalities of architecture in a complex, multifaceted space. The cloister could be conceived as both Edenic garden of perfection and the sparse desertum of silence.61 It is a place of daily passage for the monks between the eremitic and cenobitic life: the protected space of the cell, and the communal areas of church, chapter house, refectory. The ideal conception of paradisiac enclosure – the cloister as Heavenly Jerusalem – is here already necessarily compromised. The corner closest to the passageway from the chapter house opens onto the princely apartments of the prior – representative spaces that would have hosted the most significant visitors. Another corner houses the ‘Belvedere of the Vicario’, offering views down onto the Royal Palace. A passage from another corner leads off to the novitiate wing. All these imply comings and goings not easily subsumed under the ideal of a monk returning to his silent retreat. Architectural form, therefore, does not in any simple way produce a singular space, or sustain a specific atmosphere. The space of the cloister and the space of the cell are continuously in the making. The time-bound, temporary,

61 See comments by Giusti and Leoncini above.

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dressing-like nature of the cloister door surrounds speaks to the necessary flexibility of architecture. The temporary nature of human structures also evokes one of the most vivid metaphors developed by Hugh of Balma in The Roads to Zion, a key early Carthusian text (composed sometime before 1290) that set out the nature of the order’s contemplative or anagogical piety.62 To explain the nature of Carthusian devotion – the unitive way – Hugh compares the spiritual exercise of reflection and meditation to a wooden framework erected to support the stones as a bridge is built. Yet once these are in place, the provisional structure is abandoned just as in the upward surge of mystical union all reason and understanding must be left behind.63 Reason, reflection, and thought are not entirely discarded. Rather, they are given a paradoxical place – both necessary and necessarily dispensable. This paradox evokes some of the disjunctive effect of Fanzago’s doorways. Indeed, the rhetoric of the work of early Carthusian writers like Hugh of Balma and Guigo de Ponte rehearses such tensions between the rational and the affective.64 On the one hand, a section of The Roads to Zion referred to as the ‘Difficult Question’ engages with the modes of scholastic writing and argument prevalent in Hugh of Balma’s time. Yet Dennis Martin suggests that the scholastic mode and milieu of disputation and knowledge-attaining works precisely as a foil to Carthusian devotion.65 The ‘Difficult Question’ is an anomaly; overall, the language of Hugh of Balma’s and Guigo de Ponte’s writings is richly metaphorical and full of ellipses. This language thrives in what emerges in the gaps. Dennis Martin comments: ‘Precisely because words are inherently limiting, concealing, and determining, unitive wisdom must always spill over the boundaries of words and creatures.’66 Fanzago’s non-figural, elusive, yet richly suggestive ornaments, opening out of the gaps between geometric planes, operate analogously to Hugh of Balma’s writing in The Roads to Zion: engaging with the logic-driven parameters of scholastic thought, but at the same time exceeding, overspilling, transcending.67 The gap, leap, or sideways, non-linear movement matter in a Carthusian context. The gap as a radical discontinuity touches upon the paradoxical question of how God can be encountered in earthly life, with all its limitations. The Carthusian affective upsurge, a lifting-up of the devotee through God’s grace, is a leap beyond the parameters of earthly life. Similarly paradoxical, in the pressure-points of the monastery, Fanzago’s non-figural ornaments might open up the possibility of re-looking as a means of transcending, of the inexplicable as an overcoming of limitations. 62 See introduction in Martin, Carthusian Spirituality, pp. 3–66. 63 Hugh of Balma, in Martin, Carthusian Spirituality, paragraph 40 of the ‘Difficult Question’, p. 166. 64 For Hugh of Balma and Guigo de Ponte, see Martin, Carthusian Spirituality, especially pp. 28–31. 65 Martin, Carthusian Spirituality, pp. xv–xx and 28; and Martin, Fifteenth-Century Carthusian Reform, p. 13. 66 Martin, Carthusian Spirituality, p. 44. 67 Martin, Carthusian Spirituality, p. 40–44.

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Conclusion In the Certosa di San Martino, monstrosity is not a figurative issue. Cosimo Fanzago’s ornamental vocabulary shifts between vegetal, floral, and animal, between two and three dimensions. The forms are difficult to name and describe, yet they unfurl in close tension with elements of classical architectural vocabulary. Here, from under volutes, between mouldings, the matter of the building pushes forth in unexpectedly vital ways. Ornament opens up gaps within that which would seem to settle and coalesce into stable structure. It taps into classical architecture’s capacity to trouble and mystify. Architecture’s discontents – the fundamental uncertainty of its capacity to endure – are here given a new, spectacular, iteration. The tendrils and flourishes that introduce themselves in the midst of the framework suggest that this might be architecture in the making, architecture only just coming into shape – or continuing to take shape. Its provisionalities and potentialities parallel the mutability of the images that constitute Jean Martin’s earthly paradise of solitude. Surface appearance reveals itself to be a mutable layer, caught in a process of being dressed and redressed. Both the monstrous ornament of the Certosa di San Martino and Jean Martin’s book of emblems imagine a Carthusian being-inthe-world that is not quite identical to the early rhetoric of escape and renunciation. In this decoration, the monks of San Martino admitted the unsettled into the space of the cloister. Over the course of more than 30 years, they cultivated Cosimo Fanzago’s workmanship at the monastery, allowing him to develop an idiom that became his signature across Naples.68 Although legally and economically they eventually came down on the side of certainty, aesthetically, the unsettled – the productively polymorphous and excessive – proves of lasting value.

Bibliography Anthony Blunt, Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo Architecture (London: A. Zwemmer, 1975). Mario Carpo, La maschera e il modello: Teoria architettonica ed evangelismo nell’ Extraordinario Libro di Sebastiano Serlio (Milan: Jaca Book, 1993). Carlo Celano, Notizie del bello dell’antico e del curioso della città di Napoli, ed. and expanded by Giovanni Battista Chiarini, 5 vols. (first published 1860; new edition Naples: Edizioni dell’Anticaglia, 2000). Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. by John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). Concetta Martone Dragani, Between Heaven and Earth: Negotiating Sacred Space at the Church of the Certosa di San Martino in Early-Seventeenth-Century Naples (unpublished PhD thesis, Temple University, 2012).

68 See Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament, Chapters 3 and 4.

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Marcello Fagiolo and Adriana Giusti, ‘Giardini come esercizi spirituali’, in Lo specchio del paradiso: il giardino e il sacro dall’antico al Ottocento, ed. by Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Adriana Giusti (Cinisello Balsamo Milano: Silvana, 1998), pp. 114–161. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. by James Strachey and others, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981), XVII, pp. 217–252. Maria Adriana Giusti, ‘Giardini del Medioevo’, in Lo specchio del paradiso: il giardino e il sacro dall’antico al Ottocento, ed. by Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Adriana Giusti (Cinisello Balsamo Milano: Silvana, 1998), pp. 44–91. Helen Hills, ‘Architectural History’s Indeterminacy: Holiness in Southern Baroque Architecture’, Field, 1.1 (2007), pp. 42–61. Dom Innocent Le Masson, Disciplina ordinis Cartusiensis tribus libris distributa (Montreuil-sur-Mer: Typis Cartusiae S. Mariae de Pratis, 1894; first published as Annales Ordinis Cartusiensis, Correrie, 1687). Giovanni Leoncini, ‘Il monastero certosino: attuazione di un ideale’, in Certose e Certosini in Europa: Atti del Convegno alla Certosa di San Lorenzo Padula 22, 23, 24 settembre 1988, 2 vols. (Naples: Sergio Civita Editore, 1990), I, pp. 47–58. Dom. Gabriele Maria Lorenzi, ‘Finalità e vita quotidiana dei Certosini’, in Certose e Certosini in Europa: Atti del Convegno alla Certosa di San Lorenzo Padula 22, 23, 24 settembre 1988, 2 vols. (Naples: Sergio Civita Editore, 1990), I, pp. 29–46. John A. Marino, Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Dennis D. Martin, ‘Carthusians during the Reformation Era: “Cartusia nunquam deformata, reformari resistens”’, Catholic Historical Review, 81.1 (1995), pp. 41–66. Dennis D. Martin, Carthusian Spirituality: The Writings of Hugh of Balma and Guigo de Ponte, trans. by Dennis D. Martin (New York: Paulist Press, 1997). Dennis D. Martin, Fifteenth-Century Carthusian Reform: The World of Nicholas Kempf (Leiden: Brill, 1992). Jean Martin, Le Paradis terrestre ou les emblemes sacrez de la solitude (Paris: Jean Henault, 1655). Chandra Mukerji, ‘Material Practices of Domination: Christian Humanism, the Built Environment, and Techniques of Western Power’, Theory and Society, 31.1 (2002), pp. 1–34. Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). John Nicholas Napoli, Fashioning the Certosa di San Martino: Ornament, Illusion, and Artistic Collaboration in Early-Modern Naples (unpublished PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2003). John Nicholas Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament in Early Modern Naples: Fashioning the Certosa di San Martino (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Alina Payne, ‘Creativity and bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, RES, 34.1 (1998), pp. 20–38. Alina Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Daniel Russell, ‘The Emblem in France and French-Speaking Countries’, in Companion to Emblem Studies, ed. by Peter M. Daly (New York: AMS Press, 2008), pp. 155–185. Alison Saunders, The Seventeenth-Century French Emblem: A Study in Diversity (Geneva: Droz, 2000). Sebastiano Serlio, Extraordinario libro di architettura di Sebastiano Serlio, architetto del Re Christianissimo: Nel quale si dimostrano trenta porte di opera rustica mista con diuersi ordini: & venti di opera dilicata di diuerse specie, con la scrittura dauanti, che narra il tutto (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1551). Anthony Vidler, Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Vitruvius, De Architectura, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius/home.html (accessed 11 April 2016). Michael J. Waters, ‘A Renaissance without Order: Ornament, Single-Sheet Engravings, and the Mutability of Architectural Prints’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 71.4 (2012), pp. 488–523. Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

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About the author Maria-Anna Aristova is completing her PhD in Art History at the University of York. Her research focuses on the problem of decoration in early modern architecture, and her research interests include architectural history and theory; decorative arts; Mannerism and Baroque; feminism, gender, and sexuality studies; and histories of science. She has taught at the University of York, and is preparing an essay on grotesques and monstrous fruit to be published in the Essays and Studies series of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (University of Toronto).

6. Masquing/(Un)Masking: Animation and the Restless Ornament of Fontainebleau Lisa Andersen1

Abstract This chapter considers a series of drawings of ornamented costumes produced in mid-sixteenth-century France. In these works, the ornamental stucco framing of the Galerie François Ier at Fontainebleau became elaborate costumes, with the putti, masks, garlands, and tassels now bound to courtiers’ bodies using the same swags, beads, and strapwork that weave their way through the stucco frames. These drawings evidence ornament’s transition from the architectonic and fixed structure of the wall, to portable objects and mobile bodies. My chapter traces this movement, paying particular attention to the double role of the mask as both an ornamental motif and an instrument of transformation, revealing a process of animation that blurred the boundaries between the art object and its viewers, and between persons and things. Keywords: masks, animation, frame, architecture, Fontainebleau, masquerade

For the English translation of his essay on the ‘Parergon’ in The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida selected several images that serve, as he writes, to ‘illustrate […] the unstable topos of ornamentality. Or in other words, to “illustrate”, if that is possible, the parergon’.2 Of the few images chosen, four derive from the artistic production of the School of Fontainebleau and date to the 1540s: two are etchings of cartouches inspired by the stucco ornamental frames of the Galerie François Ier (Ill. 6.1), and the other two are engravings of the cryptoportico in the Jardin des Pins (Ill. 6.2). Claiming 1 I thank Maria Fabricius Hansen and Chris Askholt Hammeken for the opportunity to be involved in this project and for their support throughout the process. My gratitude also to Heather Muckart, Joan Boychuk, and Bronwen Wilson for providing comments on an early version of this chapter. I am also appreciative of the comments and suggestions provided by the anonymous peer reviewer. 2 Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 16.

Hammeken, C.A. and M.F. Hansen (eds.), Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789462984967_ch06

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Ill. 6.1: Antonio Fantuzzi, Ornamental panel with central oval cartouche, 1520–1584. Etching, 181 x 136mm, RP-P-1953–258. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Ill. 6.2: Léon Davent after Primaticcio, Fontainebleau. Cryptoportico of the grotto of the Jardin des Pins, Sixteenth century. Engraving. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

‘a certain illustrative detachment’, Derrida’s essay pointedly lacks any reference to the images, leaving the reader/viewer to ponder the parergonal relationship between the text and the chosen images.3 What we can safely conclude, however, is that, with a 3 The full prefatory note reads: ‘The first version was not accompanied by any “illustrative” exhibition. Here it is different. But in this first chapter or quarter-book, the iconography has not the same purpose as in the three following it, where the writing seems to refer to the “picture.” Here, a certain illustrative detachment, without reference, without title or legitimacy, comes as if to “illustrate,” in place of ornament, the unstable topos of ornamentality. Or in other words, to “illustrate,” if that is possible, the parergon.’ Ibid.

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world of images to choose from, it was the Fontainebleau prints that resonated with the difficulty inherent in defining ornament. Indeed, these images exemplify one of Derrida’s primary critiques of Immanuel Kant’s formulation, namely, the assumption that one can distinguish rigorously between the intrinsic and the extrinsic, between what is frame, what is framed, and what is outside the frame.4 Derrida is far from the only scholar to recognize that the art and architecture of the French Renaissance provide a rich field for exploring the nature of ornament and the status of the frame.5 In its prominence and inventiveness, ornament was a dominant mode of representation both at and emerging from Fontainebleau. In this chapter, I will reflect on a largely overlooked series of drawings dating to the late 1540s and attributed to the artist Léonard Thiry.6 The images depict bust-length, masked figures in profile, each wearing an elaborate ornamental costume and headdress clearly evoking the ornamental stucco frames of the Galerie François Ier and demonstrating the close alliance between monumental decor and ephemeral costume (Ills. 6.3 and 6.4). The drawings record designs for the popular French court practice of masquerading, and the objects at the heart of my study are those now lost costumes. The costumes afford a productive line of inquiry into how ornament mediated between architecture, artworks, and bodies. Focusing on the dual nature of the mask, I consider how ornament can erode the distinction between subject and object, resulting in the animation of the inanimate and vice versa. Furthermore, by tracing the ornamental costumes in a trajectory that moved from the decorative programme of Fontainebleau to the masquerade performance, and back to the walls of the château, I seek to open up connections and lines of inquiry between artworks and objects that may not otherwise be apparent.

Restless Ornament Beginning in 1532, continuing through to the 1560s, and spanning the reigns of François Ier and his successor Henri II, Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio, and a stable of artists from around Europe developed and executed a decorative programme at the château of Fontainebleau that would form the centrepiece of the artistic production of the French Renaissance.7 The defining feature of this programme, 4 Ibid., p. 63. For a thorough discussion of the relationship of Derrida’s text to the Fontainebleau images, see Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, pp. 151–153. 5 See for example, Freedberg, ‘Rosso’s Style’, pp. 14–15; Johnson, ‘The Monumental Style’, p. 11; Carroll, Rosso Fiorentino, p. 211; and Peacock, Stage Designs, p. 242. 6 The author of the drawings is uncertain; Brugerolles and Guillet propose Thiry as the artist responsible on the basis of similarities to his other works. Brugerolles and Guillet, Renaissance in France, p. 110. 7 Rosso died in 1540, while Primaticcio continued work at Fontainebleau until the completion in 1569 of the Galerie d’Ulysse. Other artists who worked during the period on the decorative programme of Fontainebleau include Léonard Thiry, Niccolò dell’Abbate, Luca Penni, and Francesco Scibec da Carpi.

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Ill. 6.3: Léonard Thiry, Bust of Male Figure in Profile, Wearing Richly Decorated Mask, Sixteenth century. Black chalk, pen, and brown ink, brown wash. Mas. 1296 (rec.19), fol. 17. © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY.

Ill. 6.4: Léonard Thiry, Bust of Female in Profile, Wearing Richly Decorated Mask, Sixteenth century. Black chalk, pen, and brown ink, brown wash. Mas. 1296 (rec.19), fol. 11. © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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exemplified in the Galerie François Ier but repeated in many spaces throughout the château, was a system of relief stucco ornamental framing surrounding frescoes depicting allegorical and mythological subjects intended to glorify the King (Ill. 6.5).8 Throughout the château, ornamental motifs, explicit in their evocations of antiquity – including putti, masks, bucrania, vases, tassels, and festoons heavy with vegetation – are structurally organized by curling strapwork and architectural features such as niches and pedestals. Rendered in both low and high relief, the three-dimensional ornament creates a continuously articulated interior surface. The frames frequently impinge upon the space of the central frescoes they enclose. The ornament resists purely decorative or formal status, with specific motifs acting as an aid to interpreting the central scene. The ornamental frames of Fontainebleau belong equally to the wall (as edifice) and to the content they enclose, without fully belonging to either. The ornamental style developed at Fontainebleau was an offspring of the grotesque ornament that had quickly gained popularity through the work of Raphael and his circle following the discovery of the Domus Aurea in Rome at the end of the fifteenth century.9 The ornamental configurations devised by Rosso and his workshop decades later in France shared with grotesques their mutable, metamorphic, and combinatory qualities.10 Like grotesques, Fontainebleau ornament juxtaposed the natural with the artificial and conjoined the architectural and the organic. Hybrid figures including satyrs, caryatids, and terms intermingled with rambunctious putti, bucrania, animal heads, and an abundance of masks – some theatrical and some monstrous (Ill. 6.6). Unlike early Italian grotesques, however, the delicate vines were now lush garlands heavy with vegetation, and the spindly candelabra supports were replaced by thick, ductile strapwork. Significantly, rather than being applied across the planar surface of the wall, Fontainebleau ornament, in its original medium of relief stucco, was volumetric, pulsating from beneath the interior surface of the edifice. Indeed, the fluctuating scale, contorted figures, and undulating strapwork suggest a latent energy. Fontainebleau, then, provides an opportunity to explore what happens when the mutable, unstable, and metamorphic character of the grotesque comes to reside within the walls, when it no longer adorns but is one with the architecture. 8 Although the Galerie François Ier is commonly understood as the space in which the decorative programme began, it has been suggested that the stucco-framed frescoes of the Pavilon de Pomone were completed around the same time (c. 1533). See Carroll, Rosso Fiorentino, pp. 198–207. Other rooms in the château that exhibited a similar decorative scheme were completed during the same period as the gallery (1532–1539), including the chambre du Roi (1533–1535), chambre de la Reine (1534–1537), and the apartment of the Constable (1536–1540). Smith, ‘La première description’, p. 46. The only one of these spaces to survive with its decorations intact, however, is the Galerie François Ier (although it has undergone considerable renovation and reconfiguration since its completion in 1539). 9 On the discovery of the Domus Aurea and the subsequent development of the grotesque in Italy see Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea. 10 The literature on the grotesque, both its historical and conceptual development during the early modern period, is extensive. See for example, Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture; Morel, Les grotesques; and Summers, ‘Archaeology of the Grotesque’.

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Ill. 6.5: Rosso Fiorentino, Galerie Franços Ier at Fontainebleau, 1535. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

While there is much to explore in the relationships between building, frame, and content within the space of the château itself, these relationships grew more complex and were further destabilized when the ornament of Fontainebleau became untethered from the wall and rendered mobile. Primarily through the technology of print (both engraving and etching), the ornamental frames were separated from the central frescoes and circulated either as vacant cartouches or as frames for a wide variety of new content. In this intermedial process, ornament also moved from periphery to centre. An engraving by René Boyvin of a pair of candlesticks (Ill. 6.7) demonstrates how ornament took on a structural role rather than an adorning or framing function. Similar designs in which the putti, festoons, masks, and strapwork of the stucco frames were reconfigured to form urns, casks, salt cellars, and platters also proliferated widely during the mid-sixteenth century. Moving from the wall to the page and from the periphery to the centre, the role of ornament was continually reconfigured and renegotiated. Throughout this process, however, and despite the move from three-dimensional space to the two-dimensional plane, artists maintained the distinctive suggestion of volume and gravity of the stucco relief, indicating

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Ill. 6.6: Attributed to Rosso Fiorentino, Design for a Wall Decoration, Sixteenth century. Pen and brown ink, brush, and grey wash, 288 x 196mm. Gift of Harry G. Friedman, 1955 (55.632.8). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

an overriding concern with retaining a connection to the original place and space of the King’s favourite château.11 The Thiry drawings and the costumes they represent participated in this mobilization and reconfiguration of Fontainebleau ornament, and, by extension, the walls of the château. Only fifteen of the original 20 drawings are extant, assembled in an album in the collection of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) in 11 Zerner, Renaissance Art in France, p. 138.

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Ill. 6.7: René Boyvin, Two Candlesticks, c. 1542–1580. Engraving, 139 x 180 mm, RP-P-OB-8349. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Paris.12 We know, however, the appearance of the full series thanks to engraved copies of the lost figures. Unfortunately, the context of production and the specific intended function of the drawings largely remain a mystery. They likely date to no later than 1549, when the existence of the prints made from the drawings is documented.13 After previous attributions to René Boyvin and Pierre Milan, Emmanuelle Brugerolles and David Guillet have proposed Thiry as the author of the drawings on the basis of stylistic similarities to his other known works.14 It is notable that Thiry, a Flemish artist, was 12 These fifteen drawings bear the marks of the stylus used to copy the designs onto the copper plate for printing. The drawings are accompanied in the ENSBA collection by five additional drawings that were likely done after the prints as the figures depicted face in the same direction as their printed counterparts. 13 In 1941, Yves Metman discovered a letter of credit dated 26 October 1549, which appears to reference the printed images. Metman, ‘Un graveur inconnu’, p. 204. Examples of engravings in their original paired configuration can be found in the collections of the Rijksmuseum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 14 On the basis of the document described above, Metman had ascribed the works to Pierre Milan rather than René Boyvin, as had long been thought. Ibid. While Milan may have been involved in the production of the engravings, Brugerolle and Guillet’s attribution of the drawings to Thiry seems more likely. They further suggest that Thiry based the drawings on designs by Rosso, adapting them as models for engravers. Brugerolles and Guillet, The Renaissance in France, p. 110.

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a close collaborator with both Rosso and Primaticcio on the decorative programme at Fontainebleau, and subsequently participated extensively in the translation of the ornamental repertoire into designs for luxury objects.15 As a result, he would have been intimately familiar with the stucco ornamental frames, both in their original volumetric and spatial incarnation as well as their graphic reproductions. A close examination of the drawings (Ills. 6.3 and 6.4) demonstrates that the costumes are essentially assemblages of the same ornament that occupied the walls of the château. Gathered swags of cloth intricately wind and weave around the heads and shoulders of each figure, binding putti, tassels, faceted jewels, vases, foliage, garlands, and festoons to the concealed bodies. Strapwork organizes and creates structure, expanding the volume of the headdresses, creating spaces to highlight prominent ornaments, and forming sartorial details such as the collars or epaulettes of the costumes. Strings of beads loop through the headdresses, frame the masks, and delineate the necklines and torsos of the figures, echoing the beadwork of the gilt frames that line the edges of the Galerie François Ier frescoes. The masks worn by the costumed figures do double duty as they both conceal the identity of the performer while also referencing the masks that appear throughout the decorative programme of Fontainebleau. By necessity, designs for masquerade costumes required that the full body be represented in order to provide the costume-maker with all of the essential visual details. Because the costumes had to accommodate often complex and athletic choreography, the figures in these designs were frequently depicted in mid-step. In their static and almost diagrammatic format, their strict profile composition, and the absence of the lower body, the ENSBA drawings bear little resemblance to the lively sketches of masquerade costume designs produced at the French court. Three works attributed to René Boyvin, however, provide evidence that Thiry’s drawings are at least obliquely related to designs for actual costumes.16 Each of Boyvin’s full-length figures is represented in ornament-laden costumes bearing considerable resemblance to those depicted in the Thiry works. In each instance, the costumed figure is depicted middance step, holding the accoutrements of court performances: an ornamented cylindrical drum in the case of the Bibliothèque Nationale drawing (Ill. 6.8); bouquets of foliage and flowers in the case of the Berlin drawing; and two torches, common props of masquerade performance, in the case of the engraving in the Metropolitan Museum collection. If there were any lingering doubts that these works represent designs

15 For Thiry’s time at Fontainebleau, see Dacos, ‘Léonard Thiry de Belges, peitre excellent de Fontainebleau à Bruxelles’. 16 The works are: Figure de mascarade, drawing, pen, brown ink, and wash, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Rés. B 5; Masked figure, drawing, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Hdz 2383; and Torch Bearer, engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32.92.27(22). On the similarities between the Berlin and BnF drawings, see Berckenhagen, ‘Zeichnungen’, pp. 11–23.

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Ill. 6.8: René Boyvin, Figure in a Masquerade Costume, Sixteenth century. Drawing, Reserve B-5 Boite. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

for actual masquerade costumes, the Berlin drawing includes written instructions in the margins directed at the costume-maker. Despite the differing formats of the works, the similarities of Boyvin’s dancing costumed figures to Thiry’s masked ornamental busts are undeniable.17 Indeed, on this basis, it seems sound to conclude that Thiry’s drawings represent actual costumes that formed part of court performances. Masquerade and other festivities were both ubiquitous and ephemeral in the early modern French court, resulting in considerable difficulty for historians attempting to reconstruct these events (one of the primary reasons objects such as the costume drawings are rarely taken up in the 17 Brugerolles and Guillet note the similarities of both the BnF and Berlin drawings to Thiry’s busts, and suggest they may belong to the same body of work. See Brugerolles and Guillet, The Renaissance in France, p. 110.

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scholarship). There are no known documents that clearly link the costumes depicted in the ENSBA drawings to a specific masquerade – hence the date, location, and context of such a performance remain the subject of speculation; but this is overwhelmingly the norm rather than the exception for sixteenth-century costume designs, and should not prevent further analysis of these remarkable works or the costumes they depict. The compositional disparity between the Thiry costume bust drawings and Boyvin’s costume designs can be explained by the fact that they represent different stages in the intermedial life of the object. Like so many of the School of Fontainebleau artworks, particularly those on paper, the Thiry drawings likely fulfilled a variety of functions and registered multiple temporal resonances.18 The drawings and their subsequent engravings would have functioned as independent art objects appealing to collectors while also serving as models for future works in a variety of different media. At the same time, they record, or at least recall, the costumed bodies of courtiers and the ephemeral moment of performance. Before returning to the intermedial trajectories of the ENSBA drawings briefly at the end of this chapter, I will first turn to the objects at the heart of this study: the now lost costumes based on the Fontainebleau ornament.

Masquing In a 1541 letter written while he was at Fontainebleau, Giovan-Battista da Gambara, the Mantuan ambassador to France, wrote: ‘At this court they are occupied by nothing but giving themselves a good time all day long, with tournaments and festivities with exceptionally beautiful mascarades which are always different.’19 Gambara’s words are only mildly hyperbolic; the early modern French court was absorbed with the rituals of their own entertainment. Catherine de’Medici recounted that her father-in-law, François Ier, held a ball at least twice weekly in order to keep his court happy and diverted.20 These were elaborate occasions that often spanned several days and encompassed multiple events, including religious ceremonies, jousting tournaments, staged battles, concerts, banquets, balls, and masquerades. The masquerade, already popular by the beginning of the sixteenth century, became a staple

18 This kind of intermediality was a pervasive characteristic of the French Renaissance. While there are certainly linear translations to be traced from one medium to another, these trajectories are most often messy and polysemous. As a result, intermediality is better understood as an entangled meshwork, multidirectional and overlapping. In this conceptualization, I have been influenced by Tim Ingold’s writing on entanglement. See particularly Ingold, ‘Bringing Things Back to Life’. 19 Cited in Châtenet, La Cour de France, p. 215; my translation of the following passage: ‘In questa corte non si attende ad altro che darsi bon tempo tutto'l dí in giostre, feste con bellissime massacrate sempre diverse.’ 20 Knecht, French Renaissance Court, pp. 66–67.

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of French court festivities during the reign of François Ier.21 Interspersed throughout the feasting and social dancing of the banquet and ball in the evenings, the King along with his closest courtiers would suddenly appear, masked and disguised in themed costumes, to perform choreographed and rehearsed dance steps. At the end of each performance, the masquers would choose one of the assembled revellers to dance with before eventually removing their mask to reveal their identity.22 Another course of the meal would then be served and the process would begin again, continuing into the early morning hours. A single celebration could include as many as a dozen masquerades. It is no surprise given the frequency and intricacy of courtly entertainments that all of the artists involved with planning and executing the decorative programme at Fontainebleau – including Rosso, Primaticcio, Nicolò dell’Abate, and Antoine Caron – also participated in the design of costumes, props, and temporary structures for masquerades and ballets.23 Primaticcio, for example, was not only responsible for designing dozens of masquerade costumes, but also devised a number of elaborate props for court performances including floats and chariots on which dancers would enter, clouds that descended from above bearing the gods, and scenography depicting paradise and hell.24 Indeed, in terms of time, effort, and expense, the records indicate that both court artists and their royal patron did not prioritize or hold in higher esteem – as we have a tendency to do now – the more permanent design of monumental decor over the design of ephemeral court festivals.25 Moreover, these activities should not be understood as separate or distinct practices. They both involved mastery of many of the same media and certainly overlapped in subject matter, often drawing from both the natural surroundings and the decorated interior spaces of the château.

21 Masquerades maintained popularity in the French court throughout the sixteenth century, although they underwent changes in format as ballet became increasingly fashionable and there was a shift away from the complexity of the costume toward the intricacy of the choreography. Henri III, who reigned briefly from 1573 to 1575, was reported to be entirely obsessed with ballet. On the popularity and evolution of French court performances, see McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance. 22 Ibid., p. 62; Châtenet and Lecoq, ‘Le roi et ses doubles’, p. 27. 23 McGowan, ‘Costumes pour la dance’, p. 48. McGowan further observes that many of the costume designs reflected the mythological characters that decorated the courtly spaces in the form of fresco or sculpture. 24 McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance, 70. 25 François Ier I took a particular and sustained interest not only in the dressing of his courtiers for festivities but also in their general sartorial choices while at court. Records indicate that the King placed an order in 1538 for 22 dresses for the ladies at court, each of which would have cost roughly the equivalent of a court artist’s annual salary. See Croizat, ‘Living Dolls’, pp. 119–120. On the King’s interest in dressing his court, see also Châtenet and Lecoq, ‘Le roi et ses doubles’.

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Masquerade costumes encompassed an almost endless variety of themes.26 At the festivities for the wedding of the Princesse de Navarre to the duc de Clèves in June 1541, for example, nine masquerades were performed, each with a different ensemble of themed costumes – from ostriches to Franciscans, and hourglass headdresses to warriors clothed in the Turkish fashion.27 In some cases, the King and his chosen companions were disguised as gods and goddesses or other mythological figures, such as Rosso’s Hercules design worn by François Ier28 or Primaticcio’s design for Alexander and Thalestris.29 While observers would have easily recognized such popular characters, the masquerade themes were frequently ambiguous and allegorical in nature. For the 1542 carnival celebrations, Charles d’Angoulême, the duc d’Orléans, and five companions slowly made their way into the hall disguised as women spinning thread while seated on the backs of ersatz tortoises.30 The ensemble was recognized by the Venetian, Ludovico da Thiene as a metaphor for the wisdom of proceeding cautiously.31 In many cases, masquerade costumes consisted of a collage of symbols bound to the cloaked and masked bodies of the performers. In a costume study by Hugues Sambin, sheaves of wheat are secured around the waist of a masked performer while he sports a towering headdress composed of horses’ heads, a plough wheel, and plumes – transforming the courtier’s body into an agricultural allegory. At a 1518 masquerade, this time held in the courtyard of the Bastille and for which we only have written accounts, the King’s white satin robe was covered in compasses, clocks, and various inscriptions that viewers were left to interpret.32 Encrusted with symbols and cryptic messages, these costumes functioned as mobile emblemata and both delighted the court as a test of erudition but also frequently frustrated observers. One contemporary report from Gambara betrayed his irritation with costumes that had become too bizarre and complex; he directed his frustration at the artists who he felt had become overly ambitious in their inventions and the poets who focused excessively on obscure and convoluted symbolism.33 In 26 To my knowledge, there has not been a comprehensive study of the costume designs at the French court during this period, a topic that seems ripe for further attention. Generally, see McGowan, ‘Costumes pour la danse’. On the costume designs of Primaticcio during François Ier’s reign, see Cordellier, ‘Les Capricciose Invenzioni’ and Occhipinti, ‘Un disegno del Primaticcio’. On the collection of costume drawings in the National Museum in Stockholm, see Dimier, ‘Några minnen’; Dimier, Le Primatice, pp. 460–465; Beijer, ‘XVI – XVIII Century Theatrical Designs’; and Bjurström and Dahlbäck, ‘Témoignages sur l’éphémère’. On the same collection in Sweden, as well as designs in the Biblioteca Nationale in Florence, see Hall, ‘Primaticcio and Court Festivities’. 27 For the full list of costumes, see McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance, p. 63. 28 Anonymous etching after a design by Rosso, BnF, Vol. Ba 12. See Carroll, Rosso Fiorentino, pp. 342–344. 29 Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, inv. No. NMH 848/1863. 30 Ibid. 31 McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance, p.76. 32 McGowan, ‘Costumes pour la danse’, p. 47. On the 1518 festivities held at the Bastille, see Lecoq, ‘Une fête italienne’. 33 McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance, p. 74.

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this game of interpretation, the masquerades of the French court reflected the notoriously complex and ambiguous decorative programme of the Galerie François Ier, famous to this day for its dense and enigmatic iconography.34 Inspiration for costume designs came not only from the mythological figures that populated the frescoes of the gallery and other rooms of the château; architectural and ornamental features of the spaces were also transformed into masquerade disguises. Primaticcio, for example, created several architectonic costume studies including a performer disguised as a canopy, another as a column, and a third as support to a pedestal.35 A striking example of this type of architectural costume was described in a letter dated 4 July 1546, in which Giulio Alvarotti, Ercole II d’Este’s ambassador to the French court, reported on the weekend-long festivities held to celebrate the marriage of Claude II de Guise to Louise de Brézé. Alvarotti describes a masquerade that followed dinner on the Sunday, during which a figure emerged disguised as a fountain. Carmelo Occhipinti has identified a drawing now in Stockholm as the design for the costume described by Alvarotti (Ill. 6.9).36 The performer’s legs and torso were hidden in the tall, draped pedestal with a tabletop resting on his shoulders. On the table was a sphere encircled by female figures representing the three Graces. A large, double-handled urn topped the structure, balanced on the shoulders of the three women and holding perfumed water that flowed from the breasts of each of the Graces. Along with mechanized set pieces, architectonic costumes such as the perfumed fountain participated in the animation of the courtiers’ environment during masquerade performances, seemingly bringing surrounding objects and structures to life.37 The use of architectonic forms as costumes would have held particular significance for contemporary viewers. In the sixteenth century, the Vitruvian analogy between buildings and the human body had a currency that exceeded concerns with prescribing proper architectural ratios.38 As Charles Burroughs has explained, the early modern conceptualization of the connection between building and body encompassed both an ‘anthropometric model’, which posited good architectural design as based in ideal human proportions, and an ‘anthropomorphic metaphor’, which understood a ‘literal inclusion of the human body into architecture’, exemplified by the caryatid or 34 The scholarship attempting to ‘decipher’ the gallery’s iconographic programme is extensive. Rather than rehearse these sources here, I refer the reader to Phillip Usher’s excellent and succinct historiography of the debate over the Galerie François Ier’s meaning: Usher, Epic Arts, pp. 86–88. 35 Hall, ‘Primaticcio’, p. 374. 36 Occhipinti, Carteggio d’arte, p. CXX. 37 Zorach has identified animation as a pervasive theme in the art of Fontainebleau. Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, pp. 237–243. 38 The literature on the building/body analogy is extensive. Rykwert’s The Dancing Column and Onians’s Bearers of Meaning continue to be seminal works on the issue. See also Dodds and Tavernor’s edited volume Body and Building. Peacock writes of the ‘allegorisation’ of the Vitruvian body/building analogy during the sixteenth century in relation to theatrical stage design. Peacock, Stage Designs, p. 121.

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Ill. 6.9: Francesco Primaticcio, Pillar on Lion’s Feet, Sixteenth century. Pen and grey-black ink, watercolor, 353 x 130mm, NMH 870/1863. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

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atlante.39 This latter understanding, with which I am particularly concerned in this study, had clear resonances with the grotesque. Unlike the prescriptive and idealized association between building and body suggested by the anthropometric model, the anthropomorphic metaphor fell outside of intellect and reason, conjuring an unsettling blurring of boundaries between the organic and the inorganic. At Fontainebleau, the physical imbrication of building and body had its most explicit visual manifestation in the cryptoportico in the Jardin des Pins (see Ill. 6.2).40 Located on the ground floor of the west wing of the château, the entryway to the grotto designed by Primaticcio between 1541 and 1543 represents a moment of transformation from stone to flesh as male bodies struggle with the effort of coming into form. Conversely, perhaps what we see is a moment of petrifaction, with flesh and muscle turning to stone and being subsumed into the wall. This ambiguity compels the beholder to grapple with the instability, both of the structure itself and of what we perceive. In both scenarios, the boundary between body and building and between subject and object is eroded.41 As Alina Payne has observed, it is in the moments when the distinction between subject and object is effaced that animation occurs.42 The animation of architecture was not just an aesthetic effect or a theoretical conceit in the French Renaissance.43 The enchanted palace was a prevalent literary theme during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From Amadis de Gaule, a chivalric romance in which doors, staircases, and other architectural features of the hero’s castle spring into action to prevent entry by the unworthy, to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the architectural dream within a dream in which the protagonist wanders through antique structures that come to life, architectural fantasies were enthusiastically consumed by the French court.44 This notion of an edifice being brought to 39 Burroughs, Italian Renaissance Palace Façade, 31. 40 This is the same cryptoportico that Derrida included two images of in his work on the parergon as noted at the beginning of this chapter. 41 Caroline van Eck makes the connection between the cryptoportico of the Grotte des Pins and the ‘more widespread interest in the boundaries between dead matter and living bodies and how to transcend them’. Van Eck, ‘Animation and Petrification’. 42 Payne, ‘Living Stones, Crying Walls’, p. 310. 43 For a discussion of animation with regard to French Renaissance art more generally, see Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, pp. 237–243. 44 François Ier became familiar with Amadis de Gaule while in captivity under Charles V in Madrid in 1525– 1526. It was after negotiating his release and returning to France that he commenced his most productive period of building, including the extensive renovations to Fontainebleau. He also commissioned a French translation of Amadis from Nicolas de Herberay de Essarts, which was published over the course of the 1540s. André Chastel has explored the degree to which Amadis de Gaule and other literary descriptions of miraculous castles influenced French Renaissance architecture, noting in particular the use of the plans for François Ier’s château at Chantilly as the model for Apolidon’s palace in Essarts’s translation. See Chastel, The Palace of Apolidon. François Ier owned several editions of the Hypnerotomachia, including a copy given to him by his mother as a wedding gift. The book was translated into French in 1546 (likely by Jean Martin) as Le songe de polyphile. Despite first being published in Italy, Liane Lefaivre has argued that the text had the greatest popularity and success in France, shaping ‘to a great extent the sensibility of the arts of the French Renaissance’. Lefaivre, Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, p. 24.

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life by the presence of a specific protagonist is reflected in the comments of François Ier’s sister, Marguerite de Navarre, who, in a letter bemoaning her brother’s absence during her recent visit to Fontainebleau, wrote ‘your edifices without you are a dead body’.45 While architecture’s perceived animation was undoubtedly the result of a complex interaction between the ingenuity and illusionistic skills of the artists working at court along with the collective imagination of those who inhabited its spaces, Marguerite’s comments allude to the King’s exclusive ability to enliven – to bring to life – his favourite château. It is in this context of the animating potential of performance that we should consider the costumes depicted in Thiry’s drawings. Audiences for masquerades consisted of courtiers and distinguished foreign visitors to the court, individuals who also had privileged access to the decorated spaces of the château and would have readily recognized the ornamental motifs. The costumes would have been appreciated not as costumes inspired by Fontainebleau ornament, but rather as animated, mobile incarnations of the walls and especially the frames of the château, in particular, those of the Galerie François Ier. They were the King’s ornamental repertoire come to life.

(Un)masking Early modern court entertainments, according to Julia Reinhardt Lupton, produced ‘a phenomenal zone, a space of appearance, that is neither simply physical nor purely representational’.46 Within this zone there was an interchange between ‘the assembly of things’ and the ‘assembly of people’.47 In addition to the props and costumes designed specifically for the occasion, objects from the vast royal collections would be gathered and displayed within the spaces of celebration. In 1546, for the festivities planned for the baptism of his granddaughter, François Ier ordered that all of his vaisselle d’or be brought from Paris to Fontainebleau to be displayed on a specially built nine-tier structure at the centre of the pavilion in which the banqueting and dancing took place.48 In the flickering torchlight, the sight of these gold and silver vessels, many of them bearing the same ornamental motifs that protruded from the surrounding walls, had a profound effect on the gathered revellers.49 It was not just the abundance of assembled objects, the mere statement of their ownership, that spoke to the magnificence of the sovereign. Rather, as Lupton argues, it 45 The full passage reads: ‘Voir vos edifices sans vous c’est ung corps mort, et regarder vos bastiments sans ouïr sur cela vostre intencion, c’est lire en ebryeu.’ Marguerite de Navarre, Nouvelles lettres, p. 382. 46 Lupton, ‘Soft Res Publica’, p. 108. 47 Ibid. 48 McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance, p. 133. 49 Ibid.

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was the shifting relationship between people and things that enhanced monarchical power. It was into this ‘space of appearance’, an atmosphere of heightened expectations within which the people and objects assembled by the King participated in the rituals of courtly splendour, that the costumes depicted in the ENSBA drawings would have entered. But how might the costumes have functioned in their performative incarnations? And what role, in particular, did ornament play? I propose that the answers to these questions lie in the multivalent functioning of the mask. Masks play a complex double role in the costumes: the first, a performative function associated with concealing and revealing identity; and the second, as an increasingly popular ornamental motif in architectural and decorative programmes.50 As we will see, the mask’s differing associations facilitated the blurring between subject and object that underlies the process of animation. Masks fulfilling both of these roles were ubiquitous in the early modern French court. In the first instance, worn to cover the face, they were a crucial feature of most masquerade performances as well as other court celebrations and festivities.51 Moreover, the King and his chosen companions would sometimes don masks in order to conceal their identities when the monarch wished to ‘hide’ among his courtiers. A May 1517 eyewitness report recounts the public’s unease when the King and several companions rode into Paris on horseback one evening, dressed in bizarre costumes with their faces covered by masks.52 As Monique Châtenet and Anne-Marie Lecoq have demonstrated, this use of masks created a kind of collective identity that served to multiply the King’s presence.53 When worn, masks acted as figures of concealment, dissimulation, and transformation.54 As faces premised on artifice, fixed and frozen, masks suggested the absence of subjectivity.55

50 As Mikhail Bakhtin observed, ‘it would be impossible to exhaust the intricate multiform symbolism of the mask.’ Bakhtin, Rabelais, 40. While my focus in this chapter is on two of the functions of masks, I do not suggest that the masks discussed herein are limited to these two potential significances. The literature on masks is expansive. On the mask in European early modern art, see Barasch, ‘The Mask in European Art’ and Paoletti, ‘Michelangelo’s Masks’; on the mask as ornamental motif or architectural detail, see Cordellier, ‘Le mascaron’. For an in-depth analysis of the mask in relation to cultural history, anthropology, and visual representation, see Hans Belting’s recent book Face and Mask. 51 While many aspects of Bakhtin’s work on the carnivalesque are of particular relevance to any discussion of French Renaissance festival and performance, he draws a distinction between the ‘popular-festive mood’ of the marketplace, with which he is primarily concerned, and the ‘court and humanist utopia’ of the masquerades which are the focus of this chapter. Interestingly, the court that Bakhtin provides as an example in this passage is that of Marguerite de Navarre, François Ier’s sister. Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 138–139. 52 Lalanne, Journal d’un bourgeois, p. 55. 53 Châtenet and Lecoq, ‘Le roi et ses doubles’. 54 On the mask as figure of metamorphosis or transformation, see Cheng, ‘Mask, Mimicry, Metamorphosis’, pp. 65–66 and Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 39–40. 55 Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, p. 172.

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In the second instance, unworn masks, liberally applied to architectural features, performed an ornamental role. They were particularly popular on columns and liminal structures such as doorways, arches, and frames.56 Dominque Cordellier points out that masks became such a common ornamental figure in the mannerist art of the sixteenth-century French court that the word mascaron was introduced into the French lexicon in order to differentiate these ornamental masks from those worn to conceal the face.57 Human, animal, and fantastical faces configured frontally and in profile appear throughout the stucco framing of Fontainebleau. Along with associations to antiquity, such decorative use of masks gave a literal face – a potent signifier of life – to inanimate architectural objects.58 In their dual role, then, masks were figures that obscured, or signalled a lack of subjectivity while simultaneously bestowing animation. This binary nature of masks is consciously referenced in a number of Thiry’s costume bust drawings. On folio 9 (Ill. 6.10), for example, a small face is affixed above the costumed figure’s forehead sheltered below a curving piece of strapwork, similar to a mascaron that might appear at the apex of a door or archway. This mask is doubled by a similar face peering out from the back of the figure’s headdress at the base of his skull. Nestled in the foliage atop the headdress, a putto-like creature holds a mask aloft. From this angle, the beholder can see both the external features of the mask and its concave interior, emphasizing its intended (but here unfulfilled) role to be worn on the face. The vacant mask foregrounds its objecthood, highlighting its nature as a face without subjectivity. Finally, the bearded mask that conceals the costumed figure’s face, obscuring his identity, blurs the distinction between mask and mascaron in its resemblance to the crescent-shaped, bearded profile masks that inhabit the Fontainebleau stucco frames.59

56 The association with masks and architecture, particularly the column, links back to theatrical masks through Dionysus. As Hans Belting notes, ‘Dionysos, in whose name the Athenians produced theater, was honored in the cult with a mask, a prosopon – a mask that hung from a column wreathed in ivy.’ Belting, Face and Mask, p. 51. 57 Cordellier, ‘Le mascaron’, p. 147. As Cordellier further notes, the term mascaron was derived from the Italian maschera. Belting in turn traces the etymology of the term further back in time to the Arabic concept mashara. Belting, Face and Mask, p. 54. 58 Cordellier, ‘Le mascaron’, p. 149. On this blurring between animate and inanimate, also see van Eck, ‘Animation and Petrifaction’, p. 150. 59 All of Thiry’s costume bust drawings visually represent some level of play with the nature of masks, but perhaps the most striking example is an image known to us now only through print. An engraving now in the Albertina Museum in Vienna that clearly belongs to the same series depicts a figure wearing a bearded mask concealing his face while his headdress is encircled with large empty masks of slightly varying expressions. Yet two more masks hang, suspended by ribbons of cloth, from his shoulders – one resting on his chest directly below his face, the other on his back. Albertina Graphic Collection, F I 3, fol032, 083.

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Ill. 6.10: Léonard Thiry, Bust of Male in Profile, Wearing Richly Decorated Mask, Sixteenth century. Black chalk, pen, and brown ink, brown wash. Mas. 1296 (rec.19), fol. 9. © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

With the costumes depicted in the Thiry drawings, the masks that concealed the identities of the performers also had the effect of transforming their bodies into closed systems of ornament.60 Through the function of ornament, and particularly the dual nature of the mask, a complex operation was performed in which subject 60 Brugerolles and Guillet note that even ‘the few visible anatomical elements’ belonging to the figures in Thiry’s drawings, such as ears or locks of hair, are treated in a similar ornamental fashion as the ‘eyebrows, beards and moustaches visibly implanted on the masks’. Burgerolles and Guillet, The Renaissance in France, p. 110. This effect further blurs the distinction between the natural and the artificial, between body and ornament.

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was rendered object while simultaneously, in the moment of performance, the object became animated. In this masked configuration, then, ornament rejected the restrictive role of adornment or embellishment. Instead, ornament became the thing itself and the dancing courtiers were transformed into enlivened artworks.61 Through the performance, the courtier’s mobile, unidentified body – or perhaps more appropriately, his or her energeia – was thus harnessed and appropriated by the King to actualize the latent energy in the ornament lining the walls of the château.62 Like all illusionism, the effectiveness of this enchantment relied not only on the skill and virtuosity of the artists and performers, but also on the participation of the court in a collective suspension of disbelief and a ready willingness to engage in the deception. The deployment of grotesque ornament as costume could only facilitate the illusion. Never wholly one thing or another, elusive and in flux, grotesque ornament appealed to the senses, inciting in the beholder confusion, unease, and wonder. The enchantment effected by the ornament costumes was only short-lived, however, and the relationship between body and costume and between content and frame would have shifted once again in the act of revelation. According to Spyros Papapetros, ‘[t]he animation of the object is predicated on the momentary suspension of human presence.’63 As the courtiers removed their masks following the performance, presence was resumed, identities were revealed, and any illusion of objecthood was broken. In this process, the costumes were converted to frames, and ornament became adornment in relation to the body. Despite its adorning function, the costume was not meaningless embellishment; instead, it was a continued act of appropriation by the King that simultaneously became a mark of favour and claim to status on the part of the courtier. The act of unmasking was much like the effect of peering into one of the ornamental hand mirrors designed by the goldsmith and draftsman Étienne Delaune (Ill. 6.11). In these delicate designs, elaborate ornamental frames of curling strapwork cradle female figures surrounded by motifs that evoke the Fontainebleau stucco frames. In the centre was a gold plate on a hinge depicting a relief of a mythological scene (in this case, the death of Caesar’s daughter, Julia), which could be lifted to reveal a mirrored surface below. As the panel was opened, the central content was evacuated and the hand mirror became yet another ornamental frame waiting to be filled, much like the empty cartouches circulating in print. Only

61 While unconcerned with the issue of animation, Brugerolles and Guillet, following Carroll, have observed that ornament tends to transform the figures into works of art. Ibid. and Carroll, Rosso Fiorentino, p. 214. 62 On the role of the Aristotelian concept of energeia in relation to ornament as ‘the actualization of potential’ that ‘makes inanimate things appear to live’, see Guest, The Understanding of Ornament, pp. 83–84 and p. 150. Guest argues that, in the Renaissance, there was a particular value accorded to movement or the illusion of movement as actualization of form. 63 Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic, p. 10.

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Ill. 6.11: Étienne Delaune, Mirror with Death of Julia, 1561. Engraving, 221 x 105mm, RP-P-1964–948. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

this time, it was the courtier that could, at will, incorporate his or her likeness into the work of art.64 In this way then, framing one’s image with the King’s ornamental repertoire, the mirrors functioned in a similar way to the unmasked ornamental masquerade costumes.

64 The mirrors were designed with a small loop at the end of the handle indicating that they were intended to be suspended from a belt or from the wrist, making them easily accessible throughout the day.

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Stilling Restless Ornament Throughout this chapter, I have demonstrated how Thiry’s drawings can be traced from the stucco frames of the decorative programme at Fontainebleau to the bodies of masquerading courtiers. The drawn costume busts, however, lack the movement and liveliness associated with the animated bodies of the masquerade. In these drawings, the figures are stilled, stiffened, and pressed into uniformity. This disparity may be explained by the prospective nature of the images as designs for future artworks. Eugene Carroll has proposed that Thiry’s drawings may have been used as designs for mosaic images intended for the walls at Fontainebleau.65 The drawings, then, may mark a circular step in the trajectory of ornament – extending out from the stucco frames of the gallery, into the mobile array of print and costumed bodies of courtiers, and finally back, reabsorbed into the fabric of the walls of Fontainebleau. This unfixing, mobilization, and proliferation of ornament was remarkably dynamic. It resulted in new objects in which the relationships between frame and content, artwork and architecture, and building and body were reconfigured and renegotiated in a seemingly continuous process. In these drawings of costumed courtiers – themselves based in the ornament of Fontainebleau – a moment of animation is recaptured and stilled, ultimately to be subsumed back into the walls of the château.

Bibliography Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Moshe Barasch, ‘The Mask in European Art: Meanings and Functions’, in Imago Hominis: Studies in the Language of Art, (Vienna: IRSA, 1991), pp. 47–58. Agne Beijer, ‘XVI – XVIII Century Theatrical Designs at the National Museum’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6e. ser. XXVIII (1945), pp. 213–236. Hans Belting, Face and Mask: A Double History, translated by Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Nicole S. Bensoussan, ‘Casting a Second Rome: Primaticcio’s Bronze Copies and the Fontainebleau Project’, PhD Dissertation (Yale University, 2009). Ekhart Berckenhagen, ‘Zeichnungen der “Ecole de Fontainebleau” in Berlin’, Berliner Museen 18, no. 1 (1968), pp. 11–23. Per Bjurström and Bengt Dahlbäck, ‘Témoignages sur l’éphémère’, Revue L’Oeil 24 (December 1956), pp. 36–41. Emmanuelle Brugerolles and David Guillet, The Renaissance in France: Drawings from the École des BeauxArts, Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Charles Burroughs, The Italian Renaissance Palace Façade: Structures of Authority, Surfaces of Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 65 Carroll bases this suggestion on an entry in the Comptes des bâtiments du roi, which indicates that the mosaics were made by Jean le Roux, dit Picard, and Domenico Fiorentino. See de Laborde, Les Comptes, p. 195; see also Carroll, Rosso Fiorentino, p. 215.

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Eugene A. Carroll, Rosso Fiorentino: Drawings, Prints, and Decorative Arts (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1987). André Chastel, The Palace of Apolidon, The Zaharoff Lecture 1984/1985 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Monique Châtenet, La Cour de France au XVIe siècle: vie sociale et architecture (Paris: Éditions A. et J. Picard, 2002). Monique Châtenet and Anne-Marie Lecoq, ‘Le roi et ses doubles: usages vestimentaires royaux au XVIe siècle’, Revue de l’art 174, no. 4 (2011), pp. 21–31. Joyce Cheng, ‘Mask, Mimicry, Metamorphosis: Roger Caillois, Walter Benjamin and Surrealism in the 1930s’, Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 1 (2009), pp. 61–86. Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Dominque Cordellier, ‘Les Capricciose Invenzioni pour les Fêtes de Mascarades, 1539–1547’, in Primatice, Maître de Fontainebleau, edited by Ugo Bazzotti, Geneviève Brese-Bautier, Dominique Cordellier, Marianne Grivel, and Vittoria Romani (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004), pp. 120–136. Dominique Cordellier, ‘Le mascaron au XVIe siècle, une “bizzarie”’, in Masques, Mascarades, Mascarons, edited by François Viatte, Dominique Cordellier, and Violaine Jeanmet (Paris: Louvre Éditions, 2014), pp. 147–163. Dominique Cordellier, Primatice: Maître de Fontainebleau (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004). Janet Cox-Rearick, The Collection of Francis I: Royal Treasures (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996). Yassana Croizat, ‘“Living Dolls”: François Ier Dresses his Women’, Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2007), pp. 94–130. Nicole Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques á la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969). Nicole Dacos, ‘Léonard Thiry de Belges, peintre excellent de Fontainebleau à Bruxelles’, Gazette des BeauxArts 138 (1996), pp. 21–36. Marguerite de Navarre, Nouvelles lettres de la reine de Navarre, edited by F. Génin (Paris: J. Renouard, 1852). Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 [1978]). Louis Dimier, ‘Några minnen i Stockholms Nationalmuseum från den gamla Fontainebleauskolan’, Ord och Bild (1899), pp. 594–601. Louis Dimier, Le Primatice, peintre, sculpteur et architecte des rois de France (Paris: Leroux, 1900). George Dodds and Robert Tavenor, eds., Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Sydney J. Freedberg, ‘Rosso’s Style in France and its Italian Context’, in Actes du Colloque Internationale sur l’Art de Fontainebleau, Fontainebleau et Paris, 18, 19, 20 octobre 1972, edited by André Chastel (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975), pp. 13–16. Clare Lapraik Guest, The Understanding of Ornament in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2016). J.T.D. Hall, ‘Primaticcio and Court Festivities’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 58, no. 2 (1976), pp. 353–377. Tim Ingold, ‘Bringing Things Back to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials’, NCRM Working Paper, University of Manchester, 2010 (unpublished). W. McAllister Johnson, ‘The Monumental Style of Fontainebleau and its Consequences: Antoine Caron and “The Submission of Milan”’, National Gallery of Canada Bulletin 26 (1975), pp. 11–23, 39. Robert J. Knecht, The French Renaissance Court, 1483–1589 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). R. [Robert] J. Knecht, ‘Charles V’s Journey through France, 1539–1540’, in Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance, edited by J.R. Mulryne and Elizabeth Goldring (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 153–170. Léon de Laborde, Les Comptes des bâtiments du roi (1528–71), 2 vols. (Paris: J. Baur, 1877–1880). Ludovic Lalanne, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous le règne de François Ier, 1515–1536 (Paris: J. Renouar, 1854).

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Anne-Marie Lecoq, ‘Une Fête italienne à la bastille en 1518’, in ‘Il se rendit en Italie’: Études offertes à André Chastel (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante 1987), pp. 149–168. Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Soft Res Publica: On the Assembly and Dissassembly of Courtly Space’, Republic of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 2, no. 2 (2011), accessed 1 September 2017 at http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/96. Yves Metman, ‘Un graveur inconnu de l’École de Fontainebleau: Pierre Milan.’ Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 1 (1941), pp. 202–210. Margaret M. McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Margaret M. McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Margaret M. McGowan, ‘Costume pour la danse’, Revue de l’art 174 (2011), pp. 43–49. Philippe Morel, Les grotesques: les figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1997). Carmelo Occhipinti, ‘Un disegno del Primaticcio: la maschera di Francesco I per il carnevale di Parigi del 1542’, in Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Sylvie Béguin (Naples: Paparo Edizioni, 2001), pp. 239–248. Carmelo Occhipinti, Carteggio d’arte degli ambasciatori estensi in Francia (1536–1553) (Pisa: Scuola normale superior, 2001). John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). John T. Paoletti, ‘Michelangelo’s Masks’, Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (1992), pp. 423–440. Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Alina Payne, ‘Living Stones, Crying Walls: The Dangers of Enlivenment in Architecture from Renaissance Putti to Warburg’s Nachleben’, in The Secret Lives of Artworks: Exploring the Boundaries between Art and Life, edited by Caroline van Eck, Elsje van Kessel, and Joris van Gastel (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2014), pp. 308–339. John Peacock, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Nicolas Russell and Hélène Visentin, eds., French Ceremonial Entries in the Sixteenth Century: Event, Image, Text (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007). Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Marc Hamilton Smith, ‘La première description de Fontainebleau’, Revue de l’Art 91 (1991), pp. 44–46. David Summers, ‘The Archaeology of the Grotesque’, in Modern Art and the Grotesque, edited by Frances S. Connelly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 20–46. Phillip John Usher, Epic Arts in Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Caroline van Eck, ‘Animation and Petrifaction in Rubens’ Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi’, in Art, Music and Spectacle in the Age of Rubens, edited by A. Knapp and M. Putnam (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 146–161. Henri Zerner, Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism (Paris: Flammarion, 2003). Rebecca Zorach, ‘The French Renaissance: An Unfinished Project’, in Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity, 1300–1550, edited by Stephen J. Campbell and Alan Chong (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2005), pp. 188–199. Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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About the author Lisa Andersen is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation, Courtly Space and its Translations at Fontainebleau and Beyond, explores issues of intermediality, animation, and ornament in the mid-sixteenthcentury courts of François Ier and Henri II. Her research has been supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Graduate Scholarship, a Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Non-Doctoral Research Grant, a Getty Library Research Grant, and an International Research Fellowship with the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Lisa was co-editor of a special edition of WRECK journal titled Processes of Change: Translation, Metamorphosis, and Conversion (2013).

7. Sea-Change: The Whale in the Florentine Loggia Chris Askholt Hammeken

Abstract In 1550 the carcass of a whale found on the shore close to Livorno was displayed under the vaults of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, evoking a sense of ambiguity between art and life. Exposed as a hunting trophy and natural wonder, the sea creature can also be seen as a monstrous ornament, overwhelming in sheer scale and bizarre lifelikeness. An analysis of this curious showpiece will contribute to deepening our understanding of how the monstrous and ornamental qualities of sixteenth-century visual culture correlated with conceptions of image-making. My chapter suggests a relation between anthropomorphic ideas in architecture, the interest in skeletons, dissection, and cadavers on the one hand, and, on the other, sixteenth-century grotesques and fascination with transformation. Keywords: animation, lifelikeness, artificiality, wonder, cosmology, anatomy

In 1550 the carcass of a whale was found on the shore close to Livorno and displayed under the vaults of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. Cosimo de’ Medici had the colossal bones transported to the city in order to have them examined and assembled anew, resulting in bizarre lifelikeness.1 The whale carcass appeared overwhelming to contemporary onlookers and even seemed ‘as if [it] was alive’.2 Occupying approximately half of the length of the loggia, the huge sea creature was framed and arranged as a monstrous ornament. The visual phenomenon of the whale carcass can be related to ideas of the living image that in sixteenth-century writing on art had almost become a cliché through a descriptive vocabulary with a quite exhaustive topos: by far, the highest praise possible was to say that figures breathe or pulsate with life.3 Sixteenth-century art theory was completely entangled in a web of rhetorical thinking, and the ancient ekphrastic issue of lifelikeness and illusionism flourished in a 1 Devlieger, Benedetto Varchi, p. 227. 2 Cambiagi, Descrizione dell’ imperiale giardino di Boboli, p. 64. 3 For studies on ekphrasis, enargeia, energeia, and energy see especially, Onians, ‘Abstraction and Imagination in Late Antiquity’; Shearman, Only Connect, p. 112; Van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence, pp. 32–33; Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion, pp. 1–11. Hammeken, C.A. and M.F. Hansen (eds.), Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789462984967_ch07

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way of thinking that blurred the lines between representation and reality, or, between likeness and presence. Inscribed with the fascinating fright of monstrosity, the curious example of the whale carcass questioned these blurred lines by being installed as an unruly ornament within the architectural body of the cityscape. Throughout these following pages, the whale functions as a frame that interrogates the meaning of the image, lifelikeness, and animation in sixteenth-century visual art. The loggia was not yet a space for framing famous sculptures, and, being inhabited by stalwart Landsknechts, it functioned as a lively terrace from which the ducal family could watch a variety of ceremonies and festivities on the piazza (Ill. 7.1). From the Middle Ages onwards bestiary events, hunts with exotic animals, and the like frequently occurred on the piazza as pure re-enactments of ancient circus games, spectacular fights, and chariot races.4 Still the very choice of having the whale carcass reconstructed and placed in such a prestigious sphere as the loggia points to its exclusiveness as an object: it was embraced and exhibited in an architectural frame, only to provoke the idea that it itself became part of the architecture and complemented it as animated ornamentation, oscillating in illusory movements between the sheer representation of the living monster and the artificial assembly of the bones.

Ill. 7.1: Loggia dei Lanzi, built by Benci di Cione and Simone di Francesco Talenti, possibly following a design by Jacopo di Sione, 1376–1382. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

4

Lazzaro, ‘Animals as Cultural Signs’.

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Shifting Worldviews: Anatomy and Cosmology The enormous whale bones were transported from the coast to Signa and then to Florence under the direction of Luca Martini, who was employed as Cosimo de’ Medici’s overseer in Pisa. Cautiously aware of the delicacy of the bones, their heavy weight, and yet fragile structure, Luca Martini was busy occupied with mapping the different parts of the skeleton in order to be able to assemble them once again. The art of anatomy was undergoing an interesting development at the time and, as Lionel Devlieger argues, it is not unlikely that Luca Martini had been observing some of the dissections of human corpses conducted by the Dutch anatomist Andreas Vesalius in Pisa during the winter of 1544.5 At this point in time it was a total innovation to assemble bones into skeletons. Rearticulating the human body and making way for enhanced knowledge on the fabric of its structures, skeletons were used as didactic tools in anatomy lessons.6 The oldest anatomical preparation of a human skeleton was reassembled by Vesalius in 1543 in Basel. Vesalius travelled to Basel to have his famous anatomy books printed, and faced the opportunity of reassembling a human skeleton from the corpse of an executed criminal. Evidently, the mere circulation and dissemination of Vesalius’s anatomy books, De humani corporis fabrica, published in 1543, may also have ignited Luca Martini’s interest in skeletal organization and the composition of bones. Famous for its diverse illustrations of dissected bodies and skeletons depicted in highly allegorical poses, the work partook in a sculptural tradition in which the body was given ornamental flair. The cadaver woodcuts fluctuate between carnal lifelikeness and animated death as if they were living corpses portrayed in artificial re-enactments (Ill. 7.2). Arguably, the artistic interest in anatomy and its desire to uncover the inner depths of the human body can be seen as a precursor to the advancements in medical anatomy that appeared in parallel with the paradigm shift of the Copernican Revolution. The new worldview was formulated by Nicolaus Copernicus in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, also from 1543, but visually already understood in architecture, gardens, and images with restless axes, perspectival illusionism, and sound feelings of dynamic space in new room types.7 The infinity of the universe was studied alongside an interest in the mysteries of the human body. Experiencing the fabrics of the vast universe in outer space and the components of the internal body apparently went hand in hand. This peculiar desire to unmask the body in order to discover the inner depths of flesh, muscles, and bones was conducted through a familiar pictorial tradition in which reflections on the image were of central concern. The boundaries between 5 Devlieger, Benedetto Varchi, p. 231. 6 O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, p. 199; Santing, ‘De Fabrica corporis humana’. 7 On the restless axes and spatial concerns in sixteenth-century visual art and architecture, see Hager, ‘Zur Raumstruktur des Manierismus’; and Hansen, ‘Tilstandsskift og gennemgange’.

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Ill. 7.2: A ruined body leans against ancient ruined architecture as if echoing its decay. Woodcut by Titian’s workshop, in Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1543, p. 192. Photo: © U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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human and divine creation were questioned in this transitional phase between votive effigies, sacred icons, and cult images on the one hand, and the new aura of the masterpiece and the divine artist on the other hand – or, what Hans Belting has termed an opposition between the image of the Middle Ages and the art of the Renaissance.8 As Stephen Campbell argues, the clash and dialogue between image and art make itself manifest in a visuality that thematizes an insecure metamorphosis between presence and representation, and which seeks to reflect upon the polarity between lifelike animation and mere appearance.9 The ornate ways in which the art of anatomy was depicted can be seen as part of a tendency mediating between an autumn aura of cult imagery and the dawn of a new aura of art characterized by a demonstrative feeling of artificiality.

Deep Sea Curiosities Returning to the whale carcass in the Florentine loggia, it seems reasonable to stress its artificial visuality. The use of whale bones as decorative device had, however, not been an unusual practice throughout the Middle Ages. Especially in churches whale bones were exposed as natural mirabilia, or even combined with the celestial architecture and thus playing on the fluctuating relation between nature and art with an appeal to myths of genesis and creation. In medieval treasuries and collections, natural curiosities such as narwhal teeth and whale jawbones were put on display alongside other rarities such as nautiluses and ostrich eggs.10 At the porch of the Saint Pierre church in Montpellier, a huge jawbone from a whale was arranged so artfully that it appeared to visitors as another architectural rib, and in Frontignan vertebrae of a whale were used as seats within the church.11 In Roman Antiquity as well, bones and limbs of fabulous sea creatures adorned architecture and were especially sought after for their rarity and almost mythological character.12 As such, legend tells that the Emperor Augustus presumably had an affinity for decorating his palaces with bones of giant sea monsters and other wild beasts.13 Wishing to imitate the greatness of Augustus and a bygone age, Cosimo de’ Medici’s interest in the whale carcass therefore also seems to carry a political significance by contributing to shape an image of the leader as supreme hunter showing off his magnificent trophy as a marvellous wonder that attracts attention.14 8 Belting, Likeness and Presence, p. 484. 9 Campbell, ‘Fare una Cosa Morta Parer Viva’, p. 606. 10 Maerker, ‘Leviathan in the Box’; Mariaux, ‘Collecting (and Display)’. 11 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, pp. 67–108. 12 Pliny, Natural History, Book IX, ‘The Natural History of Fishes’. 13 Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, p. 126. 14 Devlieger, Benedetto Varchi, pp. 227–228.

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The whale carcass exposed at the Florentine loggia therefore deeply relied on a familiar tradition with extraordinary bones and limbs from the deep sea, which in various contexts were inscribed with a supernatural and celestial flair. For the Romans ornare simply meant to honour or praise, whereas ornatus related to distinction, excellence, as well as useful resources – just as ornamentum had a twinned meaning consisting of decorative adornment on the one hand and military weaponry, arms, and equipment for warfare on the other.15 This could be telling of the Florentine ornamental showpiece. Yet, the novel approach taken with the whale carcass was nested in its complete skeletal reconstruction in an architectonic setting, in which it must have appeared as an ornamental monstrosity that sculpturally partook in the building. This ambiguity shaped a balancing movement between the real and the virtual, which the whale carcass apparently ignited in contemporary onlookers, for whom it even seemed as if the bare skeleton bones bore resemblance to a living creature.16 Appearing as an echo through an enlivening gaze, the living organism of the whale was rearticulated by means of the assembled skeleton bones. The loggia almost framed the whale in an enormous stone cage or imaginary aquarium; and, vice versa, the bones of the whale complemented the architecture in an enhancement that seemed as if complete with natural columns and arches brought forth by the riches of the sea. Consequently, it is the clash between cultic lifelikeness and exposed art piece partaking in its architectural surroundings as a lively ornament that makes the whale carcass balance on the verge between image and art.

Fragile Beasts Stranded corpses and giant bones have enlightened a visual awareness of huge sea creatures, but also furnished a fright and fascination with the monstrous and given inspiration to an array of whale myths. The Florentine cultural sphere was clouded with such conceptions of the supernatural, and in general whale myths were found in oral tales, in folklore, as well as in scripture. In the engraving The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, endless eating and an obscure cycle of death and regeneration are carried out in bizarre absurdity (Ill. 7.3). According to Jan Ziolkowski, there is a common pattern in folk tales, in which the hero is ingested by the sea monster and slays it from within, oftentimes by burning it – with the result that his hair is lost as he emerges alive through the gaping mouth of the tormented monstrosity.17 One such tale is found in fragments of the myth of Hercules, who rescued the Trojan princess Hesione from being consumed 15 Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts, p. 25. 16 Cambiagi, Descrizione dell’ imperiale giardino di Boboli, p. 64. 17 Ziolkowski, ‘Folklore and Learned Lore’, p. 110.

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Ill. 7.3: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish, engraving. Photo: © Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1557.

by a sea monster.18 Another is found in the satirist Lucian’s Vera Historia, in which stories of being swallowed are mocked by a fantastical tale of 50 men engulfed by a whale so huge that it contains an entire island with a forest on top. The giant whale thus becomes suggestive of a small universe carrying a tiny planet inside its belly. In order to escape, the men set fire to the forest, but have to wait several days before the whale finally succumbs.19 Such tales signify an underworld atmosphere within the bestial body of the whale, complete with fire and heat. Thereby the gaping mouth of the whale also comes to be reminiscent of a monstrous entrance to hell. The whale myths embody a transitional state of being in which human beings are devoured by fragile beasts, only to escape in regurgitation through the very same opening that has functioned as a way of enclosure to begin with. Symptomatically, one element thus leads to another as human and animal are intertwined in strange anatomical unions. Such scenes abound in perhaps the most famous whale myth of them all, namely in depictions of the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. In, for instance, Giotto di Bondone’s fourteenth-century version of the motif in an ornamental band, Jonah is swallowed by the whale as sea meets heaven, in a liminal phase between the temporal and the eternal (Ill. 7.4). The tale of the prophet Jonah’s encounter with the whale 18 Ziolkowski, ‘Folklore and Learned Lore’, p. 111. 19 Ziolkowski, ‘Folklore and Learned Lore’, p. 111.

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Ill. 7.4: Giotto di Bondone, Jonah Swallowed by the Whale, 1306, Arena Chapel, Padua. Photo: © Scala, Florence.

has been interpreted as a foretelling of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. In this juxtaposition, Christ is fisherman turned to bait and crucified on a hook so that the whale can catch him and he can free the souls, which it has kept in its hellish belly.20 Again it is plausible to see the giant corpus of the whale as metaphor for the underworld where transformation occurs as a human being is devoured and afterwards regurgitated. Such fantastical and cultic imagination can also be turned upside down, as is the case with Michelangelo’s interpretation of the motif in the Sistine Chapel (Ill. 7.5). Oftentimes, scale is relative when it comes to the proportional relationship between Jonah and the whale. With Giotto, they are almost the same size, but with Michelangelo, the proportions are completely blurred. In Michelangelo’s Jonah, presence and representation meet as lifelike animation and mere appearance merge. Whereas Jonah has supernatural powers, the size of the whale is thoroughly diminished, as if to suggest the allegorical potential of the biblical tale in radical foreshortening, distortion, and luminous colour. 20 Ziolkowski, ‘Folklore and Learned Lore’, p. 113.

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Ill. 7.5: Michelangelo, The Prophet Jonah, 1512, Sistine Chapel, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City. Photo: © Simon Abrahams/EPPH.

Form and Formlessness Seemingly, whale myths amplify movement from one condition to another as human form traverses through animal bestiality and back again without any consideration as to the natural laws of physics. The tales of humans being endeavoured by whales as well as the whale skeleton exposed in the Florentine loggia make reference to imagery in motion. Such themes of transformation and metamorphosis are especially embodied in grotesque ornamentation, in which a variety of elements sprout out of one another whereby they generate an array of constantly shifting figurations.21 A hybrid state of being occurs in these compositions of different elements, and this characteristic makes them grotesque. As a cultural phenomenon, the grotesque is shapeless and simply cannot be contained.22 The whale in the loggia is a striking 21 For studies on grotesques, see especially Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture; Guest, The Understanding of Ornament; Hansen, The Art of Transformation; Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque. 22 Edwards and Graulund, Grotesque, pp. 135–136.

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Ill. 7.6: Federico Zuccari, Monstrous door and windows in the former garden wall of Palazzo Zuccari, now the facade of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, 1590, Rome. Photo: © Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte.

analogy to the grotesque. For Wolfgang Kayser the grotesque is exactly characterized by an ‘awareness that the familiar and apparently harmonious world is alienated under the impact of abysmal forces, which break it up and shatter its coherence’.23 The grotesque can deform and transform through exaggeration as well as adornment in multiple juxtapositions of laughter and fright, desire and disgust, or allure and repulsion.24 Scale and proportion time and again simply collapse with the grotesque through its manifold disruptions of classical stability. Above all, the grotesque is characterized by unruly movement and shifting fluctuations. Often it is connected to the monstrous, with which it sometimes converges in structures that are bizarre, fanciful, or strange in appearance and shape.25 Sixteenth-century gardenscapes relate especially well to the ornament of the grotesque and its dark and uncanny aspects in nature transformed. Connoting thresholds and meandering metamorphoses, masks often appear in fountains and other ornamental structures of gardens. The former garden entrance of the Palazzo Zuccari in 23 Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, p. 37. 24 Edwards and Graulund, Grotesque, p. 135. 25 Edwards and Graulund, Grotesque, pp. 36–37.

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Ill. 7.7: Monstrous grotto in the Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo, 1550–1580. Photo: Chris Askholt Hammeken.

Rome, constructed by Federico Zuccari in 1590, even seems as if it were an opening to the underworld. As anthropomorphic transformations, the door and windows in the wall are composed as monstrous mouth and horrifying masks, respectively (Ill. 7.6). The play between horror and humour, fright and irony is also evident in the hellish grotto in Bomarzo, in the Sacro Bosco, created by Vicino Orsini perhaps in collaboration with Pirro Ligorio from the middle of the sixteenth century and finished around 1580 (Ill. 7.7).26 The gaping whale ornament in Bomarzo is another example of a monstrous ornament gone rogue, emerging as if sprung directly from the earth and the stone out of which it was carved (Ill. 7.8). The inventive thereby goes beyond measure and the ornamental grotesque is transfigured to a gaping mouth of gigantism alone. Tellingly, the meaning of cosmos as both universe and ornament amplifies this dyadic patterning of form and formlessness. From ancient understanding, the cosmetic and the cosmic were related through an affinity towards the ordering of empty space in defined, decorative compositions creating limits and displaying contraries. The early cosmology positioned ornament as filling and framing pattern through stages of coming into being such as harmony, rhythm, and dance.27 26 On Bomarzo, see Bredekamp, Vicino Orsini und der heilige Wald von Bomarzo; Morgan, The Monster in the Garden. 27 In the Greek concept of kosmos the twofold idea of world order and ornament forms a synthesis. See Fletcher, Allegory, pp. 108–109; and Guest, The Understanding of Ornament, pp. 21–66.

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Ill. 7.8: Whale mouth in the Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo, 1550–1580. Photo: Chris Askholt Hammeken.

Conventionally, hell mouths are represented in medieval church frescoes of the punishment of the damned. Here, they have a disquieting meaning that centres on the monstrous passage to the underworld as a devouring and daemonic image with an apotropaic function. Mannerist art of the sixteenth century ascribes an ironic and humorous dimension to the horror of these gaping monstrosities.28 The pronounced artificiality in the Palazzo Zuccari garden entrance bespeaks this claim. One literally enters the elongated, gaping mouth of a monster. Such folly has no danger to it, since it is all artifice and irony. The entrance functions as a passage into an unknown theatrical sphere with many wonders. The aforementioned fascination with grotesques at the beginning of the sixteenth century is paralleled with secretive and mysterious matters, with burial chambers and an infernal underworld. The inventive goes beyond measure and the masks of the grotesques are transfigured to colossal gaping mouths. When Michelangelo discussed the freedom in grotesque ornamentation, he even compared invention with monstrosity, making the terms appear interchangeable.29 Originality and chthonic matter are certainly to be found in Bomarzo, where several gaping monsters appear as if sprung directly from the living soil and stone. It is literally a park of monsters and hybrid creatures. Enigmatic inscriptions on the sculptural outcrops only add sphinxian riddles to further mystify the place, which 28 Hansen, ‘Maniera and the Grotesque’. 29 See, Summers, ‘Michelangelo on Architecture’, pp. 150–151, who convincingly argues that Michelangelo’s point of view on the subject may be deduced from a series of contemporary written sources.

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indeed has a labyrinthine structure. The hellish mouth has a participatory aspect and can be entered as an artificial grotto amid the fantastical forest of amusement and wonder. Once inside, laughter and noise might start echoing and sound as if coming directly from the animated monster. Furthermore, al fresco meals can be enjoyed from within the mouth of the monster, and thereby a double entendre of eating and being eaten is wittingly made up.30 This deceit emphasizes the openness of the body. If the whale skeleton in the loggia is considered akin to monstrous grotesques and ornamental structures in excess, it might be quite similar to how it has been perceived back then. Through popular conception, the Florentines held the whale as one of the largest animals in the world, even capable of swallowing a human being.31 In the sixteenth century, however, fables and superstitions were slowly confronted with an increasing scientific attitude towards the world. As such, besides the interest in human anatomy, illustrated treatises on biology were also published by naturalists.32 The physician and biologist Guillaume Rondelet was in Florence during the time that the whale carcass was exposed in the loggia, and he identified it as a physeter, or what we now term a sperm whale or cachalot.33 In Libri di piscibus marinis (1554), Rondelet only briefly mentioned the Florentine whale, but in the general description of the specimen he emphasized its giant size, bestial mouth, sharp teeth, brawny tongue, and the impressive breathing hole that could blow and spout a tremendous amount of water.34 Indeed, the wondrous scale of the Florentine whale alone might have appealed to its cultic lifelikeness. Leonardo da Vinci even saw analogies between whales and the body of the earth, and hence presented the whale, dolphin, or fish breathing water instead of air as an entire microcosm reflecting the locus of the planet.35 Again this conception can be aligned with myths of human beings whose bodies are devoured and encapsulated within the grotesque monstrosity of a whale with a belly the size of the world.

Anthropomorphic Thinking The very lifelikeness of the whale skeleton fluctuates in grotesque manner through myth, lore, and fantastical ideas of creatures in faraway, unknown waters. Appearing as a synecdoche, the strange vivacious character of the whale skeleton nevertheless also runs deeper as regards sixteenth-century architectural theory. In general, a corporeal vocabulary with many physiological terms has been used to describe the art of building, and this tendency cannot be seen without reference 30 Bredekamp, Vicino Orsini und Der heilige Wald von Bomarzo, pp. 56–115; Morgan, ‘The Monster in the Garden’. See also Schmidt, Iconography of the Mouth of Hell. 31 Devlieger, Benedetto Varchi, p. 228. 32 Devlieger, Benedetto Varchi, p. 228. 33 Devlieger, Benedetto Varchi, p. 229. 34 Devlieger, Benedetto Varchi, p. 229. See also Rondelet, Histoire entière des poissons, p. 356. 35 Da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, p. 544.

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to the studies in anatomy at the time. In the Spanish anatomist Juan Valverde de Amusco’s illustrated work Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano from 1556, a muscle figure is utterly flayed, holding his own skin in one hand and a knife in the other (Ill. 7.9). Not just suggestive of Saint Bartholomew’s martyrdom, the idea embodied in the flaying of skin can also be transferred to architecture. As such, a sense of anthropomorphism was characteristic when it came to building projects of restoration and destruction in sixteenth-century Florence. The city has an infamous history of unfinished facades, and its architecture is accompanied by parallel notions of making and unmaking, ornament and structure, as well as skin and bones. Architecture was inscribed with historical awareness and capable of manipulating with time through palimpsests, in which old age became new. Thus, Florentine buildings were often described as living organisms complete with skeleton, skin, and even blemishes. These architectural bodies could be flayed and defaced, or revived and cured, when they underwent major restorations or were given new ornamental features such as columns or pilasters.36 Gherardo Spini even devoted an entire, encyclopaedic treatise to the idea of ornament in architecture, combining it with figures of speech in poetry: the extensive, unfinished, and unpublished I tre primi libri sopra l’istituzione intorno agl’ornamenti from 1568–1570.37 For Spini, the persuasive delight in architectural ornament was based on imitation, correspondence, invention, and decorum, all the while representation was the vehicle that connected architecture with poetry in a capacity to transform.38 It is possible to view the whale in the Loggia dei Lanzi through the lens of a conception of anthropomorphic ideas in architecture which took shape in the sixteenth century. Arguably, it seems reasonable to consider the whale in the loggia as a monstrous ornament in fluctuation, oscillating between art and life amid an architectural setting. Despite being marvellous in its scope, in the end the whale was a temporary invention. After only a few months, the grotesque quality of the whale carcass truly unfolded, as the foul odour of the decaying bone marrow was so horrible that the Florentines had to get rid of the sad remains of the whale carcass.39 In its complete and utter transformation from monstrous creature to architectural ornament, the whale had nevertheless been changed. It had suffered a sea-change. As a concept, sea-change has its origin in William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (1610–1611). In the deep sea, Alonso is wholly changed: his bones become coral, his eyes pearls. Whether the transformation is wrought by the sorcerer Prospero’s magical powers or will merely occur as a result of natural metamorphosis from a corpse being absorbed by underwater landscape is left open in a striking ambivalence between the powers of art and nature.40 36 Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts, pp. 139–162. 37 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 144–169; Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts, pp. 31–50. 38 Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts, pp. 48–49. 39 Devlieger, Benedetto Varchi, p. 232. 40 See Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

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Ill. 7.9: Depiction of a flayed body. Drawn by Gaspar Becerra and engraved by Nicolas Beatrizet, in Juan Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano, Rome, 1560 [1556], p. 64. Photo: © U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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With its capacity to mediate between representation and reality and between lifelike vivacity as well as mere, dead appearance, the whale carcass had become symptomatic of a sea-change in itself, insofar as it comprised aspects of the rich and strange monstrosity of ornament in the sixteenth century. Nature was framed by architecture, and absence transformed into presence as an oscillation occurred between the representation of the living monster and the dead remains of the whale. With the whale in the loggia, ornament unfolded as the centre of attention, and thus appeared as a far cry from a later modernist sensibility that only defined it by its adorning quality.41 Consequently, the etymological meaning of cosmos as both universe and ornament seems to unravel through this extraordinary phenomenon. The whale in the loggia appears as an outstanding example of the many layers of meaning, the enhanced ambiguity, and, not least, the extreme fascination with monstrosity, with which ornament is inscribed throughout the period.

Bibliography Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edward Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Horst Bredekamp, Vicino Orsini und Der heilige Wald von Bomarzo: Ein Fürst als Künstler und Anarchist (Worms: Werner’sche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985). Gaetano Cambiagi, Descrizione dell’ imperiale giardino di Boboli (Firenze: Stamperia imperiale, 1757). Stephen J. Campbell, ‘“Fare una Cosa Morta Parer Viva”: Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un)Divinity of Art’, Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 4 (2002), pp. 596–620. Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [2012]). Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, ed. Carlo Pedretti (Giunti Editore, 1979 [c. 1503–1505], 203 recto-b). Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998). Lionel Devlieger, Benedetto Varchi: On the Birth of Artefacts (PhD thesis, Universiteit Gent, 2005). Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund, Grotesque (London: Routledge, 2013). Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964). Clare Lapraik Guest, The Understanding of Ornament in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Werner Hager, ‘Zur Raumstruktur des Manierismus in der italienischen Architektur’ in Festschrift Martin Wackernagel zum 75. Geburtstag (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1958), pp. 112–140. Maria Fabricius Hansen, ‘Maniera and the Grotesque’ in Manier und Manierismus: Sonderdruck aus Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, vol. 106, ed. Wolfgang Braungart (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000), pp. 251–273. Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Art of Transformation: Grotesques in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Rome: Accademia di Danimarca and Edizioni Quasar, 2018). Maria Fabricius Hansen, ‘Tilstandsskift og gennemgange: Gallerier, kabinetter og kunstkamre i 1500 – og 1600 – tallet’, Passepartout, vol. 14, no. 28 (2009), pp. 13–42. Claudia Lazzaro, ‘Animals as Cultural Signs: A Medici Menagerie in the Grotto at Castello’ in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual culture in Europe and Latin America 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 197–227. 41 Such understanding is in direct continuation of a modernist tradition derived from architects such as Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier – and accordingly in line with a view of ornament as useless coating or extravagant glaze of pure form. See for instance, Loos, ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’.

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Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’ in Trotzdem: Gesammelte Schriften 1900–1930, ed. Adolf Opel (Vienna: Georg Prachner Verlag, 1997 [1908]). Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 [1957]). Anna Maerker, ‘Leviathan in the Box: Collecting Whales’ in Objects in Transition, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2007), pp. 6–13. Pierre Alain Mariaux, ‘Collecting (and Display)’ in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 [2006]), pp. 213–232. Luke Morgan, The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Luke Morgan, ‘The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque, the Gigantic, and the Monstrous in Renaissance Landscape Design’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, vol. 31, no. 3 (2011), pp. 167–180. Charles O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). John Onians, ‘Abstraction and Imagination in Late Antiquity’, Art History, vol. 3, no. 1 (1980), pp. 1–24. Alina Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Pliny, The Natural History of Pliny, trans. and ed. John Bostock and Henry Riley (London: H. G. Bohn, 1855 [77–79 AD]). Guillaume Rondelet, Histoire entière des poissons (Lyon: Matthieu Bonhomme, 1558 [1554]). Catrien Santing, ‘Andreas Vesalius’s de Fabrica corporis humana, Depiction of the Human Body in Word and Image’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, vol. 58 (2008), pp. 59–85. Gary D. Schmidt, The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell: Eighth-Century Britain to the Fifteenth Century (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1995. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1610–1611]). John Shearman, Only Connect … Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992 [1988]). Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, ed. Alexander Thomson and Thomas Forester (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1914). David Summers, ‘Michelangelo on Architecture’, Art Bulletin, vol. 54 (1972), pp. 146–157. Caroline Van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object, Studien aus dem Warburg Haus (Leiden: Walter de Gruyter and Leiden University Press, 2015). Caroline Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). Alessandra Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque: Fantastical Decoration from Antiquity to Art Nouveau, trans. Peter Spring (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008 [2007]). Jan Ziolkowski, ‘Folklore and Learned Lore in Letaldus’s Whale Poem’, Viator, vol. 15 (1984), pp. 107–118.

About the author Chris Askholt Hammeken received his PhD degree in Art History from Aarhus University in 2017 on a dissertation entitled Unruly Ornament: On Artificial Moments in Sixteenth-Century Visual Art. He has had research stays in Rome and Vienna, and is now a lecturer in visual art and literature at Gammel Hellerup Gymnasium in Copenhagen, Denmark. His research interests include ornament, animation and artificiality, as well as art historiography and questions of style, space, and time.

8. Ornament and Agency: Vico’s Poetic ­Monsters Frances Connelly

Abstract Horace first drew a link between ornament and monstrosity in Ars poetica, characterizing as misbegotten any attempts by ornament to claim a voice and agency of its own. Sixteenth-century artists embraced monstrous ornament, called grottesche, to do just what Horace feared: scrambling conventions and rupturing settled argument. More than an aesthetic choice, it was a means to grapple with the contests of meaning unloosed in early modern Europe. Giambattista Vico expanded upon these debates in his 1725 study The New Science, creating a theoretical armature for ornament’s broader cultural agency. Vico offers insights into the deployment of ‘monstrous’ ornament by artists in the Renaissance and in subsequent periods of radical change, including Gonkar Gyatso, Yinka Shonibare, and Hew Locke. Keywords: diaspora, emblem, grotesque, hieroglyph, ornament, poetic monsters

The link between ornament and monstrosity was forged early in Western aesthetic discourse, when Horace summoned up his famous example of a combinatory creature in Ars poetica. Significantly, the monstrosities he warned against were not the result of extravagant embellishment; in fact Horace allowed that poets might occasionally choose to ‘sew on purple patches’ for ornamental effect.1 Instead, he pointed to an ornament gone rogue, one that refused to stay in its place, mute and deferential. Intermixing with and subverting the argument that it is supposed to enhance, ornament turns monstrous, transmogrified into a woman out of control – fair above, foul fish below: in short, a monster of confused parts. This is not simply a vivid example set by Horace to ridicule the excesses of artistic licence. Ars poetica deploys it as a sort of talisman to ward off a breach of social decorum. Monstrous ornament is

1

Horace, ‘The Art of Poetry’, stanzas 9–13.

Hammeken, C.A. and M.F. Hansen (eds.), Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789462984967_ch08

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not simply in bad taste; it threatens accepted societal norms and subverts cultural traditions and hierarchies. The disruptive cultural agency of monstrous ornament warrants more attention. It is a function of ornament that has been largely overlooked, and represents a critically important way in which sixteenth-century Renaissance artists and intellectuals forged a modern sensibility. Their embrace of monstrous ornament turned the tables on Horace’s aesthetics in order to do just what he feared: to challenge the status quo by scrambling narratives, bending genres, and rupturing settled argument. More than an aesthetic choice, it was a means to grapple with the fusions of disparate realities and the contests of meaning unloosed in an early modern Europe unsettled by geographic and scientific discoveries. These ornamental incursions and interruptions put things into play, signalling that existing norms and cultural narratives were in flux and under negotiation. Significantly, Giambattista Vico builds upon these Renaissance debates in his seminal 1725 study, The New Science, and creates a theoretical armature with which to investigate the broader cultural agency of the ornamental grotesque. Vico proposed that these ‘poetic monsters’ appeared in times of cultural crisis as a means to destabilize and then re-imagine cultural topoi. His work offers insights into the sophisticated deployment of ‘monstrous’ ornament by sixteenth-century artists, but also suggests that this role for ornament is not limited to one historical period, but can be applied to poetic monsters created by artists in subsequent periods of radical change. This chapter explores the emergence of poetic monsters in Renaissance art, where ornament usurps the power to speak, as a new means to engage with and assimilate the unprecedented changes of modernity.

Ornament that Insists on Speaking Within the historical iterations of classical art and aesthetics – whether Ancient, Renaissance, or Academic – the conception of ornament was that it was subservient to argument, to use Alois Riegl’s useful rubric.2 Argument is the organizing idea, whether architectural structure or pictorial narrative, and conveys the meaning of a work. While argument is associated with intellect, ornament is linked to the body and the senses, and firmly relegated to the secondary role of enlivening and enhancing argument. The ‘proper’ role of ornament within this aesthetic framework can be illustrated by the coffers animating the interior of the Pantheon’s dome. Their pattern of recessed squares, repeated in ascending registers, accentuates the perfect geometric form far better than a uniform, unarticulated surface. The coffers create 2 Alois Riegl proposed this opposition in his early studies on ornament in the winter of 1890–1891. See Margaret Olin’s discussion in Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, pp. 60–66, and in ‘Self-Representation.

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a lively play of light and shadow that delights the eye in order to make the mind’s grasp of the building’s symmetry and structure more immediate. Further, the subtle tapering of each square enhances the loft of the dome and the visual effect of greater height. Ornament serves and supports argument, appealing to the senses so to better instruct the mind. When ornament goes rogue, however, it breaches the boundaries of argument, interrupting and challenging its primacy and authority. Adam van Vianen’s auricular designs demonstrate just this sort of ornament (Ill. 8.1). Traditionally, the ornamentation for a cup or ewer would be confined to a decorative band of some sort, its style and subject appropriate to the object’s overall design and function and its sole purpose that of pleasing enhancement. Van Vianen’s ornament does nothing of the sort. Faces with agitated expressions emerge and bodies struggle to figure forth, with little apparent connection to the ewer or to each other. Opposite the wide-open mouth of the human face, two beasts snarl and bite. In these inventions, the metamorphic process engulfs the entire vessel, its creative energy pulling edges and contours into weird, suggestively bodied shapes. In fact, the fleshy, lobed characteristics of van Vianen’s auricular style give the entire object a corporeal quality. The aggressive, full-bodied ornament renders the identity and purpose of the ewer almost unrecognizable, and appears ready to attack any hand that dares to reach toward it. Simultaneously, the identity of this object as a sculptured bust of an angry man also fails to come to full realization, stymied by the demands of functionality and by competing storylines of crouching figures, biting beasts, dragon-like shapes. His identity is also unstable, hovering between the possibilities of demon, satyr (a horn protrudes from his forehead), or fool (the dragon-like flourish on his head resembles a partial jester’s cap, but also mimics liquid that would pour from this vessel). With the nose taking on the shape of a back, and breasts and arms emerging from his cheek and jaw, it is also possible that the illusion of the face itself will transmogrify into something else entirely. Locked in a stalemate, both argument and ornament actively contest each other’s efforts to resolve into a unified image. It is important to distinguish between ornament that is excessive and ornament that turns monstrous. Van Vianen’s ewer could maintain its functional identity despite all manner of swags, flourishes, and frippery affixed to its outer form. Such overheated decorative choices might be gaudy or extravagant, perhaps verging on tasteless, without destabilizing the hierarchy of argument over ornament. What makes them monstrous is not simply that their ornament is figurative, but that it intends to figure, to convey meaning. The identity and purpose of an image or object is called into question by an emboldened and argumentative ornament. A careful reading of Horace confirms that the point at which ornament tips into monstrosity is when it presumes to claim the power of speech, the means to represent. Horace

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Ill. 8.1: Unnumbered copy after Adam van Vianen’s Modelli Artificiosi di Vasi diversi d’argento et alter Opere capriciozi, published by Christiaen van Vianen, Utrecht, 1646–1652. Etching. © The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

ridiculed such ill-advised attempts as incapable of meaning, being ‘empty of substance, no single form relating head and foot’.3 It was, he wrote, ‘like a woman intermingled with various animals, in which a woman of appealing form above ends in a black fish below’. Classical authors excoriated this species of figured and combinatory ornament (later named ‘grotesques’ in the Renaissance) as one that did not know its place, and mocked propriety. Such monsters were the misbegotten attempts of ornament to claim a voice and agency of its own, and it is no accident that Horace characterizes it as a woman out of control. Vitruvius famously brands it as a bastard,4 3 Horace, ‘The Art of Poetry’, stanzas 1–9. 4 Vitruvius, De architectura, vol. 2, pp. 106–109.

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and Dionysius of Halicarnassus compares it to a strumpet usurping a ‘lawful, freeborn, virtuous’ wife’s rightful place in the household.5 Horace’s passage is usually read as a warning about artistic licence, but there is a deeper aversion to intermixture that fuels his rejection of monstrous ornament, or the grotesque. Ornament must not presume to mingle with argument; but Horace goes on to warn against mixing genres, categories, and styles, stating that there are ‘characteristic ways and tones of different kinds of work’ so that ‘comic matter refuses to be expressed in tragic meters’.6 and ‘each individual subject [should] be allotted its proper place and keep to it’.7 When Horace states that ‘each character should act in a manner fitting to his or her station in life’ it becomes clear that his aesthetic strictures embody more fundamental social codes.8 Ars poetica decrees that any serious artist should steer clear of bawdy language and low subjects, for ‘people who have […] ancestry and property take offense, and do not accept with like mind what the buyer of chick-peas and nuts approves’.9 Horace equates the intermingling of lowly ornament with higher forms of expression as a threat to established social order and hierarchy. He acknowledges that people allow ‘painters and poets alike a fair chance to venture what they pleased’, but they should stay within cultural norms, so that ‘fierce things should [not] associate with peaceful, snakes couple with birds or lambs with tigers’.10 Like Horace’s monstrous woman, these unnatural intermixtures serve as warnings of the debasement of Roman culture. Horace laments that ‘Once there existed men of wisdom with the power and insight to separate public from private things, sacred from profane, to prevent marriage with aliens, to give rights to husbands, to build cities, to engrave laws in wood.’11 Ornament must remain circumscribed and subservient, in the same manner that women, peasants, foreigners, and barbarians must be kept in their ‘natural’ place. Given this parallel, Horace’s characterization of the ornamental grotesque as a monstrous woman takes on deeper significance. She is a creature of confused identity and an interloper who threatens decorum and the status quo. Horace put his finger on precisely the critical element of this sort of ornament.12

5 Dionysius, On the Ancient Orators, pp. 213–226. 6 Horace, ‘The Art of Poetry’ stanzas 86–91. 7 Horace, ‘The Art of Poetry’ stanza 32. 8 Horace, ‘The Art of Poetry’ stanzas 312–322. 9 Horace, ‘The Art of Poetry’ stanzas 244–250. 10 Horace, ‘The Art of Poetry’ stanzas 9–13. 11 Horace, ‘The Art of Poetry’ stanzas 396–399. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s discussion in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression regarding the class distinctions embedded in the term ‘classical’ is especially pertinent here. 12 See a full discussion in Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, Chapters 1 and 2.

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Renaissance Embrace of Rogue Ornament This sort of audacious and presumptuous ornament was precisely what many Italian artists and theoreticians embraced in the later Renaissance as a new form of expression, an artistic principle in its own right.13 A powerful counter-argument emerged to justify these combinatory forms, one that essentially turned Horace’s dictum upside down by claiming the grotesque to be emblematic of the artist’s freedom of invention. In fact, monstrous ornament served as the primary vehicle through which many artists demonstrated their invention by disfiguring and refiguring the conventional structures of pictorial and architectural argument. Although the word grotesque initially identified a specific strand of Roman ornament, artists and theorists quickly recognized and employed it to break artistic conventions and bend the rules of representation, and they did so primarily by speaking through ornament. Of Michelangelo, Vasari wrote that: The license he allowed himself has served as a great encouragement to others to follow his example; and subsequently we have seen the creation of new kinds of fantastic ornamentation containing more of the grotesque than of rule or reason. Thus all artists are under a great and permanent obligation to Michelangelo, seeing that he broke the bonds and chains that had previously confined them to the creation of traditional forms.14

Vasari’s observation that it is through ‘fantastic ornamentation’ that Michelangelo breaks the bounds of traditional forms is critically important. The embrace of confused identities and unresolved, in-between creatures – from the myriad painted and engraved grottesche to Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s composite portraits (Ill. 8.2) to Michelangelo’s emergent captives struggling out of stones – marks a new reflexivity in the sixteenth century about the rules of representation, as well as a desire to open up established arguments to contradictions and reformulations. It is important to consider why monstrous ornament is such an effective vehicle for this challenge. A key component is that ornament is defined in terms of its (subservient) relationship to something else. When it ruptures set relations by calling attention to itself, claiming a right to represent, ornament implicitly interrogates these relations, questioning what is deemed authoritative, ‘natural’, and ‘normal’ (confirmed in a back-handed way by Horace’s characterization of monstrous ornament as abnormal, unnatural, and worthy only of derisive laughter). Such monsters can undermine and expose the artifice of accepted genres, narratives, conventions, 13 Sources on Renaissance grottesche include Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea; Morel, Les Grotesques; Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque; and Hansen, The Art of Transformation. 14 Vasari, Lives, vol. 3, p. 264.

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Ill. 8.2: Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Winter, 1563. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

and hierarchies. But these ruptures can also create the potential for new configurations and variations. Horace’s monster, with ‘no single form relating head and foot’, lacks a single unifying element; however, it is these kinds of disparate combinations that Renaissance artists employed to render relations more fluid and contingent, allowing both artist and observer to imagine other connections and associations. Rogue ornament deploys visual structures that enable this contest of meaning and openness to new possibilities. In a conventional Renaissance pictorial composition, everything is unified by the narrative focus, but also severely delimited by it. No figure, gesture, or prop deviates from the stated purpose, and typically a perspectival grid locks in place a hierarchy of relations. Monstrous ornament breaks open these fixed pictorial relations and replaces them with linkages and fusions of disparate

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Ill. 8.3: Raphael Sanzio and Giovanni da Udine, Interior, Loggetta, 1519. Vatican Palace, Vatican City. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

things. Freed from both strictures of dramatic narrative and illusionistic scenography that fix a specific time and place, hierarchies come unmoored, fluid and unpredictable. Although the pitture grottesche painted by Raphael and Giovanni da Udine in the Vatican Loggetta and Loggia include narrative panels, they are diminutive, and are themselves read in relation to the various mythical creatures, swags of foliage, and improbable architectural elements with which they are entwined, rather than conveying the organizing idea (Ill. 8.3). Similarly, Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s combinatory heads shatter pictorial chains of meaning. Images such as Winter fuse genres of

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still life and portraiture, breaking the accepted rules for each. His composition binds together completely incompatible objects – a human head in profile and varieties of woodland plants – in a manner that renders them, paradoxically, incomplete without one another. Incompatible and inextricable, Arcimboldo collapses the distance between these realities, confronting the viewer with a delightful, irresolvable puzzle. What is argument and what is ornament in this strange visage or in the witty combinations of grottesche? The character of ornament as mute and bodied, appealing to the senses, also contributes to the surprising potentialities of these Renaissance monsters. While the visual language of istoria, developed in the Quattrocento, parallels the linear and logical sequences of prosaic narrative, monstrous ornament fractures the syntax of this argument, rendering it mute or garbled. When it claims the right to speak, ornament does so by forging simultaneous and polysemous associations. And further, ornament speaks differently: its fused, combinatory forms convey meaning in a fundamentally imagistic manner. This sort of imaged-based language fascinated Renaissance thinkers, who conflated grottesche with imprese, emblems, and hieroglyphs. Gregorio Comanini, for example, praised one of Arcimboldo’s combinatory creatures as a ‘novel monster’ while also characterizing the artist’s method as both hieroglyphic and as ornamental: ‘Thus like a learned Egyptian Arcimboldo covered / Your royal face with a veil of lovely fruits.’15 In his Trattato of 1584, Gian Paolo Lomazzo linked grotesques to a pictured language, comparing them to Egyptian hieroglyphs and to the emblems and heraldic devices of his own era.16 Pirro Ligorio also acknowledged the capability of grottesche to function as a hieroglyphic language, noting that to ‘common people’ they might appear as simple dream-like fantasies, but could be ‘all […] symbols and appropriate subjects, not made without secrets’, in which were ‘mingled both the moral and fabulous actions of the gods’.17 In sum, the late Renaissance embrace of the ornamental grotesque’s associations with occult and symbolic language countered Horace’s characterization in many ways, one of these being that ornament could indeed speak. In his 1654 volume Il cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope), Emanuele Tesauro defended pictured language, and extolled the poets and artists who possessed a ‘quickness of mind in seeing resemblances between dissimilar things and capturing these insights in unusual metaphors or engaging paradoxes’.18 Such ingegno requires perspicacity, which can ‘penetrate the most distant and minute 15 Comanini, Il Figino, p. 24. Comanini was referring to Arcimboldo’s composition Vertumnus, which doubles as a portrait of the Emperor Rudolf II. 16 Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arte, II: pp. 367–369. Brian Curran explores the Renaissance fascination with mystical and hidden meanings in his recent study: The Egyptian Renaissance, especially Chapters 3 and 10. 17 Coffin, ‘Pirro Ligorio and Decoration’, p. 183. Nicole Dacos includes Ligorio’s unpublished treatise on the grotesque in Appendix II of La découverte, pp. 161–182. 18 Gilman, Curious Perspective, p. 68.

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Ill. 8.4: Engraved by Giorgio Tasniere after Domenico Piola, Allegorical frontispiece, from Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico, o sia, Idea dell'arguta et ingeniosa elocutione: che serue à tutta l'arte oratoria, lapidaria, et simbolica (Turin: Bartolomeo Zavatta, 1670).

characteristics of any subject; such as its substance, material, form […] property, causes […] all of these things which are coiled up and hidden in every subject’.19 Tesauro presents wit and ingegno in terms of a sudden brilliant insight, ‘an act of discovery, 19 Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico, pp. 82–83.

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an exploration of the subtle network of interrelationships knitting all things together’.20 Distinct from the movements of reason and logic, wit could, in a flash, seize the meanings possible in the combination of disparate things. The frontispiece for Tesauro’s work offers an instructive display of his imagistic argument (Ill. 8.4). A seated figure of Poesis, surrounded by various emblems and insignias, peers through a telescope; its lenses collapse space, merging near with far. Another figure, Pictura, paints a conical mirror anamorphosis. In the painting, what appears to be a random and meaningless arrangement of letters suddenly snaps into focus the moment a reflective cone is placed in its centre revealing the phrase omnis in unum. For all of these reasons, monstrous ornament is uniquely capable of assimilating disparate voices and alien elements. It is not surprising that the grottesche for the Vatican Loggetta include images of exotic peoples and animals.21 This became a hallmark of many printed and painted grottesche, which pull into their orbit all sorts of things that hover on the peripheries of the known.22 The ability to incorporate new knowledge outside existing paradigms underlies the representations of the natural world displayed in Renaissance Wunderkammern as well. Combinatory and metamorphic creatures that defied existing categories and narratives were actively collected and just as actively fashioned. It is important to recognize, therefore, that the pursuit of marvellous curiosities, like the formulation of audacious grottesche, was not only driven by a desire to amaze and delight, but also by a desire to reconfigure existing representational structures that proved inadequate when confronted by an expanded field of specimens arriving from other parts of the world. Grottesche and Wunderkammern both embrace the sheer profusion of creaturely forms, and their pursuit of the bizarre and unnatural interrogates the boundaries of what defines the natural. These scrambled relations and deliberate ornamentality grapple with the means to represent what is coming to be: challenges to religious belief, interactions with other world cultures, revelations about the natural world and our place in it. J.J. Cohen’s formulation captures the function of these combinatory monsters: ‘The horizon where the monsters dwell might well be imagined as the visible edge of the hermeneutic circle itself […]. They are ‘harbinger[s] of category chaos.’23

20 Gilman, Curious Perspective, p. 70. 21 Dacos, The Loggia of Raphael, pp. 33–44. 22 Especially striking examples of these capabilities of ornament are the Mexican murals discussed by Barnaby Nygren in Chapter 4 of this volume. What sort of dramatic narrative could possibly represent the complex cultural negotiations taking place in that setting with the same success as this ornamental grotesque? Its structure is multivocal and interweaves disparate styles, symbolic fragments, and points of view from both Spanish and Mexican cultures. This pattern repeats itself in the eighteenth century when Europeans assimilated Chinese imagery through ornamental ‘arabesques’ called chinoiserie. See Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, Chapter 3. 23 Cohen, ‘Monster Culture’, pp. 6–7.

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Vico’s Poetic Monsters The cultural agency of ornament comes fully into focus in the work of Giambattista Vico, whose La scienza nuova, or The New Science (1725), established a working theory of the origins and development of culture, one in which he accorded a foundational role to visual elements long cast in a secondary role as ornament. A landmark text, overlooked in art and aesthetics, Vico’s New Science was written against the grain of his own era, one that was increasingly impatient with imagistic thought rather than empirical fact or logical deduction. As a professor of rhetoric, Vico was well versed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century interpretations of the ornamental grotesque and their associations with emblems, imprese, and hieroglyphs. Adding to this, The New Science drew upon contemporary travel accounts of encounters with New World peoples, archaeological material, mythologies, and Homeric poetry as he sought to understand the deeper cultural agency of these combinatory forms, and to theorize how they facilitated the formation and re-formation of culture. The New Science is a truly transformative work that, Janus-like, looks to the past, making an embattled stand for the relevance of poetic thought, and looks to the future by making a study of culture itself, one of the primary new directions in Enlightenment thought. In this work, foundational to the social sciences, Vico extends the arguments of Tesauro and others. He makes the case that the capabilities of poetic thought to seize upon insights through the association of disparate things was also the means through which the first knowledge of humanity was fashioned. He also furthers the associations of grottesche with mythical expression and ancient hieroglyphs because his conjecture is that ‘poetic monsters’ formed the earliest language and first gave shape to thought. Here, too, Vico draws upon ideas promulgated by earlier theorists. A. J. Smith observes that G.B. Valeriano, Luca Contile, and G.A. Palazzi ‘assumed in common that the pristine knowledge of men was hieroglyphically rather than discursively acquired’. Contile surmised that ‘because of their purity’, God’s creation could immediately and intuitively be read by the early men. They ‘imitated God who was the first inventor of Imprese’.24 Compared to the broader debates concerning ornament that reignited in the Enlightenment, Vico’s was a minority voice. Enlightenment thinkers on the whole argued that figured or emblematic speech had no place in the modern world. The Abbé DuBos (1719) held that modern audiences could no longer make sense of these ‘strangers and vagabonds […], a kind of cypher, whereof nobody has the key and very few are desirous of having it’.25 John Locke (1690) branded it ‘an abuse of language’ and that:

24 Smith, Metaphysical Wit, p. 35. 25 DuBos, Réflexions critiques, vol. I: pp. 153–54 and 157.

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We must allow that all the art of rhetorick, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.26

In the eighteenth century, the emergent disciplines of art history and aesthetics effected a more extreme bifurcation of argument and ornament. The study and practice of the fine arts granted argument a radical supremacy, and promulgated an ideated, discarnate variant of classicism best exemplified by Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s influential treatises, Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755) and History of Ancient Art (1764), that characterized the highest forms of art as ‘ideal beauties, brain-born images’.27 Ornament was beneath his notice, and Winckelmann mentioned it only long enough to quote Horace’s warning against mixing high and low, and to impose limits: ‘For all forms of ornamentation there are two primary rules: first, they should be suitable for the nature of the subject matter […] and second, they should not be devised by arbitrary use of the imagination.’ Ornamental expression was narrowly circumscribed, its application ‘an exact correspondence between what is being decorated and the ornaments used’.28 Similarly, in his foundational aesthetic treatise, Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant reinscribed the primacy of argument and denounced ‘ostentatious and affected styles’ whose ‘manner of carrying the idea into execution is aimed at singularity instead of being made appropriate to the idea’. Notably, Kant allowed that certain ornaments, such as designs ‘á la grecque [or] foliage for framework or on wall-papers’, could stand on their own as ‘self-subsisting beauties’. But he pointed out that these ornaments can ‘please freely and on their own account’ because they were incapable of argument and represented nothing more than themselves: they ‘have no intrinsic meaning; they represent nothing’.29 Vico was interested in images as embodiments of culture rather than as works of fine art, and his approach was anything but aesthetic. In fact, he states that philology rather than philosophy is better suited to understanding the workings of human culture. Philosophy, being the metaphysical pursuit of absolute truths, ‘contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology [which Vico designates as “the study of the languages and deeds of man”] observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness of the certain’.30 That is, what is certain is what cultures hold in common in terms of beliefs and customs. It is the ‘common sense [that] is judgment without reflection, shared by […] an entire 26 Locke, ‘Abuse of Words’, vol. II: Bk. 3, ch. 10, p. 41. 27 Winckelmann, ‘Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks’, p. 2. 28 Winckelmann, ‘Observations on Ancient Architecture’ p. 111. 29 Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 72. 30 Vico, The New Science, pp. 138–139.

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people’.31 Through long study of language and history, Vico sought to establish how these common certainties, or foundational topoi, came to be established and how they functioned within a culture over historical time. His rather startling argument was that ‘the founders of […] humanity […] in a certain sense created themselves’, meaning that they became fully human through the fashioning and manipulating of objects and materials that bound together community.32 The first peoples created a poetic wisdom ‘in their robust ignorance’ and ‘did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination. Those who by imagining did the creating, for which they were called “poets,” which is Greek for creators.’33 Thus Vico intended his term, ‘poetic wisdom’, to underscore that it was made, created by lashing together from the concrete particulars of common experience: Hence poetic wisdom […] must have begun with a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination.34

Vico ascribes a profound and originary role to the image as both the first language and the site, the sensory topos, for the formation of culture. The first peoples were all sense and imagination, reasoned Vico, and consequently they ‘bodied forth’ their ‘poetic wisdom’ through the combination and intermixture of disparate things. These combinatory images embodied a form of sensate, pre-abstract thought, providing the means to make present common beliefs and collective memory: The first men […] conceived ideas of things by imaginative characters of animate and mute substances. They expressed themselves by means of gestures or physical objects, which had natural relations with the ideas. […] Scholars have failed to understand how the first nations thought in poetic characters, spoke in fables, and wrote in hieroglyphs.35

Drawing a ligature between concrete and particular things was a means to bind thought to these objects, and a means by which thought bound together a people. Juxtaposing and conjoining objects in such a way as to spark meaning, these combinatory forms were described by Vico as ‘poetic monsters’. Significantly, the poetic monster that Vico identified as the foundational bearer of meaning, enabling the

31 Vico, New Science, p. 142. 32 Vico, New Science, p. 367. 33 Vico, New Science, p. 376. 34 Vico, New Science, p. 375. 35 Vico, New Science, pp. 431 and 429, respectively.

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power to speak, is rooted precisely in the kind of expression embraced by Lomazzo, Tesauro, and others. Therefore, when he described these combinatory forms as ‘poetic monsters’ he was fully cognizant of the rich connotations of the word, its root word being ‘monstrum […] etymologically that which reveals, that which warns’.36 Poetic monsters and metamorphoses arose from a necessity of this first human nature, in its inability to abstract forms or properties from subjects. By their logic they had to put subjects together in order to put their forms together, or to destroy a subject in order to separate its primary form from the contrary form which had been imposed upon it.37

While this emergent wisdom was first expressed through poetic monsters, Vico argued that as cultures developed, poetic thought was superseded by ‘metaphysical’ thought and abstract systems of representation. He pointed to heraldic imagery as an example, which he characterized as a vestigial form of poetic monster because it has to be ‘explained by mottoes […] whereas the natural heroic emblems were such from their lack of mottoes, and spoke forth in their very muteness. Hence they were in their own right the best emblems, for they carried their meaning in themselves.’38 A motto makes the emblem’s meaning more legible and fixed, but does so by stripping the argument away from ornament and rendering the image subservient. Put another way, once a motto is thought to be necessary for clarity’s sake, the image has already ceded its place in the communal wisdom and become ‘mere’ ornament. Although Vico asserted that these advancements toward the reason were common to all cultures, he was pointed in his argument that such progress was not without a loss. Poetic monsters, Vico argued, remained the highest, most metaphoric form of expression at any stage, and he decried the fact that the modern argument of his own era lacked the perspective of metaphoric thought. Stripped bare of ornament and complexity, it was, according to Vico’s thinking, ‘flat and inelegant’.39 The New Science emphasized that crossing the threshold into rational thought and abstract language was an irrevocable act. Vico argued that ‘with our civilized natures we [moderns] cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men’, reasoning that ‘metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses; metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep to particulars’.40

36 Cohen, ‘Monster Culture’, p. 4. 37 Vico, New Science, p. 410. 38 Vico, New Science, p. 484. 39 Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, p. 41. 40 Vico, New Science, pp. 34 and 219, respectively.

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Vico maintained, however, that the poetic wisdom of a people was never entirely forgotten, but lay dormant, buried within it. In times of crisis or radical change, a culture at any stage of development would return again and again to the formative poetic wisdom that first nurtured it. Vico called this process of return and revision corso and ricorso. The ricorso was far from a rote recapitulation, however: it did not ‘merely repeat the corso. It is a historical process, and it has the legal sense of a retrial or appeal.’41 Cultural narratives and boundaries accepted as correct and normative can be contradicted by events and called into question. As Tesauro observed, it is the poetic monster’s rich, allusive potential that enables the re-combinations and additions necessary to fashion new meanings, because it is copious and diverse in its possibilities.

Corso and Ricorso: Resurgence of Ornament in Contemporary Art It is not at all surprising, as the accelerating pace of globalization generates unprecedented cultural intermixtures and competing narratives, to find poetic monsters roaming across the landscape of contemporary art. In recent years, disruptive and outspoken ornament has been put to especially effective use by artists whose work is grounded in the experience of dislocation and diaspora. A brief summary of significant artists who employ ornament as a deconstructive device include Yinka Shonibare, Hew Locke, Chris Ofili, Gonkar Gyatso, and Aisha Khalid. What these artists share is that they fully inhabit and negotiate two or more disparate cultural spheres and their artwork engages these ongoing contests of meaning. All of these artists skilfully exploit the ambiguities and contradictions of their experiences, which play out in many respects as microcosms of the cultural collisions of globalization. Hew Locke, for example, grew up in both Scotland and Guyana, a country that was for over 200 years a British colony, and studied art at the Royal College of Art in London, where he now resides. Locke’s perspective on the spectacle of majesty and the trappings of empire is one of ambivalence and fascination. In 2002 he began a series of reliefs titled House of Windsor, taking an iconic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, reminiscent of those on postage stamps, making it ten feet tall, and adorning it with layers upon layers of cheap plastic flowers, toys, beads, insects, lizards so that it appears like an overstuffed, seething version of an Arcimboldo. Kobena Mercer writes that: To the extent that such instantly recognizable symbolic forms provide shelter or housing for the conceptual dimension of his work, Locke is not a figurative artist so much as an artist hollowing out the iconography of sovereignty that has become so all pervasive that its figurative codes are overlooked.42 41 Bergin and Fisch make this critical point in their introduction to New Science, p. xliii. 42 Mercer, ‘Starless and Bible Black’, p. 10.

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Ill. 8.5: Hew Locke, Morley, from the Restoration series, 2006. C-type photograph with mixed media applied. Courtesy Hales Gallery, London. Photo by FXP Photography.

It is through the adornment that Locke garbles the meaning of this iconic figure. Similarly, in his Restoration series (Ill. 8.5), he queries another kind of cultural convention: public monuments to famous men that, while honouring an influential individual, also reinforce a particular historical narrative. Here, the artist takes photographs of monuments and mounts them on aluminium backings, onto which he affixes all manner of gold chains, braids, and filigree. Traditionally, one of the roles of ornament has been to signify distinction and status, but Locke pushes such

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Ill. 8.6: Gonkar Gyatso, The Shambhala in Modern Times, 2008. Courtesy of the artist/TAG Fine Arts.

valorization to extremes, to the point that it overwhelms whatever argument the monument intended to convey. Ornament obliterates the figure’s identity (Samuel Morley, philanthropist and Member of Parliament for Bristol) and, usurping any meaningful dedication, Locke attaches the words: ‘GET WELL SOON.’ In this ricorso, the sober bronze statue of an Englishman transforms into something exotic and fearsome, like some ancient pagan deity. Locke’s poetic monster is jarring not only because his golden apparition seems to materialize in the midst of rather banal modern apartment buildings, but also because its outspoken ornament does not enhance power as much as expose its raw realities. Ornament gone rogue plays a profound role in the work of Gonkar Gyatso, who simultaneously destabilizes and re-imagines cultural topoi. In works like The Shambhala in Modern Times (Ill. 8.6), Gyatso combines fragments of Tibetan Buddhism, Western popular media, traditional Chinese arts, and global commerce. He is well versed in the visual languages of these disparate traditions, having grown up in Tibet during a time when the ‘official’ culture was that of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,

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Ill. 8.7: Gonkar Gyatso, Detail, The Shambhala in Modern Times.

and only later learned the ancient artistic techniques and iconography of Tibetan Buddhism while living in Dharamsala, the community of Tibetan exiles in India. Upon his move to London in 1996, Gyatso was overwhelmed by the chaotic mixture and sheer volume of mass media and pop culture. In this image, Gyatso ignites a complex contest of meaning in which the traditional symbolism of Tibetan Buddhism collides with myriads of contemporary logos, slogans, and mascots: a clash of sacred and profane. It is difficult to imagine icons from more divergent world views. The image is anchored by the silhouette of the Buddha’s head, centred within a cosmos suggested by the four directions and the absolute symmetry. Yet within this aura, or halo, the intricate ornamentation that traditionally serves to glorify the Buddha now bristles with a bewildering array of contemporary logos and brands, openly challenging, even mocking, the meanings embodied in these deeply symbolic forms (Ill. 8.7). Clare Harris observes that at first glance ‘the aura surrounding the Buddha […] presents a ravishing vision of the embodiment of wisdom and compassion’. Looking closely, however, ‘it becomes apparent that the aura […] consists of an encyclopedic survey of the life of an itinerant Tibetan artist […] crafted from the ephemera of the artist’s local environment […] and sampled from the detritus of the everyday.’43

43 Harris, Museum on the Roof of the World, p. 258.

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Individually, any one of these shiny stickers or slogans has its own distinct message (many of them under copyright to protect the purity of the ‘brand’s’ identity). Buddha’s aura is infected with these disparate identities; each piece attempts to speak for itself, and none seems to reflect the holiness of the Buddha. But while these frenetic fragments of contemporary media exuberantly contradict and overwrite the meanings of this Buddhist icon, their arguments are also garbled and contested through ornament. Relegated to an ornamental backdrop that mutes their impact, diminished in size and disconnected from context, they jostle promiscuously for attention within a teeming mass of other identities. Therefore, while the cacophony of secular modernity seems to overrun this conventional Buddhist icon, it is equally true that the wisdom of the enlightened Buddha encompasses all of these diverse and changeful realities. Gyatso’s title, The Shambhala in Modern Times, exemplifies Vico’s concept of ricorso: what meaning can Buddhism, and specifically Tibetan Buddhism, hold for our fractious times? Will its traditions and wisdom sustain the onslaught of mass media and commerce? Can they reveal a more transcendent reality for those mesmerized by these shiny baubles and momentary delights? Gyatso’s image mutes settled argument, and punctures both ancient and contemporary realities to the point that their ‘mottos’, whether ritual prayers or commercial jingoes, cannot fully hold sway. The potential meanings of this image are buried in the image itself and the interconnections between disparate things. Contrasted here are different kinds of desire: the constant goading of worldly desires in commercial culture; the Buddhist call to release oneself from desire; and the desire to reach the hidden kingdom of Shambhala – ‘a land devoted to the practice of Buddhism […] a “Pure Land” of peace and tranquility’.44 Tibetan cultural identity is also contested here, bombarded by global exchange, but also suppressed and compromised by Chinese power. Gyatso suggests as much through the characters that make up the head of the Buddha, which are his own invention: a fusion of Tibetan and Chinese, and as such unreadable to either.45 As with any ricorso, a re-negotiation is underway, and Gyatso applies his individual experience to construct this contrast between spiritual enlightenment and the hubbub of modern life. But Gyatso also embraces these intermixed realities, stating that: In the most overt sense the image of the Buddha is meant as a reflection of everything in the world; the height of enlightenment must be a reflection of everything it sees and tries to understand. For me the form of the Buddha acts as a container the way that a city is a container. I am inspired by urban areas where people, ideas, and things coexist and sometimes clash. My process has become my own way of making sense of the world and each piece acts as kind of private meditation.46 44 Harris, Museum on the Roof of the World, p. 259. 45 Harris, Museum on the Roof of the World. 46 Gonkar Gyatso interview by Allenchey, ‘Meet the Artist’.

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In this ricorso, Gyatso breaks open established narratives of Buddhism, global capitalism, Tibetan identity, and contemporary image culture, interposing new elements that jostle and combine in unexpected ways. Hew Locke’s burgeoning ornamentation too sets in motion a different sort of ricorso that examines the mechanisms of power and authority, and seeks to renegotiate historical narratives. Enriched and contradicted by an ornament that insists on speaking, these works of art body forth a poetic wisdom for our own time, and seek out new ways to bind together community. Published nearly 300 years ago, Vico’s New Science provides a means to consider the ways in which these poetic monsters give shape to cultural norms and beliefs. Vico’s theories, rooted as they are in sixteenth-century art and thought, reveal how these Renaissance experiments unlocked a new, self-reflexive cultural agency that could challenge existing frameworks of thought and representation. Paradoxically, in his efforts to understand the work of images in the origin of culture, Vico’s theories show that monstrous ornament was one of the most radically modern developments of the Renaissance.

Bibliography Alex Allenchey, ‘Meet the Artist: Gonkar Gyatso’, Artspace, 16 December 2012. David R. Coffin, ‘Pirro Ligorio and Decoration of Late Sixteenth-Century Ferrara’, Art Bulletin 37, no. 3 (1955), pp. 167–185. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Gregorio Comanini, Il Figino, overo del fine della pittura (Mantua, 1591), in Ann Doyle-Anderson and Giancarlo Maiorino (ed. and trans.), The Figino: Art Theory in the Late Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Nicole Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques á la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969). Nicole Dacos, The Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art Treasure, trans. Josephine Bacon (New York: Abbeville, 2008). Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On the Ancient Orators, trans. E.H. Gombrich, ‘The Historiographic Background of the Concept of Mannerism’, in Liana Cheney (ed.), Readings in Italian Mannerism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). Jean-Baptiste DuBos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719), trans. Thomas Nugent, 2 vols. (London, 1748). Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Art of Transformation: Grotesques in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Rome: Accademia di Danimarca and Edizioni Quasar, 2018). Clare Harris, The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Horace, ‘The Art of Poetry: A Prose Translation’, trans. James Hynd, in Burton Raffel (ed.), Horace: The Art of Poetry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974).

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Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). John Locke, ‘Abuse of Words’, Essay on Human Understanding (London, 1796), vol. II: Book 3, Chapter 10, p. 41 (London: T. Longman, 1690; rpt. 1796) in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, Gale Group, https://quod. lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/ (accessed 10 April 2018). Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arte, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, 2 vols. (Firenze: Marchi & Bertolli, 1973–1974. Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). Margaret Olin, ‘Self-Representation: Resemblance and Convention in Two Nineteenth-Century Theories of Architecture and the Decorative Arts’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 49 (1989), pp. 376–397. Kobena Mercer, ‘Starless and Bible Black: Art Travelling through Dark Times’, in Stephanie James and Peter Bonnell (eds), Stranger in Paradise (London: Black Dog, 2011). Philippe Morel, Les Grotesques: les figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1997). Albert J. Smith, Metaphysical Wit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986). Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico, o sia, Idea dell’arguta et ingeniosa elocutione: che serue à tutta l'arte oratoria, lapidaria, et simbolica (Turin, 1670). Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston de Vere, 3 vols. (New York: Abrams, 1979). Donald Philip Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948; reprinted 1986). Vitruvius, De architectura, trans. Frank Granger, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Johann Joachim Winckelmann, ‘Observations on Ancient Architecture’, in Johann Joachim Winckelmann on Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, trans. David R. Carter (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013). Johann Joachim Winckelmann, ‘Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755)’, trans. Henry Fuseli, in Gert Schiff (ed.), German Essays on Art History (New York: Continuum 1988). Alessandra Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque: Fantastical Decoration from Antiquity to Art Nouveau (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008).

About the author Frances Connelly is Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research focus is modern European art, with a particular interest in the intersection of art history and anthropology. She has published two books on the grotesque – The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (2012) and Modern Art and the Grotesque (2003) – as well as book chapters and essays for exhibitions on this topic for the Museo Picasso Málaga, the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and the Neue Galerie, New York. She has also written extensively on primitivism and its aftermath, including The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725–1907 (1995). Her research has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Mellon Foundation, and she was recently named a Visiting Fellow to the Van Gogh Museum.

9. Trafficking the Body: Prolegomena to a ­Posthumanist Theory of Ornament and Monstrosity Jacob Wamberg

Abstract This chapter activates a posthumanist conceptual framework – including general complexity theory, aesthetic philosophy, and Wilhelm Worringer’s theory of abstraction and empathy – in order to explore how ornament and monstrosity uphold and negotiate the supremacy of the generalized entity, the body, and its ultimate derivation from the specific figure, the autonomous human body. Whereas ornament belongs to the periphery of the human body, monstrosity emerges when the body is invaded by foreign parts of humans, animals, plants, inorganic nature, or artefacts. If ornament and monstrosity and their sustaining body/less complex hierarchy peak in humanist cultures, even then these cultures appear as fragile islands that are often flooded by a surrounding nonhuman sea, sixteenth-century Mannerism being a case in point. Keywords: ornament, monstrosity, abstraction, complexity, Great Chain of Being, inorganicity

Introduction Viewed through a classically aesthetic lens, ornament and monstrosity could resemble a pair of exact opposites. Each relates in a mutually antagonistic way to what we could call the ‘body’ – a category spanning the organismal body proper and its structural echoes in things (buildings, instruments, clothes, food, pictures). Ornament is the supplement that beautifies the body with small doses of matter which do not belong intrinsically to the body proper, typically what we will term less complex materials – from plants to minerals, or naturalistic or abstract patterns derived

Hammeken, C.A. and M.F. Hansen (eds.), Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789462984967_ch09

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from such materials. Monstrosity, on the other hand, signifies a distorting, uglifying, and typically scary invasion of the body by the same sort of matter which does not properly belong to it. And yet the two notions have something in common. They both uphold the supremacy of the body, especially the human body and its echoes in things. Ornaments directly point to this supremacy by discreetly framing the body with non-bodily matter. Monstrosity upholds the same supremacy indirectly by mobilizing the memory of an intact body that may counteract the monstrous body actually shown. Ultimately founded on a dualism between human body and nonhuman surroundings, indeed on a whole hierarchy spanning these poles, ornaments and monstrosity both emerge as basically humanist aesthetic tools. They both suppose a hierarchy between a body occupying the centre and less complex materials occupying the periphery – the distinction between important and less important that is described in the classical humanist tradition using two terms: ergon (‘work’) and parergon (‘bywork’).1 In this chapter I will activate a posthumanist conceptual framework – including tools from general complexity theory, aesthetic philosophy, poststructuralism, and Wilhelm Worringer’s theory of abstraction and empathy – in order to explore how ornament and monstrosity uphold and negotiate this supremacy of the generalized entity, the body, and its ultimate derivation from the specific figure, the autonomous human body.2 The framework is posthumanist, since although it does accept the dualisms and hierarchies developed in humanist cultures as regulating historical ideals – indeed gives these dualisms and hierarchies a base in cosmic evolution – it also has as its premise that we are now entering an epoch, the posthuman, in which the selfsame dualisms and hierarchies are losing their contemporary actuality and need a thorough deconstruction. Through a revival of non-humanist paradigms introduced earlier in history, adding up to a whole nonhuman ocean of spatio-temporalities in which the humanist paradigms emerge as fragile islands, such a deconstruction allows us to see more clearly the humanist dualisms and hierarchies – such as those maintained by ornament and monstrosity – that were earlier taken for granted. In terms of complexity theory we could state that the two phenomena in question regulate the relationship of the most highly evolved, most complex organism of biological evolution – the human body – to all those parts of the world that are less evolved and less complex than the human body itself: from nonhuman animals to plants, to inorganic appearances, either unformed (minerals, water, fire) or cut and reassembled into human artefacts (drapery, tools). This use of complexity theory to interpret older art forms is less alien to its objects than it might seem at first sight, since this theory has 1 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §14, p. 142; Derrida, ‘Parergon’. 2 Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos; Kauffman, At Home in the Universe.

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an important forerunner in, and indeed could be seen as a temporal version of, the classical idea of the Great Chain of Being (in Latin: Scala naturae) – the scale of rising order originating in the geocentric hierarchy from earth to heaven.3 My contention will thus be that across this mutation of registers from spatial to temporal, from geocentric to evolutionary, ornaments have their point of gravity in less organized matter, either the lower parts of the geocentric world hierarchy or, as regards the introduction of materials involved, the pre-human parts of cosmic evolution – from the less organized parts of the organismal world proper to geometrically regular or randomly irregular pre-organismic materials. In this perspective, monstrosity concerns the import of less organized matter or organisms into more highly organized organisms, peaking in the eruption of the less organized within the human body. Without doubt, the notions of ornament and monstrosity and the body/less complex hierarchy which sustains them have their peak in humanist cultures of naturalism, especially those that have the classically autonomous human body as an ideal (Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, Neo-Classicism, Socialist Realism, Fascism, capitalist popular culture). Even during these humanist paradigms, however, the fragile islands are often invaded more thoroughly by the nonhuman sea, sixteenth-century Mannerism being a case in point. Seemingly upholding the Renaissance decorum for anthropocentric organicity, with naturalist surfaces of well-proportioned and coherent human forms, Mannerism introduces various sorts of hard inorganic matter into bodies and allows their outer contours to modulate according to distorted ‘monstrous’ patterns. However, in certain periods the nonhuman ocean totally floods the dominant pictorial paradigm, thereby hindering the dualism between autonomous human body and nonhuman surroundings that sustains both ornament and monstrosity. This is what we term abstraction, a tendency in which very pictorial language becomes ‘ornamental’ or indeed ‘monstrous’, since it is taken over by less organic or wholly inorganic tendencies. As shown by the first scholar to observe this tendency, Wilhelm Worringer, the pictorial paradigms actually oscillate between naturalist humanist paradigms dominated by empathy and abstract paradigms in which naturalism is flooded by inorganic abstraction.4 Taking in a macro-historical perspective, we observe such floodings by the nonhuman ocean in Lower Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer culture, horticultural tribalism, the Middle Ages, and now again in our own posthuman epoch initiated around 1900.

3 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. 4 Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung.

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The Complexity Hierarchy between the Great Chain of Being (Space) and Evolution (Time) The implicit hierarchy that lurks behind ornaments and monstrosity and regulates their relation to the autonomous human body has (in its own times) been sustained by the thinking around the Great Chain of Being.5 This cosmological hierarchy, developed in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, could be seen as a more fine-grained version of the geocentric world picture. The different matter and creatures of the terrestrial zone – from earth and water to plants, fish, lizards, birds, and on to nonhuman mammals – thus constitute the lower parts of a ladder that leads to heaven, with the human body mediating between material and celestial parts (Ill. 9.1). Like air and fire, the human heart and intellect are related to the immaterial celestial regions, whereas the stomach, guts, and genitalia lead toward the subterranean regions of the earth. The movement down the ladder, towards increasing disorganization, thus implies a movement toward matter which is increasingly suitable for being made into ornaments (with a possible climax in minerals, water patterns, and plants), just as the import from lower stages into upper ones concerns the stuff of which monsters are made (with a possible climax in the insertion of limbs from the lowest animals like lizards, snakes, and insects into humans). Strikingly, after the displacement of the geocentric world picture by the Copernican world since the sixteenth century, the Great Chain of Being does not disappear. Rather, its main outlines re-emerge in a temporal guise: evolution – or to be more precise those parts of evolutionary theory that assume an increase in complexity in selected lines of speciation over time (from Robinet to Bergson to Stuart Kauffman).6 With the more generalized systems and complexity theories that have been developed since the 1920s, evolution not only includes the strictly biological process of simple organisms evolving into more complex ones, but also the basis and continued embedding of this process in unorganized matter, the originary subject area of the modern natural sciences. In this context, even the geocentric world resurfaces as Gaia, the combined planetary system of non-organized, semi-organized, and organized matter.7 What evolutionary theory, especially its complexity-exploring versions, adds to its ancient forerunner apart from over-layering space with time is a transformation from rising order (upwards through the world hierarchy) to rising complexity (upwards through time). As shown by Oswald Spengler, classical geometric order is bound up with notions of closed corporeality, with ultimately organic terrestrial bodies being put together coherently under the influence of incorruptible celestial sources.8 But 5 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. 6 Ibid., 242–287; Bergson, Creative Evolution; Conway Morris, Life’s Solution; Kauffman, At Home in the Universe. 7 Lovelock, Gaia. 8 Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, p. 283.

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Ill. 9.1: The Great Chain of Being from Diego da Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana (1579), engraving. Universal Art Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

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as heaven is dissolved into Copernican infinity, so geometric order loses this alliance with organized bodies and becomes allied with its seeming opposite, chaos. Both geometric order and chaos now characterize the basic cosmic states before complex structures like life emerged and could therefore be analysed through the rising modern disciplines of mathematical physics and chemistry – with order being analysed directly, and chaos being analysed indirectly using statistical methods. With heaven dissolved into Copernican infinity, celestial phenomena also lose their affinity to anything ‘higher’ and actually drop into the very bottom of the new temporal hierarchy, delivering the perfect cases needed to build up the new natural science of physics. Actually, it is only with the rise of the more recent systems and complexity theories that more complex phenomena – phenomena countering locally the universal tendency toward entropy, the levelling out of differences and organization, by thriving on the edge of order and chaos – can cautiously enter the more systematic parts of the natural sciences. Complex phenomena, and especially life, retain an ambivalent position in the natural sciences because of their inclusion of qualia – phenomena like self, subjectivity, and inner experience that all seem to be fundamental for the generation of life.9 In any case, the post-medieval natural sciences and their extension into complexity theory can confirm our intuition that ornaments and monstrosity concern the less complex phenomena of nature, with wholly unorganized matter – either geometrically regular (minerals, crystals, celestial bodies moving according to mechanical laws) or chaotically random (unruly fluids, gases) – being the most basic of these; with semi-complex phenomena (spirals, turbulence, flames) coming next; and wholly organized living phenomena being at the top (plants, insects, fish, lizards, birds, mammals).

The Inorganic What makes both ornaments and monstrosity challenge the organicity of the body, especially the human body, is their recurrent character of being assembled, of consisting of parts that do not belong to a coherent organismal whole. This confirms again their affinity with the basic, uncomplex matter constituting the primal cases for the post-medieval natural sciences, since through the lens of the natural sciences this matter obeys mechanical laws and can therefore be assembled and dissembled with unlimited flexibility. A prime characteristic of ornaments is thus seriality, the repetition of the same grounding pattern that in itself was easily detachable from its original context and that remains so in the never-ending whole it builds up by being repeated. Ornaments have a point of gravity in matter that can be cut and formed according to constructionist principles – which for Henri Bergson formed 9

Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos; Deacon, Incomplete Nature.

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the manipulable base for the rational reflections of the intellect that finally turned into the natural sciences: stones, minerals, metals, wood, plants, even human hair and nails, and diverse sorts of animal skins that can be detached.10 Such skins are also covered with patterns that seem to be constituted by easily detachable individual parts. Just as plants partake in the typical reservoir of ornaments by being easily cut and bent, as if they were inorganic materials, they also have an inbuilt serial tendency since their leaves and branches develop in large rows, often after some of them have been cut away. Even though plant members are always dependent on a close attachment to the mother organism for their continued sustainment – so much so that Kant believed there would never be a Newton of the blade of grass, a physicist explaining organisms in mechanical terms – plant members in their complete flexibility to sprout forth new members, often in series, gain an affiliation to human artefacts and the flexible way they are constructed and assembled, which the much more restricted and pre-programmed possibilities of animal bodies do not.11 Although monsters may be monstrous by simply being animals horrifically different from humans (snakes, crocodiles, enlarged apes, or insects), the most monstrous monsters are similarly composite beings that (for instance) recombine animal parts, including human ones, into new more or less coherent wholes (griffins, centaurs, mermaids, sphinxes, unicorns, winged horses, minotaurs, cyclopes).12 Sometimes they mix these with inorganic elements, like the fire of dragons, or artefacts, like the neck bolt of Frankenstein’s monster that Jack Pierce added in the filmic version of 1931, thus turning Mary Shelley’s assemblage of dispersed organs and limbs from the ‘dissecting room and the slaughter-house’ into a more explicit cyborg.13 Distinguishing between false and true griffins, the Victorian aesthete John Ruskin nevertheless confirms that the most convincing monster is the naturalist one, i.e. the one in which the combination of the parts is overcome by making them look as if they have grown into one (Ill. 9.2). In its classical Roman version (on the frieze of the temple of Antoninus and Faustina in Rome), the griffin is simply a montage of eagle and lion which Ruskin terms ‘very composed’, and therefore false. Indeed, demonstrating that naturalism is less necessary in the composition of ornaments, Ruskin remarks that the classical workman ‘set himself to fit [lion and eagle] together in the most ornamental way possible’. In contrast, in the Lombard Gothic version (bearing one of the pillars of the porch of Verona cathedral), the eagle and lion appear to have grown forth as one organism. This pervasive fusion of lion and eagle shows the true and real griffin, who has ‘the combined power of both. He is not merely a bit of lion and a bit of eagle, but whole lion incorporate with whole eagle.’14 Generalizing Ruskin’s remarks, 10 Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 45–46, 138–145, 156–157. 11 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §75, p. 352. 12 Mittman, ‘Introduction, p. 5. 13 Brookland, ‘Frankenstein’s Monster Bolt’. 14 Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, pp. 140–148. Citations on 141–142 (Ruskin’s emphasis).

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Ill. 9.2: True and false griffins. Griffin from the frieze of the temple of Antoninus and Faustina (141 ce), Rome, vs. griffin from the porch of Verona cathedral (c. 1139). Reproduced drawing from John Ruskin, Modern Painters (Boston: Dana Estes s.a., c. 1873 [1856]), vol. III, Plate I.

we could observe that when ornaments and monstrosity unfold in versions of the default humanist language of naturalism, ornaments sometimes (but not always) subdue naturalism with marks of abstraction, while monstrosity, on the other hand, intensifies the graphic nature of naturalism. Ornaments may exist as pure physical things – less complex natural phenomena like stones or artefacts that are combined with bodies, architecture, or trees (such as Christmas trees). Or they may appear as pictures or sculptures of such things bordering central pictorial scenes or architectonic surfaces, or covering whole surfaces, from artefactual surfaces (such as ceramics) to human skin (such as tattoos). When turned into pictures, they may be fully illusionistic (like many classical ornaments showing plants) or more stylized, simplified, or abstract (like meander borders showing a contrast in pictorial style to the illusionist scenes they frame). If they are stylized, this stylization could be conceived of as a voluntary regression to the less complex matter that constitutes all sorts of ornaments, thus making the potentially more pronounced complexity that exists in illusionistic ornaments (for instance plants) less complex when presented less illusionistically and more abstractly (when plants, for instance, become halfway geometrical). What is true of both ornaments and abstraction is that both derive from the less complex parts of nature, ultimately from what Worringer referred to as the inorganic.15 Ornaments appear ‘abstract’ not only because they are sometimes stylized 15 Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, p. 73.

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away from naturalist illusionism, but also because the very matter they articulate tends to belong among the most disorganized, inorganic domains of nature – with the more organized domains including animals and plants, and the less organized domains being more undifferentiated matter such as earth, minerals and crystals, aquatic waves and turbulence, fire, clouds, star formations, or camouflage patterns of animals and plants. And so, even in their sheer physical appearance, these phenomena often tend to appear ‘abstract’: that is, firstly, they appear to be non-figurative, in the sense of not referring to organismic figures; and, secondly, they are spatially indeterminate, a disorientation of referents often counting as part of the ‘ornamental’ domain. In ornaments, it is thus often difficult to judge whether certain figures, say angular geometric patterns, are ‘just’ abstract or rather illusionistic depictions of inlaid materials such as wood or stone. For this reason, Worringer was on the right track in claiming that the drive toward abstraction finds its beauty in ‘the life-disowning inorganic, in the crystalline, in general in all abstract lawfulness and necessity’.16 Or rather: he was partly correct, since his observations were restricted to those parts of abstraction which are marked by geometric regularity. But actually, the sources of pictorial abstraction and ornaments might easily be broadened from geometric regularity to the completely unruly and chaotic parts of nature. Take the sometimes surprisingly large rectangular fields of marble patterns found in the peripheries of late medieval and Renaissance Italian illusionist frescoes. They clearly serve as ornamental zones. Yet they are also perfectly illusionist depictions of cut panels of stone. So although Georges Didi-Huberman has presented some crucial reflections about them in Fra Angelico’s case, seeing them as marked by a suspension with the figurative frescoes above them, he is probably too rash in his poststructuralist urge to simply see them as indications of anachronism (Ill. 9.3).17 It is true, as he claims, that the figurative frescoes obviously belong to a Renaissance naturalism and that the marmi finti articulate a version of medieval non-figuration which is also allied to abstract expressionism à la Jackson Pollock. Nevertheless, the very act of pointing out these temporal differences and alliances indicates that certain features have their high moments, their temporal points of gravity. And even though these moments often extend into other temporal regimes, this does not mean that these temporal regimes lose their reality, the status of dominance, and are dissolved into pure, un-hierarchical anachronism. On the contrary, the afterlives achieve the status of ‘underground’ or ‘less dominant’ (abstraction in the Renaissance) until they are later resurrected and reacquire dominance (abstraction after 1900).

16 Ibid. 17 Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, esp. pp. 1–22, 28–44 and 119–123; Didi-Huberman, ‘Before the Image’.

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Ill. 9.3: Fra Angelico, Fake marble panels below the Madonna delle Ombre/Madonna of the Shadows (c. 1438–1450), fresco. Florence, Museo di San Marco. © 2018. Photo: Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. ­Culturali e del Turismo.

And in fact, even in its Renaissance version, the abstract tendency is not truly ‘underground’, since it does not contradict Renaissance illusionism. Rather, by convincingly giving a naturalist depiction of cut marble – something which was not part of medieval pictorialism – it fully respects Renaissance decorum. So the point of Fra Angelico’s marmi finti is not to contrast two pictorial regimes: rather, it is to point out the ‘abstract’ qualities residing in the midst of even the most explicit optical illusionism. Deep down, abstraction is not a question of more or less illusionism, but rather of how obvious and well known the objects signified in illusionism are. Drained of recognizable figures and framed without discursive guidance, the least organized and inorganic matter of nature – earth, stones, steam, water, fire, air, etc. – seen in fragmented framings or in difficult light conditions like darkness or its opposite is most prone to give rise to more than one interpretation, the objects signified being accordingly indeterminate. This matter and these signifiers thereby assume abstract qualities even when depicted in full illusionism. When we, on the other hand, identify something as more clearly organized, the prime example being human bodies, we convince ourselves that we know what is being depicted. And the more the depiction confirms our memory explicitly and in detail, the more we tend to call its style naturalist.

Ergon/Parergon Relating ornaments to what we call abstract pictorial qualities is only half the story, since ornaments are dependent on and thrive in a notion of periphery (of the body, of architectural units or rooms, of pictures, of genres), whereas abstraction takes over the whole pictorial field, even if this field is partly figurative. To understand this notion of periphery and its challenges, we need to examine the Greek-Roman

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pair ergon/parergon and their re-evocation in Kant. In the ancient humanist conception, ergon (‘work’) concerned the main, more or less anthropomorphic motive – the body – in pictorial and sculptural compositions, whereas parergon (‘bywork’) was its peripheral supplement: some form of marker of setting inside the virtual scene or ornamental zone outside it. Parergon could, for instance, be the partridge on top of a column that the Greek painter Protogenes of Rhodes had painted beside a satyr. However, he was permitted to remove it after it had received too much public attention at the expense of the main motif, thereby turning from ergon into parergon. Parergon could also be the small depictions of warships that the same Protogenes added to his Athenian murals ‘in what painters call the side-pieces [parergia]’ (it is unclear whether these are located inside or outside the main scenes).18 In Kant’s brief remarks on ornaments in the Third Critique, parerga have become wholly ornamental: Even what one calls ornaments [Zieraten] (parerga), i.e., that which is not internal to the entire representation of the object as a constituent, but only belongs to it externally as an addendum and augments the satisfaction of taste, still does this only through its form: like the borders of paintings, draperies on statues, or colonnades around magnificent buildings. But if the ornament itself does not consist in beautiful form, if it is, like a gilt frame, attached merely in order to recommend approval for the painting through its charm – then it is called decoration, and detracts from genuine beauty.19

This fleeting Kantian passage is actually a pedagogical demonstration of the humanist hierarchy that makes ornaments peripheral in relation to the central entity, the autonomous human body. This body is the central metaphor in all three instances – buildings, statues, paintings – but it is obviously in the home context of the statue, the plastic representation of the human body, that it works most convincingly. Drapery is an ornamental supplement that is not internal to the human body, but whose external presence nevertheless augments the satisfaction of taste when we look at this body – an addendum that pervades the whole neo-classical academic tradition in which the garments always come second to the body. In his deconstructive reading of this passage and related notions of border regulation, Jacques Derrida has a fine eye for this exceptionalism of the human body, ‘its privilege in this whole problematic’: What is represented in the representation would be the naked and natural body; the representative essence of the statue would be related to this, and the only beautiful thing in the statue would be that representation; it alone would be essentially, purely and intrinsically beautiful, ‘the proper object of a pure judgment of taste’.20 18 Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, vol. 6, 14, 2, 5; Pliny, Naturalis historia, pp. 35, 101. 19 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §14, pp. 110–111; Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §14, p. 142. 20 Derrida, ‘Parergon’, p. 57.

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In the building and the painting, on the other hand, Kant’s exemplifications become somewhat strained in various directions. It is plainly absurd to claim that columns should be subordinate in importance to any other parts of a magnificent building, even if the building is regarded as a body in the classical humanist tradition. Although Kant’s selection of ornamental parts in architecture could have been easily compensated for by other and more convincing choices (acroteria, triglyphs, metopes, cornice decorations, capital ornaments, etc.), it nevertheless shows the problems of regarding architecture as a body and not something that is always tendentially environmental and open towards its surroundings. In contrast, if they are not composed directly together with their painted insides, frames tend to be easily detachable from the paintings they surround, and so are almost unavoidable victims of Kant’s warning about deterioration from ornaments to mere decoration. As Derrida amply demonstrates in his virtuoso deconstruction of this Kantian passage, it is in any case, in any sort of art work, problematic to distinguish between internal and external, constituent and addendum, essential and superfluous: ‘How can one assimilate the function of a frame to that of a garment on (in, around, or up against) a statue, and to that of columns around a building?’21 Nevertheless, Derrida’s reading belongs obviously to an age – ours – that has become obsessed with breaking down the borders between bodies and surroundings, erga and parerga, centre and periphery. Our eagerness to overflow the former aesthetic centres with what was earlier merely considered ornamental could indeed be considered structurally equivalent to the very process of abstraction, which is also about ornaments absorbing their earlier centres, humanist bodies which Worringer locates as sites for empathy attraction. One meeting point between the two procedures – peripheries overtaking centres more generally, and ornaments overtaking pictorial styles more specifically – is the status of parerga shifting between landscapes (spatially determinate peripheries, settings, surroundings) and ornaments (spatially indeterminate entities of lower complexity). Landscapes want to integrate everything into the remote surroundings (space), ornaments into the near ones (matter). Ornaments become landscapes become abstraction, when it is impossible to determine whether what we are looking at is close at hand (matter) or remote (space). To be sure, the most obvious effect of the new post-medieval naturalism rising since the early fifteenth century is the will to displace ornaments from the central areas of pictures: the more naturalist the pictures are, the more they are about non-stylized spatial views of humans, animals, plants, and physical objects. Nevertheless, this naturalism keeps and indeed intensifies an engagement with the less complex matter that otherwise constitutes the stuff of which ornaments are made. 21 Ibid., p. 60.

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This engagement is seen in the expanding settings that have challenged the dominance of human figures since the sixteenth century, and that are furthermore parcelled out in specialized genres such as animal painting, landscape, and still life (not to mention increasingly specialized scientific illustrations of minerals, plants, and other natural phenomena). In such pictorial genres, the matter that was previously allowed inside medieval visual culture primarily as marginalia or as part of a more abstract indeterminate gaze in ‘ornamental’ sections (e.g. Insular interlace or Gothic tracery) is made the object of a naturalist, remote gaze that moreover is sometimes over-layered with what one could term the material friction of subjective sight. This friction, condensed in the painterly style developed since sixteenth-century Venice, tends to break down the body/less complex hierarchy by treating the entities of the surroundings in a ‘statistical’ manner, as a chaos which is in principle unknown and which might just as well be inorganic as organic. The broad, woollen brushstrokes demonstrate that they are only perceptual approximations to this infinity of possible states, whose exact actualization cannot be represented in paint. However, this dissolution of the outer organic body/less complex hierarchy is then made the projection ground of a subjective organic perception, the signifiers of the outer world becoming receptive to the imprints of the artistic organic subjectivity owing precisely to their slight indeterminacy, their openness to interpretation when absorbed into the perceptual friction. A true characteristic of modern humanist vision is thus this subjective summing up of sense impressions whose referents remain basically unknown. Thus, although for a long aftermath in post-medieval paintings bodily subjects in front of the pictorial gaze continue to act as sites for identification, what Worringer terms empathy, they are nevertheless accompanied and over-layered by a new subject for empathic identification: the pictorial gaze itself, including its perceptual friction when meeting the more chaotic and unknown entities of the surroundings.22 Especially when this gaze moves toward the less complex surroundings around the organic bodies – those settings which increasingly, in genres such as landscapes and still lives, displace those bodies from view – it is often impossible to judge whether the indeterminacy of signified objects, their ‘abstract’ quality, is due to the subjective friction of perception or rather to a crystal-clear depiction of matter from the surrounding world, which itself appears chaotic (cf. Turner’s fog pictures or Whistler’s Nocturnes, Ill. 9.4). Here we meet an unresolved dialectics of the remote spaces of landscapes and their reception in the near perception that bears witness to a continued abstract quality in the heart of naturalism. An illustrative case of ornaments that first overwhelm the closed body and are then absorbed into a more landscape-like view when the subjective gaze of the spectator is foregrounded is found in Renaissance and Romantic receptions of 22 Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, pp. 72–75.

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Ill. 9.4: James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne (1875–1880), oil on canvas, 12¼ x 203/8 inches (31.1 x 51.8cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917. Cat. 1111. © 2018. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.

Gothic architecture. What annoyed the Italian Renaissance theoreticians about Gothic architecture, the thing that made it barbarian and monstrous in their view, was its undefined proportions due to ornamental dominance. An overload of parerga, a multitude of architectural ornaments – some of them monstrous themselves – flooded and diluted the ergon, the no longer self-contained architectonic body. Filarete, one of the first declared enemies of the Gothic, stated, for instance, that the Gothic style was created not by real architects but rather by painters, stonemasons, and especially goldsmiths, who designed their modern works ‘like tabernacles and thuribles’.23 And in Raphael and Castiglione’s letter to Leo X (c. 1519), the two authors took offence at the Gothic’s badly executed and observed small figures and at the ‘strange animals and figures and foliage beyond all reason’.24 Vasari sums up that the makers of maniera tedescha created ‘a curse of tiny tabernacles, one above the other, with so many pyramids and spires and leaves that […] it seemed impossible that they could sustain themselves; and they appeared more as if they were made of paper than of stone and marble’.25 However, what the Italians condemned – the architectonic body turned immaterial by superfluous ornaments, ergon drowned by parergon – was precisely what Romantic writers like Georg Forster, John Milner, and 23 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, p. 176. 24 Rowland, ‘Genesis of the Architectural Orders’, Appendix I, p. 101. 25 Vasari, Le vite, vol. I, p. 367.

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Uvedale Price appreciated in the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. For them the empathic centre of the Gothic was no longer the architectonic body, in relation to which ornaments should remain peripheral; rather, it was the subjective perception that is created when all the Gothic ornaments melt into an infinitely remote view-determined setting, a sublime vision founded upon the aspiring movement toward the celestial heights sustained by the amorphousness of less complex entities.26 This spatialization of ornaments was also seen in pictures, where naturalistic figuration similarly was diluted into panoramic settings such as landscapes (plant runners, for instance, having meanwhile become scattered forests). Although these spaces of less complex, often non-organismal matter now seemed infinitely extended, they still, in the midst of naturalism, retained a play of spatial indeterminacy, as if they were still absorbed into the near space of ornaments. It is in this spatial play – suspended between the secure anchoring of the viewing self through perspectival naturalism and its simultaneous dissolution in the touch of ‘abstraction’, the indeterminacy of the objects signified – that modern subjectivity emerges, and thereby the centre for empathic identification with the perceiving artist. This subjectivity-generating extension of the space of ornaments, their transformation into landscape, contributed to making art disinterested, a liberation from a well-defined literary content that opened the aesthetic play of subjectivity. For if, as Kant remarks, the function of ornaments, parerga, is to sustain a content, ergon, in their midst, then, freed from this content – emancipated to themselves (as for instance in paper tapestries, or à la grecque drawings, or frame foliage looked at in isolation) – ornaments do not represent anything. Instead, as Kant notes, they become ‘free beauties’, disinterested, just as Kant wishes art and the aesthetic judgement in general to be – for, as he remarks, ornaments here function like music without themes (phantasies) or, indeed, like music without text in general.27

Monstrosity between Organisms and the Inorganic Like ornaments, monsters can retain a large degree of otherness in relation to the human body, simply displaying and recombining alien and less complex organicity (for instance dragons, hydrae, the maritime Leviathan). And with monstrosity as such we can also leave the obviously corporeal domain, speaking of monstrous architecture, monstrous design, monstrous flowers. Like its close ally and sometime synonym, the grotesque, monstrosity is perhaps best approached by its negation of anything pertaining to form and closure: what is disfigured, disordered, misshapen, deformed,

26 Frankl, The Gothic, l, pp. 439–446; Wamberg, Landscape as World Picture, vol. II, pp. 82–86. 27 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §16; see also Cohn, ‘Die Gürtel der Aphrodite, p. 169.

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formless.28 Even if the monstrous may thus concern anything that radically breaks expectations of appropriateness – a monstrous dessert, a monstrous painting – the inescapable source of the monstrous remains the notion of the organism, especially the autonomous body, thus establishing a rising curve of non-monstrosity from animal to human. Paradoxically, monstrosity indirectly upholds the notion of the autonomous body, especially the human body, by actually violating it, invading what could have been a dignified body with less complex matter, and thus needing the memory of the uninvaded body as a necessary counter-figure. Monstrosity therefore fades away when we move to the completely inorganic domain. Without organismal reminiscence, it is difficult to imagine a monstrous vacuum, a monstrous metal, a monstrous galaxy. If the Horsehead Nebula appears somewhat monstrous, it is precisely because it retains a memory of corporeality. Likewise, the steep rock with the mill hovering on top in Bruegel’s Road to Golgotha (1564) has an eerily monstrous quality about it because it is isolated in the terrain like something quasi-organismal: a torso, perhaps a phallus (Ill. 9.5). This is a sneaking, non-explicit monstrosity precisely because it shows up where we did not expect it, in the middle of the inorganic domain. Confirming Freud’s idea of the uncanny (das Unheimliche), the eerily monstrous here appears as something all too familiar, returned in what one assured oneself was just alien and nonhuman.29 Whereas the grotesque is mostly bound up with subverting the human body, monstrosity concerns subverting ‘appropriate’ animality more broadly. Yet the most monstrous monsters are those that retain a memory and reminiscence of the human body, and whose complete distortion of this body through naturalist graphicness confirms its autonomy and sovereignty through the logic of dualism. For that reason, the alien of the five Alien films (1979–2017) initiated by Ridley Scott has obtained the status of being perhaps the most scary monster of recent times. Although this alien recombines all the most horrific, nonhuman traits imaginable – snakes, corrosive poison, metallic teeth, indeterminate anatomical traits, sliminess, a long tail, blackness (activated by Eurocentric racism), etc. – the truly eerie quality about this monster is precisely its déjà vu human relatedness: it walks upright, has a face like a human skull, is comparable in scale to humans, has an intelligence, grows as an embryo inside humans, can mate with them, etc. Otherwise monsters tend to be bigger (sometimes much bigger) than the human body, as we are reminded of in the German ungeheuer (and its variations in other Germanic languages), meaning both very large and monster. But even when they assume large dimensions, monsters still retain aspects of being blown-up and alienated humans. What would King Kong’s monstrosity be without the touch of humanity seen in his attachment to the small female who he wants to keep for himself, and who he protects to the very end? 28 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, p. 5. 29 Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’.

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Ill. 9.5: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Road to Golgotha (1564), detail, oil on panel. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: KHM-Museumsverband.

Very small organisms, on the other hand, do not seem monstrous until they are blown up in the microscope, thus gaining what seems a human scale, after which they can subvert the human body with over-size metallic scales, strange hair, multiple eyes, scary sword-like tendrils, etc. In his essay ‘Le monstre’ (1889), the writer of decadence J.-K. Huysmans contended that the monstrosities revealed by the microscope surpassed even the wildest artistic imagination in a scientific age otherwise deprived of real monsters.30 Perhaps the ultimately monstrous experience is therefore that of Gregor Samsa in the Kafka short story The Metamorphosis (1915).31 Waking up one morning and finding himself transformed into a ‘monstrous vermin’ (ungeheuren Ungeziefer), lying on his ‘armour-hard back’, the poor salesman nevertheless keeps his human consciousness and is able to maintain some form of communication with his parents and sister, despite having lost his human voice. It is the unresolved ambiguity between the human and the nonhuman that is the truly gruesome point of the story, the creepy transformation fulfilling a tendency to feel

30 Huysmans, ‘Le monstre’, especially pp. 149–150; Connelly, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. 31 Kafka, Die Verwandlung.

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superfluous, unsatisfactory, annoying that was already present in Samsa’s human holster.

Ornaments, Monstrosity, and the Grotesque If monstrosity needs a higher degree of explicitness than ornaments to reveal its power – an explicitness provided in pictures through naturalism – this explicitness is rarely let loose in naturalism’s main bastion in ancient classical and post-medieval early modern art: monumental representational pictures and sculptures. To be sure, as a continuation of the animal gods still so conspicuous in Ancient Egypt, hybrid creatures like satyrs or centaurs were still an intrinsic part of the Greek-Roman religious universe, and so pervade its visual representations. And yet when such creatures were emancipated into individual images, especially sculptures, they were regarded as belonging to minor genres with a slightly comical air about them. With the Middle Ages, this lightness disappeared as the human subject became more absolutely defined by its distance to the animals. Dionysian satyrs now turned into horned devils, as hybridity between human and animal became the work of Satan. Nonetheless, monstrosity and ornaments were simultaneously broadly absorbed into the pictorial language itself, peaking in such contexts as Insular miniatures. Here Celtic animal interlace overflowed their ornamental borders, while the abstract evangelist portraits were accompanied by conspicuously large animal symbols or wholly displaced by those symbols (Book of Durrow, Ill. 9.6). Nevertheless, in classical antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, monsters were driven out of the ordered world and into the peripheries of things: to the margins of paintings, manuscripts, buildings, or indeed the world as such. They were encountered either thriving in subterranean regions or far from civilization – in the wilderness and on the fringes of the inhabited world. In faraway places such as Africa, India, or Scandinavia, the ancient and medieval imagination placed monstrous beings such as one-legged humans (sciopodes), humans with inverted feet (antipodes), people with dog faces (cynocephali), and headless beings with a face in their chest (blemmyae) or their eyes on their shoulders (epiphagi).32 Echoing this geographical marginalization, when this sort of monstrosity returns in a more naturalistic guise in the early second millennium, it is typically found in marginalized and ornamental zones such as manuscript borders, capitals, and the cornices of portals.33 The wild monstrous fauna thriving in the peripheral parts of cloisters are what offends the strict Abbot Bernhard of Clairvaux around 1125:

32 Friedman, Monstrous Races, pp. 9–21. 33 Camille, Image on the Edge.

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Ill. 9.6: Lion of St. Mark, miniature from the Book of Durrow (c. 650–700). Dublin, Trinity College, ms A. 4. 5. (57), fol. 191v. © 2018. Photo: DeAgostini Picture Library/Scala, Florence.

In the cloisters, before the eyes of the brothers while they read – what is that ridiculous monstrosity doing, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity? What are the filthy apes doing there? The fierce lions? The monstrous centaurs? The creatures, part man, part beast? […] You may see many bodies under one head, and conversely many heads on one body. […] In short, everywhere so

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plentiful and astonishing a variety of contradictory forms is seen that one would rather read in the marble than in books, and spend the whole day wondering at any single one of them than in meditating on the law of God.34

Since such scenes belong to areas traditionally reserved for ornaments, they may legitimize their transgression through the playful lightness expected of such areas. Nevertheless, the inclusion of animal and human parts in such scenes absorbs so much monstrosity, so much transgression of the God-given order, into the ornamental fields that it explodes them and becomes potentially offensive. A less controversial access to Christian visual culture for this kind of marginal monstrosity presupposed a loosening of its bond to the demonic. This less moralizing sort of playfulness was only realized with the grotesques of the Renaissance and Mannerism that thrived in an aura of humorous elegance. Nonetheless, their adopted ‘origin’ was still the potentially infernal regions, more precisely what had become the buried rooms (grotte) of Emperor Nero’s unfinished Roman palace, the Domus Aurea (c. 64–68 CE). Brought to light since the late fifteenth century, these frescoed ornaments were named grottesche due to their subterranean derivation.35 Decently withdrawing to the marginal zones of fresco cycles, or to wholly separate corridors (as in their versions by Raphael and his workshop in the Vatican Loggetta and Loggia, c. 1516–1519), the resurrected grotesques nevertheless partook in full illusionism all’antica (Ill. 8.3). The Roman writer on architecture, Vitruvius, had already been provoked by this heterodox strategy in which painters freely recombined animal, plant, and artefactual parts as if they were normal ‘abstract’ ornaments, yet presented the assemblages in a naturalist language, as if they were factual compositions.36 Vasari, too, was provoked by this apparent non-functionality: Grotesques are a type of extremely licentious and absurd painting done by the ancients […] without any logic, so that a weight is attached to a thin thread which could not support it, a horse is given legs made of leaves, a man has crane’s legs, with countless other impossible absurdities; and the bizarrer the painter’s imagination, the higher he was rated.37

So true monstrosity – naturalistically depicted combinations of parts from humans, animals, and plants, the whole mixed with artefacts – could still provoke humanist Renaissance sensibilities, even though monstrosity in fact counted increasingly as proof of the artist’s inventive imagination and appeared in all sorts of fantastic 34 Apologia, here cited from Dale, ‘Monsters, Corporeal Deformities, and Phantasms’, p. 402. 35 Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea; Hansen and Paldam, ‘Grotesque!’, pp. 81–82; Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, p. 3. 36 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Book 7, Ch. 5, 3–4, 91. 37 Vasari, Le vite, vol. III, p. 85.

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genres, including, besides grottesche, capricci and fantasie. What provoked was the sheer irreality – not so much the demonic potential, the degradation of a higher order into a lower one, as in Bernhard of Clairvaux, but the withdrawal from outer experience to what increasingly counted as subjective imagination. This included disrespect for corporeal matter, the need of material bodies to be properly erected to counter their natural disposition to seek downwards. Thus, Vasari’s critique of grotesques recycles the same type of scepticism that the Italian writers continued to utter against Gothic architecture: corporeality evaporating into excessively light and dispersed ensembles, ornaments hereby becoming panoramic settings. These two characteristics of the grotesques – monstrosity proper and ornaments becoming settings – both challenge the autonomous body. Yet they do so through two different strategies. The first acts inside and around the body; the second opens and dilutes this body through integrating it in a spatial whole. In other words, no matter how much it recombines, dissolves, and perverts body parts, monstrosity is still played out around something which continues to count as a body. It is a ‘true’ monster in Ruskin’s sense. The process of ornaments becoming settings, on the other hand, seriously transcends the narrow confinement of the body and acts in a wider spatial arena, opening up for the amorphous qualities of the picturesque and the sublime.38 It starts with Ruskin’s ‘false’ monsters, its parts never organized into a corporeal whole, but is taken over by another whole which is both more continuous and fragile, the panoramic setting as a principally coherent projection from a new organic subject, the autonomous perceiving self. Although the light genre of grotesques, grotesque in plural, operates with both strategies, grotesque as an adjective increasingly sticks to the amorphousness of body-bound monstrosity. So what is the difference between monstrous and grotesque? Monstrosity could be taken as the radical other of the human body, in which the hybrid body keeps its dignity in its otherness. No matter how recombined they are, its parts remain stuck together in a convincing (if subversive) whole. However, when a body becomes grotesque, especially the human body, this is a signal that it has lost control and surrendered to alien, less complex animalistic forces. In other words, monstrosity only appears fully uncanny when its overtaking of the human is not seen as a lack in relation to the human. It is when the monstrous exposes itself as a breakdown of human dignity that it becomes grotesque. The grotesque is the shock of waking up as a modern autonomous self, realizing, like Gregor Samsa, that this new subjective self has been acquired at the expense of inhabiting one’s own body naturally. The grotesque appears in the ambivalence between the inner melancholy of losing bodily control in this way and its reception as outer horrendous comedy. Although always open for monstrous assemblages, the grotesque does not necessarily need them any more. Its transgression has its point of gravity in the general openness of the human body 38 Connelly, ‘Introduction’, pp. 4–5, touches upon this idea without fully articulating it.

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toward the world, the dissolution and breakup of the autonomous body’s borders that can be approached through Bakhtin’s carnivalesque grotesque (the grotesque of bodily holes and extremities, of becoming and dissolution, of hybridity and excesses) and Kristeva’s abjection (the aborted exclusion of the bodily other, especially its waste).39 The grotesque is what remains of monstrosity, when modernity becomes more thoroughly secularized and monsters become creatures of imagination. In Victor Hugo’s manifest for a modern Romantic art, presented in the preface to his drama Cromwell (1827), the grotesque is no less than the key concept for such an art. Solidly anchored in realism, it nevertheless offers an infinite variety of comic, ugly, and horrible themes.40 The grotesque is therefore also linked to caricature, the genre exaggerating human characteristics to such a degree that the body hovers indeterminately between the deeply human and the nonhuman. The deeply human is non-ideal fragility and weakness, the necessary deviation from the ideal human, without which we become nonhuman. Since liberal modernity exposes the ideal human as an unattainable phantom, trying to actually become one implies being possessed by the stiff conventions of culture. It is the exposition of the latter – alienating and mechanical – forces that the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson sees as the quintessence of the comical.41 When we have lost control of our own ‘human’ character and appear to be possessed by mechanical forces, laughter is provoked. Strikingly, however, such possession may also come from ‘below’, when animal impulses outdistance our autonomous self-control. Here, then, the comical takes on a grotesque character. Monstrosity and its less fantastic leftover in secular culture, the grotesque, only thoroughly dissolve the border between margins and centres of art in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Goya being a notable forerunner. In earlier monumental contexts of post-medieval art, the monstrous and grotesque are primarily visualized when demonstrating a clear religious, moralistic, or political point. Examples include depictions of Hell, Saint George and the Dragon, Saint Margaret and the Dragon, Christ conquering Satan, and the Temptations of Saint Anthony. Even what appears as the big exception to this rule, Hieronymus Bosch’s carnivalesque monstrosities and their followers in painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, seem to be legitimized by moralistic programmes pertaining to humanist Catholic cultures. The other apparent exception, Arcimboldo’s playful portrayals of hybrid beings from the second half of the sixteenth century, also served as allegories of imperial and monarchic power, especially that of the Habsburg Rudolf II, including the knowledge and possession of the natural world that sustained this power (Ill. 9.7). Composed by nonhuman, less complex items such as fish, land animals, birds, fruits, vegetables, 39 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 303–367; Kristeva, Powers of Horror. 40 Hugo, Oeuvres dramatiques, pp. 139–153; Thomson, The Grotesque, p. 184. 41 Bergson, On Laughter.

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and trees, or even diverse artefacts such as books and jewellery, these assemblages add up to visual puns, the contours of human portraits emerging in the midst of the nonhuman excesses. The highly explicit naturalist language and the hybrid ingredients would immediately appear to make these portraits monstrous, especially when they are composed of land animals and fish. Nevertheless, their self-reflective demonstration of being clearly assembled – in Ruskin’s language ‘composed’ as ‘false’ monsters – give them a playful, ornamental quality. Signalling that they are merely grotesques, ornaments posing as monsters, the struggle for human traits to nevertheless manifest themselves among the inhuman ingredients gives them an unexpectedly touching quality – a mild touch of caricature only stressed by their appearance on shallow dark backgrounds, the traditional setting for portraits. So, post-medieval naturalism carefully regulates its relationships to the nonhuman ocean that surrounds its humanist islands of empathy: the autonomous human body and the autonomous human perceptual field. However, the humanist project is always fragile, and with more space we could show that the shutters between dry land and ocean are often porous, the aquatic embassies of ornament and monstrosity leaking out in their humanist host nations. As the speculative realist philosopher Timothy Morton describes the more mature modernity since Baudelaire: Some kind of weird punk underground spirit haunts modernity with the specter of nonhumans. Far from being unspeakable within anthropocentric consumerist modernity, nonhumans are showing up all the time, their ghosts leaking into ‘our’ world.42

An obvious early case for such more swampy humanist terrain, the leaking of nonhuman ghosts sometimes making it resemble a blended human-nonhuman mangrove, would be sixteenth-century Mannerism more broadly. Although this movement encourages us to master the rules for beautiful neo-classical art even more than the High Renaissance, it also perverts those rules in its self-conscious stylization of them.43 The slight distortions of ideal human proportions found in artists such as Parmigianino and Pontormo could be seen as leaks of monstrosity into that which should be most free of it; just as the hard statue-like material taking possession of human bodies in artists like Bronzino could resemble a breakdown of the absolute hierarchy between ornaments and bodies. Even the super-humanist Michelangelo appears to participate in this flirt with the nonhuman when he absurdly magnifies parergonal volutes and shrinks ergonal columns in the vestibule of the Laurentian Library (1519–1534; realized 1559 by Bartolomeo Ammannati); or inserts his ignudi, the full nude males, in what ought to be the ornamental architectonic frames of the 42 Morton, Dark Ecology, p. 112. 43 Shearman, Mannerism, pp. 15–30.

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Ill. 9.7: Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Vegetable Gardener (c. 1590), oil on wood. Cremona, Museo Civico Ala Ponzone.

Sistine ceiling frescoes (1508–1512). So, assuming that avant-garde art after 1900 signifies a return of anti-empathic sensibilities, a renewed breakdown of the body/less complex hierarchy, and a corresponding absorption of earlier ornaments and monstrosity into general pictorial strategies, it is no wonder that this art has looked so often to Mannerism as one of its crucial precursors.

Islands (of Empathy) in a Nonhuman Ocean (of Abstraction) Up until now, I have approached the subject of ornament and monstrosity mainly from inside their peak bastion: humanist cultures and thinking, only now and then touching upon cultures, such as the Middle Ages and our own time, in which

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humanism is subdued. However, as a final gesture in order to gain a more profound understanding of what ornament and monstrosity border on and negotiate with, we should raise our point of view and more systematically zoom out to a historical distance that I will term ‘posthumanist’. For the nonhuman ocean regularly floods the islands of humanism and organic subjects of identification in general – the Middle Ages and our own age since 1900 being only the most recent of such floodings. To do this we need to integrate Worringer’s oscillatory theory of abstraction and empathy with Hegel’s progressionist theory of art historical evolution, and, furthermore, base the resulting spiralling model in a broader syncretic macrohistory, including theoretical tendencies such as the Annales school longue durée, Big History, Anthropocene theorizing, and new materialism.44 Although this syncretic correlation might look like a move toward the most remote bird’s-eye perspective imaginable, it is actually a symptom of the opposite. As Timothy Morton shows, the hyperobjects being revealed with the Anthropocene – such as global warming or evolution – are unfathomably large and incomprehensible to human senses and cognition, yet they engulf us thoroughly in the nonhuman reality from which humanism sought to distance us.45 The posthumanist syncretic intermingling of theories I propose could thus be seen as a theoretical outcome of this denser Anthropocene world, the borders between engulfment in real and virtual worlds being fluid. If we now pursue the status of ornament and monstrosity in such a transdisciplinary, transhistorical perspective, we should first observe that their prominence varies according to an oscillation between the two types of historical macro-paradigms that Worringer was the first to identify: paradigms of empathy (identification in art with autonomous organic-living subjects, hereby bridging the naturalistically depicted large open spaces in which they interact); and paradigms of abstraction (immersion in more closed intra-active meshes together with less complex nonhuman agents, the more geometric or chaotic patterns of abstraction reflecting the lower complexity of those agents).46 My core idea is thus that ornament and monstrosity have their peaks in pictorial paradigms of empathy, culminating in the empathy mentioned above toward the human body seen in classical and neo-classical paradigms (Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, Neo-Classicism, Socialist Realism, Fascism, capitalist popular culture). However, if we perform a syncretic fusion of Worringer’s oscillatory theory with Hegel’s progressionist theory, we generate a spiralling model in which the island of the autonomized humanist body emerges as only the middle island in a row of three. All three islands signify organic-living subjects that seek to autonomize themselves 44 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik; Braudel, ‘Histoire et sciences sociales; Spier, Big History; Schwägerl, The Anthropocene; for a claim to history on a larger scale, see also Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto. Basic parts of this macrohistorical methodology were developed in Wamberg, Landscape as World Picture, vol. I, pp. 33–101. 45 Morton, Hyperobjects. 46 Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung.

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against the larger non-organic ocean, in the process converting this ocean into something manageable for autonomized subjects, a space or Umwelt that can be bridged by empathic identification.47 Confirming Hegel’s idea of an increasing immaterialization of art that manifests the emancipation of self-consciousness through history, unfolding this row of islands means a movement from spectral animal bodies immersed in physical surroundings in the Upper Palaeolithic age (a stage prior to Hegel’s symbolic architecture), to autonomous material human bodies rising on backgrounds in classical and neo-classical cultures (comparable to Hegel’s classical sculpture), to an autonomized pictorial gaze in post-medieval modern culture (comparable to Hegel’s romantic painting). On the third island the subject you emphatically identify with is the autonomized mind behind the picture, the post-medieval intersection between perception and cognition that manifests itself in a subjective gaze toward the infinitely withdrawing surroundings. Identifying with the act of subjective perception as such, the self is gauged against the remote surroundings. In contrast to this completely autonomized human subject, the first island of empathic identification was, rather, comprised by a pre-human subject – the naturalistically depicted (if transparently spectral) animal of Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings. As the philosopher Georges Bataille indicated, the early male human who did not yet feel fully human, and depicted himself only rarely and through non-naturalistic scribbles, could overcome the vulnerability of not belonging to the world as obviously as the animals did by identifying with those animals.48 According to this logic, the therianthropes – hybrid beings mixing human and animal parts found in Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings – signify the opposite quality of later monsters from humanist contexts: not humans being degraded by interlacing with lowly animals, but, on the contrary, not fully formed humans being upgraded by interlacing with beings who are more at home in nature than themselves.49 In paradigms of abstraction, on the other hand (Lower Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer cultures, tribal village cultures, the Middle Ages, postmodernity after 1900), humans are gripped by what Worringer terms spiritual agoraphobia, a fear of the wide natural spaces in which they once established a sense of autonomous subjectivity. Accordingly, they wish to displace the unclear and confusing natural appearances with the regularity of the dead and inorganic parts of nature, an urge toward the crystalline resulting in abstraction.50 Since abstraction for Worringer signifies control over natural appearances, it also allows for a deeper immersion in nature, an approach to

47 Von Uexküll, ‘The New Concept of Umwelt’. 48 Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity, pp. 57–80. 49 Ibid., pp. 63–67; see further, without his interpretation, Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave, pp. 29 and 80. 50 Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, pp. 73, 81–85.

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the Kantian Ding an sich.51 Because nature, outside the empathy-attracting mammals, is comprised of less organized phenomena, these less complex phenomena invade the pictorial languages that therefore become more abstract, flooded by the non-corporeal forces and matter within which humans want to immerse themselves. It is through such floodings by the nonhuman ocean that ‘ornaments’ take over the pictorial language to such a degree that their peripheral status is displaced by that of a more pervasive abstraction. In early hunter-gatherer and tribal village cultures, this abstraction is founded in a state in which the distinction between auto­ nomous human body and surrounding world has not yet been instituted. As Spyros Papapetros remarks, elaborating upon and extending Gottfried Semper’s pioneering essay on adornment from 1856, in tribes such as the East Brazilian Botocudo, ‘the added object is not an extension but an insertion; the body itself has to protract and literally incorporate the artifact. Frame and content are inverted: The human limb is now the decorative frame or addition to the inorganic core.’52 In my view, however, the body and diverse artefacts and natural pieces meet and blend on the same level of reality, one halfway turned into pictorial plasticity; so in such tribal village cultures, the bodies are intermingled with items – animal masks, wooden plugs, bones, sea shells, etc. – that are only later categorized as ornaments, i.e. as less complex entities that are constructed as peripheral to the fleshy body. A similar breakdown of this hierarchy between ornaments and body becomes apparent when this sort of non-empathic culture is revived in modernist ‘primitivism’ in the decades around 1900, Picasso’s cubist blending of human bodies with masks and other physical-medial ‘surroundings’ in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) being a case in point (Ill. 9.8). On this background, it becomes particularly easy to understand why the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan could term our electric age the global village, a return to the tribal night.53 In architecture, functionalism’s roots in Art Nouveau (Sullivan, Wright) also become less mysterious in this perspective, since the basic characteristic of post-1900 architecture is not austerity versus flamboyancy but rather whether flamboyancy is absorbed thoroughly in the now more open architectonic body or not. This logic reveals, for instance, that Adolf Loos may both criminalize ornaments in his famous essay from 1907 and integrate rich, colourful materials in his own version of functionalism.54 From a humanist perspective, such pictorial paradigms also look ‘monstrous’ to a certain extent, with their mingling of human corporeality and the less complex, par excellence animality (cf. ‘primitive’ tribalism, the ‘barbaric’ Nordic Middle Ages, modernist ‘primitivism’). It is in such pre-humanist cultures that the very

51 Ibid., p. 84. 52 Papapetros, ‘World Ornament’, p. 312; Semper, ‘Über die formelle Gesetzmässigkeit’. 53 McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 5 and 34–35. 54 Loos, ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’.

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Ill. 9.8: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), oil on canvas, 96 x 92 in (243.9 x 233.7cm). New York, Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. 333.1939 © 2018. Digital image: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

etymology of monster originated. Monster is derived from the Latin monstrare (‘to point’) or monere (‘to warn’), since its original subjects – what we now term malformed newborns – were considered messengers from the beyond who pointed to future events, which is why monstrum came to signify everything extraordinary and wonderful.55 It is only after humanism bracketed out the human body from the broader webs of animality, including their extraordinary forms, that monstrosity could stand out subversively as truly nonhuman, thereby strengthening our human exceptionalism by showing us its horrific other. In art this outstanding quality of the monster – monstrosity sharply bracketed out from the non-monstrous – presupposes a certain dose of naturalism. In abstraction it is partly drowned in

55 Brittnacher, Ästhetik des Horrors, pp. 184–185.

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the indeterminacy of signifiers – where does referentiality stop, and where does pictorial language begin?

Bibliography Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, ed. and intr. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (New York: Zone Books, 2009 [1955]). Henri Bergson, On Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1911 [1900]). Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, ny: Dover Publications, 1991, 1998 [1907]). Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Fernand Braudel, ‘Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 13, 4 (1958), pp. 725–753. Hans Richard Brittnacher, Ästhetik des Horrors: Gespenste, Vampire, Monster, Teufel und Künstliche Menschen in der phantastischen Literatur (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994). Alan Brookland, ‘The Man Who Invented Frankenstein’s Monster’s Bolt’, alanbrookland.com (blog), 27 October 2009, http://alanbrookland.com/2009/10/. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992). Danièle Cohn, ‘Die Gürtel der Aphrodite: Eine kurze Geschichte des Ornaments’, in Vera Beyer and Christian Spies (eds.), Ornament: Motiv – Modus – Bild (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), pp. 149–180. Frances S. Connelly, ‘Introduction’, in Frances S. Connelly (ed.), Modern Art and the Grotesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–19. Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Thomas E.A. Dale, ‘Monsters, Corporeal Deformities, and Phantasms in the Cloister of St Michel-de-Cuxa’, Art Bulletin 83, 3 (2001), pp. 402–436. Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: Norton, 2012). Jacques Derrida, ‘Parergon’, in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 15–148. Nicole Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969). Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. J.M. Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 [1990]). Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism’, trans. Peter Mason, in Clarie Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds.), Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 31–45. Maria Fabricius Hansen and Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam, ‘Grotesque! Strategies of Figurative Genesis in the Sixteenth Century and in the Surrealism of the 1920s and 1930s’, in Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam and Jacob Wamberg (eds.), Art, Technology and Nature: Renaissance to Postmodernity (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 81–102. Antonio Filarete, Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, trans. and intr. John Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).

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Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, in Werke aus den Jahren 1917–1920, Gesammelte Werke, chronologisch geordnet, 18 vols. (London: Imago, 1947), vol. 12, pp. 227–268. John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1981) Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I – III. Werke, 13–15, ed. H.G. Hotho (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970 [1835]). Victor Hugo, Oeuvres dramatiques et critiques complètes (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963). J.-K- Huysmans, ‘Le monstre’, in Certains (Paris: Tresse & Stock, 1889), pp. 135–154. Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1915). Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974 [1793]. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1793]). Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (London: Viking, 1995). Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L.S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 [1980]). David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’, in Sämtliche Schriften in zwei Bänden, ed. Franz Glück (Vienna: Herold, 1962), vol. I, pp. 276–288. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1936). James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life at Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000 [1979]). Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). Asa Simon Mittman, ‘Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies’, in Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 1–14. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2013). Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Spyros Papapetros, ‘World Ornament: The Legacy of Gottfried Semper’s 1856 Lecture on Adornment’, Res 57–58 (Spring – Autumn 2010), pp. 309–329. Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia, vol. 9, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1952). Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984). John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols. (Boston: Dana Estes s.a., c. 1873 [1856]), vol. 3. Ingrid D. Rowland, ‘Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders’, Art Bulletin 76 (1994), pp. 81–104. Christian Schwägerl, The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet, trans. Lucy Renner Jones (Santa Fe: Synergetic Press, 2014 [2011]). Gottfried Semper, ‘Über die formelle Gesetzmässigkeit des Schmuckes und dessen Bedeutung als Kunstsymbol’, Monatsschrift des wissenschaftlichen Vereins in Zürich, 1 (1856), pp. 101–130. John Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967). Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1972 [1923]). Fred Spier, Big History and the Future of Humanity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

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Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, Loeb Classical Library, 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), vol. 6. Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen, 1972). Jakob von Uexküll, ‘The New Concept of Umwelt: A Link between Science and the Humanities’ [1937], trans. Gösta Brunow, Semiotica 134, 1 (2001), pp. 111–123. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccelenti pittori scultori e architettori, eds. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, 7 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1966–1987 [1550 and 1568]. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland, commentary and illustrations Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Book 7, Ch. 5, 3–4, p. 91. Jacob Wamberg, Landscape as World Picture: Tracing Cultural Evolution in Images, 2 vols. (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009 [2005]). Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, ed. Helga Grebing, introduction Claudia Öhlschläger (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007 [1907]).

About the author Jacob Wamberg is Professor of Art History at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He works on an evolutionistic theory of the visual arts, especially in relation to worldmaking, technology, and semiotics. His present focus is posthuman aspects of avantgarde art. His publications include Landscape as World Picture: Tracing Cultural Evolution in Images ([2005] 2009); Totalitarian Art and Modernity (2010, ed. with Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen); The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012, ed. with Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen); and Art, Technology and Nature: Renaissance to Postmodernity (2015, ed. with Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam).

Index Abarimon 82 abstraction 245–272 acroteria 256 Actopan (Mexico), San Nicolás de Tolentino 144, Ill. 4.4 Adam 58, 166 Aesop 80, 82 Alberti, Leon Battista 17 Aldrovandi, Ulisse 29, 84 Alien 260 Allori, Alessandro Ill. 0.1–4 Alvarotti, Giulio 190 Amadis de Gaule 192 Ammannati, Bartolomeo 267 anamorphosis 231 anatomy 205–218 animal gods 262 animation 22–23, 120, 177–199, 203–219 anthropocentrism 247, 255, 267 anthropocene 269 anthropomorphism 88, 169, 190–192, 203–219, 255, Ill. 8.2, 9.7 Antipodes 262 Antwerp 95, 97, 100–101, 103, 113, 124, 126, 128 arabesques 19–21, 113, 123 architecture anthropomorphic 190–192, 203–219 decoration 17–18, 95, 105, 112, 156–171, 181–197, 204–218, 222, 255–258 doorways 17, 112, 153–171, 195, 262, Ill. 5.5 theory 17, 26, 77, 156–172, 215–216, 264 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 226–229, 236, 266–268, Ill. 8.2, 9.7 Aretino, Pietro 63, Ill. 1.12 Armenini, Giovanni Battista 73, 86 Artemis of Ephesus 73, 75–76, 84, 86–88 Art Nouveau 271 Aspertini, Amico 53, Ill. 1.10 Augustinian Order (Mexico) 133–134, 137–138, 142–145, 149 Aztecs Religious beliefs and practices 134–137, 141, 143, 146 Spanish conceptions of 143–144, 146 Bakhtin, Mikhail 59–60, 148, 266 Barbaro, Daniele 77, 89 Bataille, Georges 270 Baudelaire, Charles 267 Bergson, Henri 248, 250–251, 266 Bernard of Clairvaux, St. 27: n.47, 125, 262–63, 265 Blemmyae 82, 262 body/less complex hierarchy 245, 247, 257, 268 Bologna, Oratorio di Santa Cecilia 53, Ill. 1.10 Bomarzo, Sacro Bosco 76, 80, 213–214, Ill. 7.7–8 Bosch, Hieronymous 139, 142, 266 Botocudo tribe 271 Boyvin, René 182, 184–187, Ill. 0.6, 7–8 Bronzino, Agnolo 267

Bruegel the Elder, Pieter 208–209, 260–266, Ill.7.3, 9.5 Bruges 100–101 Buontalenti, Bernardo 79 Cabasset Ill. 3.15 cadaver 203–205 capitalist popular culture 269 Caprarola, Villa Farnese Ill. 1.2 capriccio 56, 265 caricature 33, 266–267 Caron, Antoine 188 Cartari, Vincenzo 82 Castiglione, Baldassare 61, 258 Carthusian Order 164–172 and architecture 163–172 and The Roads to Zion see Hugh of Balma Celano, Carlo 156, 163 Cennini, Cennino 61, 65 Centaur 26–29, 65, 74, 76, 79, 134, 148, 251, 262–263, Ill. 4.2 Cesariano, Cesare 77, 89 chaos 250, 253, 257, 269 Chichimec War 134, 137, 142–143, 146 Augustinian justification for 134 Chichimecs 134, 137, 142–143, 145–146, 148 chimera 26, 54–55, 65 chinoiseries 20 Christmas trees 252 Cicero 18 Cock, Hieronymus 113 Comanini, Gregorio 229 complexity 246–248, 250, 252, 256–257, 259–260, 265–266, 268–269, 271 complexity theory 245–246, 250 Connelly, Frances S. 18, 89, 119, 168–169 Conti, Natale 84 Contile, Luca 232 Copernican world 248, 250 Copernicus, Nikolaus 205 corso-ricorso 236, 238, 240–241 cosmetics 16–17, 61, 213 cosmos, cosmology 16–17, 205, 213, 218, 239, 248 costume 179–198, Ill 6.3–4, 6.8, 6.10 Council of Trent 29, 67, 124–125 Counter-Reformation 29–30, 32, 67, 89, 124, 139 Cyclopes 82, 251 Cynocephali 82, 262 da Gambara, Giovan-Battista 187, 189 dance 188 d’Angoulême, Charles 189 da Thiene, Ludovico 189 Davent, Léon Ill. 6.2 Dea della Natura 73–74, 86 de Amusco, Juan Valverde 216, Ill. 7.9 Delaune, Étienne 197, Ill. 6.11 dell’Abate, Nicolò 188

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de’ Medici Catherine 188 Cosimo 203–207 de Navarre, Marguerite 193 d’Este Ercole II 190 Ippolito 85 demons, demonic 30–31, 33–34, 134, 139, 141, 143–144, 146, 148, 223, 264–265 Derrida, Jacques 18–19, 177–179, 255–256 Descartes, René 32: n.70; 88 Didi-Huberman, Georges 253 Dietterlin, Wendel 160–163, Ill. 5.5 difficultà 21–24 Ding an sich 271 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 225 disorganization 248, 253 dissection 203–205 Dolce, Ludovico 22–23 Doni, Anton Francesco 140 dragons 251, 259 drapery 246, 255 DuBos, Abbé Jean Baptiste 232 Duncanus, Martinus 100, 125 Durán, Diego 143, 148 emblems 57–58, 82–83, 98–99, 126, 158, 165–168, 172, 229, 231–232, 235 Empedocles 80 empathy 245–247, 256–257, 259, 267–271 entropy 250 Epiphagi 262 evolution 246–248, 251, 269 enargeia 21–23 energeia 23, 197 ergon see parergon Evangelization 134–137 Eve 58, 166 fantasia 64–65, 77–78, 229, 265 Fantuzzi, Antonio Ill. 6.1 Fanzago, Cosimo 153–156, 163–164, 172; see also architecture, doorways Fascism 247, 269 Favolius, Hugo 95, 128 female, femininity 16, 18, 27, 45–68, 85–87, 190, 197, 260 figures of speech 18, 216 Filarete, Antonio 258 First Mexican Council 137 Florence 216 Boboli Gardens 76, 78, 84, Ill. 2.2 Grotta Grande 79 Laurentian Library 267 Loggia dei Lanzi 22, 46, 49–57, 63, 76–80, 203–218, Ill. 7.1 Orti Oricellari 80 Palazzo Marzichi-Lenzi Ill. 1.11 Palazzo Medici 63 Palazzo Ramirez Montalvo Ill. 1.6 Palazzo Vecchio cover illustration, Ill. 0.5., 1.1, 1.4–5 San Marco Ill. 9.3

Uffizi Ill 0.1–4 Floris, Cornelis 112–113 Fontainebleau, Château de 75, 114, 158 cryptoportico of grotto 177, 192, Ill. 6.2 Galerie François Ier 177, 179–182, 185, 190, 193, Ill. 6.5 School of 177, 187 Forster, Georg 258 Foucault, Michel 32: n.71 Fra Angelico 253–254, Ill. 9.3 François I 179, 188–189, 194 Frankenstein’s monster 251 Frascati, Villa Aldobrandini 75, 79–80 Freud, Sigmund 159, 260 Functionalism 271 furore 140–141 Gaia 248 galaxies 260 Galle, Philips 102, 112, 128 garden 16, 21, 73–92, 105, 137–138, 156, 164–173, 205–214 gender and ornament 16, 44–72, 87 geocentric hierarchy 247–48 Gheeraerts, Marcus I 95–132, Ill. 3.1–14, 3.16–17, 3.19–22 Giambologna 79, Ill. 2.2 Gilio da Fabriano, Giovanni Andrea 67 Giotto di Bondone 209–210, Ill. 7.4 Giovanni da Udine 53, 63, 83, 228, Ill. 8.3 Giraldi, Giovanbattista 23 Giulio Romano 75, 83 goat 27: n.47, 45, 50, 54–56, 162, Ill. 1.2 Gombrich, Ernst 146 Gothic 251, 257–259, 265 Goya, Francisco de 266 Grand-Clément, Adeline 23 Great Chain of Being 245, 247–249 Grien, Hans Baldung 32: n.71, 58 griffins 251–252, Ill. 9.2 Grijalva, Juan de 143, 145–146, 148 grotesque 259–267, passim grottesche 13, 34, 45–90, 113, 226, 228–232, 264–265 grotto 21, 46–48, 56: n.17, 66, 73–88, 192, 213–215, Ill. 6.2, 7.7 Guevara, Filipe de 139, 141–142 Gyatso, Gonkar 221, 236, 238–241, Ill. 8.6–7 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 147–148 harpies50–57, 73–78, 84, Ill. 1.3, 2.2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 270 heliocentricsm 36 Henri II 179 hieroglyphs 82, 283, 141, 147, 229, 232, 234 Hollanda, Francisco de 58, 63, 65, 77 Horace 26–29, 58, 65, 76–77, 124, 139–140, 149, 221–241 Horapollo 82 Huejotzingo (Mexico) 138 Hugo, Victor 266 Humanism 269–272 hybrid, hybridity 13–36, 45–72, 73–92, 120, 133–137, 142–143, 147, 262, 266, passim hydrae 259, Ill. 3.19 hyperobjects 269

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Index

Hypnerotomachia poliphili 192 Hugh of Balma 171 iconoclasm (beeldenstorm) 95, 100–101, 119, 122, 124–126 inorganic, the 245–247, 250–257, 259–260, 269–271 imagination 18–19, 24–30, 61–67, 97, 147, 169, 193, 210, 234, 261–266, passim imprese 229, 232 ingegno 229–230 infinity 36, 205, 250 interlace 257, 262, 270 intra-action 269 intermediality 182–183, 187–188, 198–199 invenzione 77 Isidore of Seville 54 Ixmiquilpan (Mexico) 142, 145 San Miguel Arcángel 133–137, 142, 146–149, Ill. 4.1–2 Jode, Gerard de 102, 113, 116, 128 Jonah and the whale 209–211 Kafka, Franz 261 Kant, Immanuel 13–20, 179, 233, 246, 251–271 Kauffman, Stuart 246, 248 Kayser, Wolfgang 146 King Kong 260 Koerner, Joseph Leo 58 kosmos see cosmos Kristeva, Julia 59, 266 labyrinth, labyrinthine 24, 32, 47, 214 landscapes 256–257, 259, 269 Last Judgement 141–142, 165 Le Masson, Dom Innocent 165 licence, lizenzia 19–33, 63–67, 77–78, 124, 158, 221, 225, 264 Le Corbusier 16 Leonardo da Vinci 21, 48–49, 215 Leviathan 259 lifelikeness 203–219 Ligorio, Pirro 57, 73–92, 140–141, 213, 229, Ill. 2.1 Lippi, Filippino 53–55, Ill. 1.9 Locke, Hew 221, 236–238, 241, Ill. 8.5 Locke, John 232–233 locus amoenus 84 locus horridus 84 Lomazzo, Giovan Paolo 64, 141, 147, 229, 235 London 100–102 Longue durée 269 Loos, Adolf 16, 271 Lower Paleolithic age 247, 270 magic 31, 33, 143, 216 Mannerism 47–48: n.3, 123, 195, 214, 245, 247, 264, 267–268 Marco da Faenza Ill. 1.4–5 marmi finti 253–254 Martin, Jean 165–168, 172 Marvels of the East 82, 262, Ill. 2.3 mask 45, 60–63, 105, 128, 169, 177–202, 203–219, 271, Ill. 6.3–4, 6.10

masquerade 185–198, Ill. 6.8 Mata, Andrés de 133, 139 matter 245–248, 250, 252–254, 256–257, 259–260, 265, 271 McLuhan, Marshall 271 Maniera tedescha 258 meander borders 252 Medusa 62–63 Mendieta, Jerónimo de 143 Menninghaus, Winfried 19–20 mermaids, sirens 26–27, 51, 58, 63, 139, 221, 224, 251 mescolanza 77–78 mesh 269 metamorphosis 31, 59–60, 66, 74, 80, 211, 216 metopes 256 Mexico Conquest of 134, 142–143 Evangelization of 134–137, 143, 145, 147 Spanish understanding of 134, 143–148 Michelangelo Buonarroti 21–23, 63, 77–78, 210–211, 214, 226, 267, Ill. 7.5 Milan, Pierre 184 Milner, John 258 minerals 245–246, 248, 250–251, 253, 257 minotaurs 251 mirror 197, Ill. 6.11 misogyny 58, 61 Molanus, Johannes 100, 123, 125 monstrare 24, 272 monstrosity 13–16, 24–34, 245–273, passim Monte Oliveto Maggiore (Asciano) 81 Morton, Timothy 267, 269 Motolinía, Toribio de Benavente 143, 145 motto 56, 166, 235, 240 Muret, Marc-Antoine 85 Naples, Museo Nazionale Farnese Diana 87 Certosa di San Martino 153–172, Ill. 5.1–4, 5.6 naturalism 13, 24, 26–27, 60, 65, 67, 77, 80, 138–139, 141, 245–272 nature 13, 27–31, 35–36, 48–56, 66, 73–90, 125, 162, 166–167, 207, passim Neo-Classicism 247, 255, 267, 269–270 Nero 264 Newton, Isaac 251 Nonhuman 245–248, 260–261, 266–269, 271–272 Nuremburg Chronicle 82 order 17, 33, 119, 146, 247–248, 250, 262, 264–265, passim organism 245–48, 250–251, 253, 259–61 organization 247–248, 250, 253–254, 265, 271 origin of language 234 ornament 13–24, 95–132, 172, 179–185, 233, 245–273, passim; see also architecture, decoration; see also gender ornament-argument 222–224, 233, 235 Orsini, Vicino 213 Orvieto, Cathedral Ill. 1.7 ornare, ornatus, ornamentum 17, 208

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Otomí 134, 137, 145 Ovid, Metamorphoses 78–79, 89

ruins 45–48, 156, Ill. 7.2 Ruskin, John 147, 251–252, 265, 267, Ill. 9.2

Padua, Arena Chapel 210, Ill. 7.4 Paleotti, Gabriele 29, 67, 100, 125, 139–146 Pan 55 Papapetros, Spyros 197, 271 paradox 13, 24, 30, 32, 35, 61, 171, 229, 241, 260 Parmigianino 267 Pegasus 251 perception see visuality Paré, Ambroise 89–90 parergon, ergon 13, 18–19, 34, 74, 177–179, 246, 254–259, 267 Perugia, Collegio del Cambio 53 Perugino, Pietro 53 phantasies 259 Picasso, Pablo 271 Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco 64 Pierce, Jack 251 Pigna, Giovanni Battista 23 Pinturicchio 53 Piola, Domenico Ill. 8.4 plants 245–246, 248, 250–253, 256–257, 259, 264 Plato 17, 26, 65, 140 Pliny the Elder 28, 82 Poccetti, Bernardino 54, Ill. 1.6, 1.11 poetic monsters 221–222, 232–236, 241 poikilia 23 Pollock, Jackson 253 Pontormo, Jacopo da 267 Posthumanism 245–247, 269 Postmodernity 270 Pratolino, Villa Medici 79–80 Price, Uvedale 258 Primaticcio, Francesco 114, 179, 185, 188–190, 192, Ill. 6.2, 6.9 Primitivism 271 Protogenes 255 Psychomachia 134, 137 Pythagoras 80

Sadeler, Jan I 95, 99, 103, 112, 126, 128 Sahagún, Bernardino da 138, 143 Salviati, Francesco Ill. 0.6 Sambin, Hugues 189 San Juan Tietipac (Mexico) 138 Sarto, Andrea del 50, Ill. 1.3 Satan 262, 266 satyrs 29, 55, 56, 73–74, 162, 181, 223, 225, 262 Sciopodes 262 Scott, Ridley 260 Semper, Gottfried 271 seriality 250–251 Serlio, Sebastiano 17, 77, 158, 163 sfumato 60 Shakespeare, William 216 Shearman, John 23 Shelley, Mary 251 Siena, Libreria Piccolomini 53 Signorelli, Luca Ill. 1.7 singeries 20 siren see mermaid skeleton 48, 203–218, Ill. 7.2 Socialist Realism 247, 269 Sodoma 81–82, Ill. 2.3 spatio-temporality 246 Spengler, Oswald 248 sphinxes 28: n.51, 50–57, 251 Spini, Gherardo 216 stylization 252, 256, 267 Sullivan, Louis 271 Summers, David 21–24, 27, 123 syncretism 269 synecdoche 215

Qualia 250 Quintilian 18, 21–22 Raphael 53, 74, 83, 86, 181, 228, 258, 264, Ill. 8.3 remote gaze 256–257, 259, 269 rhetoric 16–32, 60–66, 142–143, 171–172, 203, 232–233 Riegl, Alois 222 Ripa, Cesare 82 Robinet, Jean-Baptiste 248 Rome Baths of Titus 74 Domus Aurea 45–46, 52–53, 65–66, 74, 159, 181, 264, Ill. 1.8–9 Palazzo Zuccari 212–214, Ill. 7.6 Villa Madama 75 Villa Medici 80 Rondelet, Guillaume 215 Rosso Fiorentino 114, 179, 181, 185, 188–189, Ill. 6.5–6

tapestries 20, 99–100, 259 Tasniere, Giorgio Ill. 8.4 technology 24, 31, 34, 36 Tempesta, Antonio Ill. 0.1–4 Tesauro, Emmanuele 229–232, 235–236, Ill. 8.4 theatre 135, 144 Thebaid images 144, Ill. 4.4 Therianthropes 270 Third Mexican Council 147 Thiry, Léonard 179, 183, 186–187, 196–198, Ill. 6.3–4, 6.10 Titian 63, Ill. 1.12, 7.2 Tivoli, Villa d’Este 73, 78–80, 84–88, Ill. 2.4 Fountain of Nature 75–76, 85–88, Ill. 2.1. Tlalmanalco (Mexico), San Lius Obispo, open chapel 141–142, Ill. 4.3 Tlaxcala (Mexico) 145 Todorov, Tzvetan 148 Tolomei, Claudio 78 Tommaso di Battista del Verrocchio cover illustration, Ill. 0.5 tracery 257 tribal village culture 247, 270–271 triglyphs 256

281

Index

transformation 33, 53, 59–63, 140–141, 148–149, 167–168, 177, 194, 203, 210–216, 248, 259, 261–262 Tribolo, Niccolò 75 trophy 203, 207 Turboli, Dom Severo 154 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 257 Umwelt 270 unicorns 251 uncanny 24, 48, 60, 159–160, 162, 212, 260, 265 Underworld 47–48, 58, 209, 212–214, Ill. 7.6–7 Upper Paleolithic age 270 Valadés, Diego 143 Valdés, Gaspar de 145 Valeriano, Giovanni Piero 82 van Aelst, Pieter Coecke 17 van den Vliete, Gillis 75, 86, Ill. 2.1 van der Rohe, Mies 16 van Doetechum, Johannes or Lucas Ill. 3.18 van Vianen, Adam 223–224, Ill. 8.1 Varchi, Benedetto 29 Vasari, Giorgio 29, 77, 226, 258, 264–265 Vatican City, Apostolic Palace Loggetta 228, 231, 264, Ill. 8.3 Loggia 74, 228, 264

Sistine Chapel 21, 210, 267–268, Ill. 7.5 Stanze 74 Vesalius, Andreas 205 Vico, Giambattista 221–222, 232–236, 240–241 visuality, perception 19, 23–25, 30–31, 66, 207, 257, 259, 270 Vitruvius 17, 26, 29, 65, 76–78, 124, 139–140, 162, 224–225, 264 Vredeman de Vries, Hans 112–113, Ill. 3.18 whale 203–219 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 257–258 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 233 wit 230–232 wonder 89, 118–119, 140–148, 197, 203–219 Wölfflin, Heinrich 33 Worringer, Wilhelm 245–247, 252–253, 256–257, 269–270 Wright, Frank Lloyd 271 Wunderkammer 231 Zacatecas (Mexico) 134 Zacualpan (Mexico) 144 Zamperini, Alessandra 20 Zorach, Rebecca 19 Zuccari, Federico 85–88, 212–214, Ill. 2.4, 7.6