The Creeping Physicality of the Grotesque in Renaissance Italy

What do an artfully rendered sparrow and a calcified stalactite fountain have in common? See for yourself in my research paper on Italian renaissance artist, Giovanni Da Udine

On the airy ink sketch Study of a Flying Sparrow (Figure 1) (1515-1520) , Artist Giovanni da Udine (1487-1564) depicts a sparrow in flight. In his time, da Udine was understood to be an exponent of a Northern Italian “Lombard style,” founded in the observation of nature[1]. He achieved popularity as a specialist of depictions of birds, animals, and still life details. The flip side of Sparrow reveals da Udine’s other specialty in Raphael’s workshop—antiquity. The drawing’s verso shows Praxiteles’ Apollo Cithroedos, known in 15th century Tuscany through Roman copies. Taken as a whole, Sparrow can be seen as the lense of interests, antique and natural, through which Giovanni filters what comes to be redefined in the 15th century as the grotesque.

Ornamental grotesque or grotteschi art, popularized by Giovanni da Udine, pulls from nature and antique tradition in praise of artistic innovation. As the grotteschi gains popular momentum and moves from Loggia pilasters to Villa grottos, it makes expression out of spectacular decoration, heightening in materiality until decoration cannot be separated from the physical space. This corresponds with the grotesque art further confounding the distinction between nature and art by moving from mimicking the processes of nature though depiction into mimicking the processes of nature by augmenting natural objects and merging artistic generation with their creative generation of form.

One defining characteristic of the term “grotesque” as we use it today is its elusiveness to a single definition. Frances Connelly acknowledges this characterizing “grotesque” as “defined by what it does to boundaries, transgressing, merging, overflowing, destabilizing them.”[2] This characterizes of the Renaissance grotesque as well, but we can get more specific with our definition. We will be talking about the ornamental grotesque, defined by Connelly as a strand of learned classical decoration, originating with Horace and Vitruvius, and reinterpreted during the Italian renaissance as a defense of artistic license[3].

Vitruvius describes painted human and bestial figures emerging from foliage, coupled with improbable architectural motifs.[4] Horace says there’s no rational reaction but to laugh out loud at these ridiculous, ill-concieved hybrids that jumble categories and confuse beginnings and ends[5]. Summers asserts that together Horace and Vitruvius establish the grotesque as a particularly extreme kind of ornament, discussing it mostly in terms of balancing artistic license and the rules of design[6]. Both Vasari and Cellini directly link the term “grotteschi” with the rediscovery of Nero’s Golden Palace, Domus Aurea and its wall frescoes, which depict fantastic scenes like animals growing out of vegetation and into architecture as decorative element. Vasari expands his discussion of the grotesque to include the deliberate exaggerations and distortions of Michelangelo’s sculpture[7]. Michelangelo, as recounted by Francisco de Hollanda offer his own support of artistic license granted by forays into a style “alla grottesca.” Michelangelo justifies these creative liberties from a desire to see what we might never see, supporting “columns made of creatures growing out of stalks of flowers with architraves and cornices of branches of myrtle” and other exercises of imagination that “seem impossible and unreasonable ; yet it may be very great, if done by one who understands.”[8] Elements of the ornamental grotesque, like flowering lines and improbable forms appear in paintings and drawings as early as the 1480s, around the time when visitors began writing their names on the walls of the Domus Aurea.[9]

Although many artists took inspiration from the Domus Aurea and fed it into their craft, Vasari links the widespread repopularization of the grotesque with one artist— da Udine. Vasari:

I will make bold to say that this work has been the reason that not Rome only but also all the other parts of the world have been filled with this kind of painting, for, besides that Giovanni was the restorer and almost the inventor of grotesques in stucco and of other kinds, from this his work, which is most beautiful, whoever has wished to execute such things has taken his exemplar; not to mention that the young men that assisted Giovanni, who were many, and even, what with one time and another, innumerable, learned from the true master and filled every province with them.[10]

Vasari describes da Udine as a role model and a trendsetter for artists wishing to engage with the grotesque. Vasari highlights da Udine’s completion of the grotesque ornamentation in paint and stucco on the Loggia of Pope Leo X as well as his painting, stucco, and sculpture for Raphael’s Villa Madama[11]. He praises da Udine for his inventiveness, also citing his discovery of Roman stucco, his invention of a type of “ox painted on canvas,” and a new compositional style explored in tapestries of putti fighting giuchi de putti, which he executes for Raphael’s workshop[12]. Vasari prioritizes the language around invention when writing about da Udine, “lovely and fantastic inventions” and “pleasing invention of the pergola of canes” at the Loggia of Pope Leo X, while praising da Udine’s “sprited and fantastic inventions” at Raphael’s Villa Madama. In the early 16th century, Clement IV, Cardinal Giulio de Medici, and Pope Leo X become some of the most vocal patrons of the grotesque. da Udine’s ornamental works, starting with the papal Loggia and then moving to the Villa Madama set an additional trend of outgrowth, moving from flattened painting, to the low relief of stucco, into rock sculpture, progressively becoming more material, becoming closer in form and substance to the generative growth that characterizes the pattern of the ornamental grotesque.

Before we get into analysis, it’s important to note the significance of ornament and decoration in creating meaning in renaissance architecture. The introduction to the catalogue for museum exhibition Ornament and architecture: Renaissance Drawings Prints and Books curated by the Department of Art, Brown University makes this case. In the Renaissance classical tradition, ornament carried the full weight of expression.[13] A column is always a sign, the definition of orders is not understandable otherwise. Rustication is always expressive too – of the character of a building, its practical use, its symbolic meaning, or an indicator of the status of the building’s patron. It is the ornamentation; the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian column that associates it with femininity for Vitruvius[14] or the decorated rustic blocks of the Medici palace in Florence that ground its Tuscan roots and create meaning for renaissance buildings[15]. The exhibition introduction points to a lack of uniform classical grammar in justifying creative invention for ornamentation as an art specifically: “Variety evident in the monuments of antiquity legitimized renaissance license to invent variations on classical themes.”[16] Furthermore, the grotesque in particular is, “as Vitruvius recognized, essentially a parody of architecture”[17]. Before the rediscovery of the Domus Aurea and the introduction of grotesque ornamentation’s substitution of fantastic for the real, renaissance architecture had only the pilaster to imbue expressive value to the wall. In the renaissance Rome Grotesques first appear in large form on pilasters, specifically the Vatican Loggia where they articulate surface rather than structure.

In Loggia detail (Figure 2) (1517-1519,) da Udine’s grotesque decorations dialogue with flatness from their pilaster placement. Swirling tendrils of plantish vines in the largest plane, surrounded by illusionistic renderings of animals blossom out into framed figures and stucco work. On the two planes that frame the largest section of the loggia detail, we see the return of improbably sized architectural niches, with large pediments and tiny supports in addition to the growth relationship between the framed figures and tendrils of the main section, suggesting connections between the work of artist and the generation of nature. These planes emphasize not only connectivity but a shared aspect of metamorphosis. This can be seen the most in the upper panels in which a putti figure, encircled by decorative plant tendrils is literally growing out, his wings reminiscent of petals or butterfly wings also imply growth and transformation, although Giovanni doesn’t resolve who transforms and what into. These panels show fantastic invention from the artist’s imagination, combining unlike parts, but also a faithful attention to nature. Like his sparrow sketch, da Udine depicts his plants and animals with an eye towards observation and illusion. His convincing snakes and mice balance the wild leaps of imagination. da Udine pulls from the Domus Aurea’s style of wall painting, heightening and expanding it through his invention. Udine pulls from nature only to reexamine its individual components to his own symbolic and creative ends. Additionally, this was made for Pope Leo X to look at and enjoy. The composition retains a sense of marvel and even goofiness in the faces of its most extreme creatures of recombination, like his metamorphic putti.

On flat loggia pilasters, Giovanni’s mixing of painted ornament and stucco ornament involves an intentional confusion of space. Giovanni achieves this through a repetition of elements between his stucco work, which literally leaves the wall into the space of the viewer, and painted illusion, which only pretends to do so. da Udine’s stucco differs from Antique roman grotesques exemplified in the details of the Domus Aurea (Figure 3) in the degree of intensity with which they pursue this illusion and in Giovanni’s more sensitively attuned opposition of artifice and nature in his combinatory mixing of subjects, styles and surfaces. da Udine’s reinvention of stucco serves as a bridge out from the wall for the grotesque conversation and a firmer connection back to antique decorative tradition to ground his seemingly outlandish creative inquiry.

Phillippe Morel discusses the mannerist grotto in “Mannerist Grottos in Sixteenth Century Italy”, citing the material wholeness of the room as a point of departure from prior renaissance architecture:

Far from being, like the walls of a palace of villa, a neutral ground against which a fresco, tapestry, or painting stands out-- a ground that demands no particular attention -- the wall surface constitutes a fundamental point of departure for the decoration of artificial grottos. It is the product of a specific choice, (the mineral substance generally being applied to masonry), participates decisively in the rustic and naturalistic characterization of the space, and it can partially cover plastic elements that are traditional components of the setting, to the point of being inseparable from them, making itself their body and material[18]

I agree with Morel that the walls of grottoes are product of specific rusticating choices that, like grotesque ornament in buildings, call upon antiquity and vegetal, natural generation to form meaning via dialogue, but I disagree that the walls before Morrel’s grottos demanded no attention. It is the expressive choices in ornamental decoration done both in painting and stucco that proposes the wall of any room, palace or grotto as a space for this discourse. The decorum, the informal setting, of a Villa grotto better permits exploring the metaphor of a cave for artistic growth, but through the 15th century, the grotesque loggia, the garden, and the grotto frequently appear in tandem with one another, echoing similar themes translated through different locations. I do not discuss themes of power for example in this essay, but they can be investigated as additional example of thematic translation through architectural settings in the Medici buildings. I assert that the cave-like mineral inserts in Villa grottos like the Grotto Buontalenti in the Boboli Gardens (1583-1593), base their grotesque intervention from wall into physical space on one of da Udine’s other inventions of form: the stalactite fountain. da Udine’s fountain in turn follows questions from his earlier special interventions of stucco, which he only heightens in his completion of the stucco work in Raphael’s Villa Madama (Figure 4) (1518-1525).

da Udine’s garden fountains and loggia decorations were constructed parallel in time to the cultivation of the Villa Madama gardens, his garden loggia and fountains respond to their earthier environment. Vasari first describes da Udine constructing a fountain in exact replica of an elephant’s head, exactly mirroring the then recently unearthed temple of Neptune at the Palazzo Maggiore, ornamented with stucco. Vasari follows his praise of Giovanni’s reproduction of antique fountainry with praise of his following assertion of artistic license:

After this he made another fountain, but in a rustic manner, in the hollow of a torrent-bed surrounded by a wood; causing water to flow in drops and fine jets from sponge-stones and stalactites, with beautiful artifice, so that it had all the appearance of a work of nature. On the highest point of those hollow rocks and sponge-stones he fashioned a large lion’s head, which had around it a garland formed of maidenhair and other plants, trained there with great artistry; and no one could believe what grace these gave to that wild place, which was most beautiful in every part and beyond all conception pleasing[19].

Vasari situates da Udine’s fountain invention around 1520[20]. Although Vasari describes it as in a rustic manner, Morel does not find descriptions of this type of fountain in any prior classical or renaissance tradition[21]. The description of this fountain includes insertion of naturalistic imitation of nature in the molding of the lion’s head, and a grotesque recombination in its insertion over the organic stalactite shape. Vasari doesn’t cite materials for the rock fountain, but based on the materials of his elephant sculpture, I don’t think its unfair to imagine the ornament involved stucco. It also accounts for a dialogue with nature. da Udine very literally examines the workings of nature by using rocks to represent rock surface. At the same time, he subverts the workings of nature for his own needs, mimicking the generation of stalactites through water drips, but reversing the flow of water for human whimsy. In leaving the wall, grotesque ideas further blur lines between art and nature. Nature does the work of art and the artist does the work of nature.

This swapping of functions follows from Leo X’s Loggia walls where the artist associates his practice with nature through the motif of growth, then with the metamorphic recombination of strange and estranged figures subverts and emulates it. Moving into the garden, a step closer to the grotto, Giovanni chooses to task nature, physical material of the rock fountain in sharing the burden of decoration and representation. Additionally, stalactite growth appeals to tangible surface texture, which suits an artist who purportedly obsesses over the original recipe of stucco. da Udine is working on pilasters inside the Madama as he does this, where his stucco protruding in higher and more articulated relief, and wider use across the room, particularly for constructing hybrid figures also follows in increasing materiality. Leo’s Loggia stucco in comparison seems more focused on the architectural aspect of the grotesque, where in the Villa Madama, we see more of the recombined figures, their shift into materiality indicating an emergence that follows their transitory state between beinghood. While Morel thinks the grotesque as cave departs from renaissance tradition in engaging the entire room, da Udine’s all-over loggia form the stylistic basis for rooms where Morel says the substance of the entire room contributes to rustic and naturalistic decoration.

Embedding decorative structure in expression, da Udine’s painting and stucco work start a dialogue that his fountains answer to by translating the growth of immaterial flat paint and half material stucco fully into the material world, which later mannerist architects and artists, like Buontalenti and company bring into the grotto. Mannerist grottos don’t emerge from nothing. They are an outgrowth of a grotesque tradition defined by Giovanni da Udine’s creative inquiry, which attempts to logically expand out from a style that uses the looseness of antique conventions to dialogue between art and nature.

As mentioned earlier, the Buontalenti Grotto in the Boboli Gardens (Figure 5) shows some of the farthest mannerist extension of Udine’s consideration of license and nature. The organic forms of da Udine’s rock fountains merge with his approach to unifying rooms into expressing a cohesive sentiment through decoration, in part by emerging metamorphic stucco as Buontalenti and his crew, which includes Vasari, employ towards making a cave of artifice. Like Udine’s wall surfaces where organic motifs undulate into corporeal bodies, in Buontalenti Grotto, Michelangelo’s recycled captive figures seem be in the act of emerging out of the rocky artifice, their tense rupture implying nature doing the work of artistic generation. The rougher finish of the sculptures only contributes to the in-between state of transformation the room projects. Other shepherd figures, covered in rocky, stalactite reminiscent mineral growths appear in process of ambiguously growing either into the “cave” walls or growing out of it. Udine receives an additional homage from the central fountain, which centers the room and mimics his original creation. Like how the fountain literally grounds the room, despite these leaps in style and scale, the grotesque ideas expressed in the Buontalenti Grotto conform to Udine’s creative lineage.

The Buontalenti room asks the same questions as Udine’s pilasters and fountains: Where do artist and nature intersect? Can artist make nature? Can nature make art? From the swapping of parts and confounding of roles, what follows for the status of the artist? The “in” for asking these questions develops with time but although it increases in materiality, Udine is always concerned with outgrowth, what is transformed when the artist observes nature, either through faithful observation in his highly popular still lives, or from those sketches further into the abstract, zany realm of the garden-loggia grotto-conversation emerging from stucco to rock, where he sets the stage for a mannerist seize of artistic license happening during his lifetime and in the decades following his death.

Works Cited

Bayer, Andrea, and Andrea Bayer. Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004.

Brown University Department, of Art and Bell Gallery David Winton. 1980. Ornament and Architecture : Renaissance Drawings, Prints, and Books : An Exhibition / by the Department of Art, Brown University and] Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, March 8 through April 6, 1980. Providence, R.I.]: Providence, R.I. : Dept. of Art, Brown University.

Connelly, Frances S., and Frances S. Connelly. "Introduction." In Modern Art and the Grotesque, 1-16. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

D'Elia, Una Roman. 2014. "Grotesque Painting and Painting as Grotesque in the Renaissance." Source: Notes in the History of Art 33 (2): 5-12. doi:10.1086/sou.33.2.23611168.

Morel, Philippe. "Mannerist Grottos in Sixteenth Century Italy." Edited by Michael W. Cole. In Sixteenth-Century Italain Art, 115-35. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Squire, Michael. 2013. “Fantasies so Varied and Bizarre”: The Domus Aurea, the Renaissance, and the “Grotesque”.

Summers, David. 2003. "The Archaeology of the Modern Grotesque." .

Wallace, W. E. 2009. Dacos, Nicole. the Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art Treasure.(Brief Article)(Book Review). Vol. 46.

Vasari, Giorgio. "Giovanni Da Udine." In Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 71-85. Vol. 3. Florence: Medici Publishing, 1550.

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Figure 1, Giovanni da Udine, Study of a Fying Sparrow, 1515-1520. Red chalk and gouache, 138 x 168 mm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

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Figure 2, Giovanni da Udine, Loggia of Raphael Grotesque (1517-1519), fresco. Vatican Apostolic Palace, Vatican City.

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Figure 3, View of cryptoporticus with illusionistic candelabra and figures, Domus Aurea, Rome (German Archaeological Institute, Rome)

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Figure 4, Giovanni da Udine and Giulio Romano, Loggia of the Villa Madama (c. 1523). Model, wood with ornamental details in stucco. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Figure 5, Bernardo Buontalenti, Vasari, and Ammanannati, Grotta di Buontalenti, Prima Sala, 1583-1593, Boboli gardens, Florence Italy.

[1] Bayer, Andrea, and Andrea Bayer. Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. 53, 86-87

[2] Connelly, Frances S., and Frances S. Connelly. "Introduction." In Modern Art and the Grotesque, 1-16. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 4.

[3] Connelly, 6

[4] D'Elia, Una Roman. 2014. "Grotesque Painting and Painting as Grotesque in the Renaissance." Source: Notes in the History of Art 33 (2): 5-12. doi:10.1086/sou.33.2.23611168. 1.

[5] Summers, David. 2003. "The Archaeology of the Modern Grotesque." 7.

[6] Summers, 7.

[7] Summers, 33

[8] Summers, 33.

[9] Summers, 21

[10] Vasari, Giorgio. "Giovanni Da Udine." In Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 71-85. Vol. 3. Florence: Medici Publishing, 1550. 77.

[11] Vasari, 78-80

[12] Brown University Department, of Art and Bell Gallery David Winton. 1980. Ornament and Architecture : Renaissance Drawings, Prints, and Books : An Exhibition / by the Department of Art, Brown University and] Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, March 8 through April 6, 1980. Providence, R.I.]: Providence, R.I. : Dept. of Art, Brown University.70

[13] Brown Univerity, VI

[14] Vitruvius, Booki IV, Chapter 1. “On the Corinthian capital”

[15] Catherine Levesque. “The Medici Palace.” Lecture, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, February 21, 2019.

[16] Brown University, VI.

[17] Brown University, VI

[18] Morel, 115.

[19] Vasari, 79.

[20] Morel, 117.

[21] Morel 118.