Ornamental motif based on Roman ornament found in grotto (underground chamber) of Golden House of Nero, featuring coiling foliage with people and animals in arabesques.
Extravagant decorative motif in which figures of humans, mythological beasts, birds, animals and sphinxes are used at the whim of the artist. The design elements are loosely linked by motifs such as intertwining scrolls, strapwork or foliage. Grotesque decoration was used in virtually every medium of the decorative arts -carved, inlaid or painted on furniture; engraved, chased or modelled on silver; woven into beauvais tapestries; and painted on maiolica. It was particularly popular during the renaissance and Rococo periods, as well as later in the eclectic high Victorian period and in Germany at the same time. The word stems from the Italian grotte, the subterranean ruins where ancient Roman motifs of this type were discovered during the Renaissance.
A comic figure - usually the combination of human and animal form.
In painting, sculpture and the applied arts, a type of extreme ornamentation based on interpretation of decorative motifs from classical antiquity.
art characterized by an incongruous mixture of parts of humans and animals interwoven with plants
distorted and unnatural in shape or size; abnormal and hideous; "tales of grotesque serpents eight fathoms long that churned the seas"; "twisted into monstrous shapes"
ludicrously odd; "Hamlet's assumed antic disposition"; "fantastic Halloween costumes"; "a grotesque reflection in the mirror"
a gargoyle which doesn't spout water but can still scare the devil
a kind of decorative painting or sculpture characterized by fantastic distortion and incongruous, unnatural, bizarre combinations of human, animal, and plant forms
a style of decorative art characterized by fanciful human or animal figures that may distort the natural into absurdity, ugliness or caricature
Derived from the term grotto which was used in the 16th century to describe the ruins of the Domus Aurea (Nero's palace in Rome). It describes painted or stucco decoration in a style frequent in ancient Rome which represented imaginary and fantastic motifs (plants interwoven with mythical or semi-human and animal figures).
Including features that are macabre, fantastic, exaggerated, pornographic or unpleasant. See Dickens.
A fantastic and unrealistic animal or human form.
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the Gothic form of arabesques, consisting of plaited scrolls budding into figures, masks and animals of fantastic character.
An artistic style in which fantastic human or animal forms are combined and distorted.
a style of painting or other art that either greatly distorts or where fantastic animal forms and human figures are combined with leaves, flowers and other objects in an ornamental way.
A marginal figure or animal, or combination of human and animal or plant. These are most often found in Gothic manuscript illustration and especially in marginal illustration.
a carving usually of a demon, dragon, or half human/half animal, serving no utilitarian purpose. Often confused with gargoyles.
As distinguished from a gargoyle (which serves to carry water off roof tops), a grotesque is any other fantastic representation of human or animal form taken to extremes of ugliness, caricature, or comedy. Most of the little knobby things you see on tombs -- ranging from little cherub heads to lions and mythical beasts are grotesques.
In art, a kind of ornament used in antiquity consisting of representations of medallions, sphinxes, foliage, and imaginary creatures.
In literary criticism, the subject matter of a work or a style of expression characterized by exaggeration, deformity, freakishness, and disorder. The grotesque often includes an element of comic absurdity. Early examples of literary grotesque include Francois Rabelais's Pantagruel and Gargantua and Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, while more recent examples can be found in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Evelyn Waugh, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Eugene Ionesco, Gunter Grass, Thomas Mann, Mervyn Peake, and Joseph Heller, among many others. (See also Black Humor.)
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When commonly used in conversation, grotesque means strange, fantastic, ugly or bizarre, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks or gargoyles on churches. More specifically, the grotesque forms on buildings which are not used as drainspouts should not be called gargoyles, but rather referred to simply as grotesques, or chimeras.
"Grotesque" is the fourteenth episode of the third season of The X-Files. Agents Mulder and Scully join Mulder's former mentor, the FBI's chief profiler, on a case involving a serial killer who claims to be possessed by a demonic force. The case gets even more mysterious when the suspect is apprehended and the murders continue.
