[Julie Steiner]

grotesque

How had I not known this word's etymology until 20 minutes ago? I find it fascinating.

From M.D. Usher, "Classics and Complexity in Walden's 'Spring'," Arion 27:1 (Sping/Summer 2019), p. 122. The first quotation below is Thoreau's, and the second is Usher's discussion of it.

It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light.

a truly grotesque vegetation: The word “grotesque” also has two senses. In Thoreau’s time, as today, it primarily meant “ugly” and connoted “disgusting” (in the way that excrement is disgusting). But its original meaning, from Italian grottesco, is “of or pertaining to a cave.” The word was coined by artists and writers of the Italian Renaissance in conjunction with the accidental discovery—by then buried underground—of the emperor Nero’s notorious Domus Aurea, or “Golden House.” Painters like Raphael and Michelangelo, eager for inspiration from the past and armed with torches, were lowered down by ropes into cavities in the ground (across the street from where the Colosseum stands today) that contained colorful wall paintings with ornate vegetal borders and decorations. These “cavities,” in fact, were actually rooms in the Domus Aurea, which had been buried long before (and intentionally so), first by Trajan, and then also by centuries of further destruction and construction above ground. That Thoreau has in mind the arthistorical sense of grotesque is clear from his appeal to the “forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves.” Today one can see the earliest and most influential adaptations of Nero’s grotesques in Raphael’s painted Loggias in the Vatican. However, this kind of decoration also appears on Corinthian columns and on other architectural elements the world over. Eventually the style made its way across centuries from the palaces and temples of the great onto everyday household furniture.