Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres. Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating tensions - monstrosities even - that manifest themselves in a variety of ways. In some cases, dichotomies (between order and chaos, artificiality and nature, rational logic and imaginative creativity, etc.) may emerge. Elsewhere, a sense of agitation undermines structures of statuesque control or erupts into wild, unruly displays of constant genesis. The monstrosity of ornament is brought into play through strategies of hybridity and metamorphosis, or by the handling of scale, proportion, and space in ambiguous and discomforting ways that break with the laws of physical reality. An interest in strange exaggeration and curious artifice allows for such colossal ornamental attitude to thrive within early modern art.
Author(s): Chris Askholt Hammeken, DR. Maria Fabricius Hansen
Series: Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 282
Cover
Title Page
Series Page
Half Title Page
Copy Right Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
On Ornament: Framed between Cosmos and Cosmetics
On Monstrosity: Reality, Imagination, and Licence
Historical Perspectives
A Brief Survey
Bibliography
About the authors
Part I Grotesques
1. Ambiguous Delights: Ornamental Grotesques and Female Monstrosity in Sixteenth-Century Italy
Grotto-esque Imagery and Female Monsters
Problems of Femininity and Hybridity
The Art of Transformation
Artistic Licence
Changing Concepts of Art
Taming the Monsters
Bibliography
About the author
2. Dissonant Symphonies: The Villa d’Este in Tivoli and the Grotesque
Art into Landscape: The Grotesque from Vitruvius to Ligorio
The Grotesque in the Garden: Artemis of Ephesus at the Villa d’Este
Conclusion: The Monstrous
Bibliography
About the author
Part II Sacred Space and Narrative
3. Outside-In: The Intrusion of Ornament into Sacred Narrative
The Passio Verbigenae
Netherlandish Grotesque
Monstrous Relations
Gheeraerts and Art
Bibliography
About the author
4. ‘That savage should mate with tame’: Hybridity, Indeterminacy, and the Grotesque in the Murals of San Miguel Arcángel (Ixmiquilpan, Mexico)
Iconography and Context
The Grotesque in Mexico
The Grotesque in Europe
Problems of the Mexican Grotesque
Ixmiquilpan and Its Environs
Anxieties of Classification and Control
Bibliography
About the author
5. Decoration in the Desert: Unsettling the Order of Architecture in the Certosa di San Martino
Unsettling the Classical Language of Architecture
Monstrous Architecture
Caught in Time: The Architecture of Solitude
Alternative Visions of the Desert: A Carthusian Book of Emblems
Ornament in the Gap
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the author
Part III Agency and Ornament Enlivened
6. Masquing/(Un)Masking: Animation and the Restless Ornament of Fontainebleau
Restless Ornament
Masquing
(Un)masking
Stilling Restless Ornament
Bibliography
About the author
7. Sea-Change: The Whale in the Florentine Loggia
Shifting Worldviews: Anatomy and Cosmology
Deep Sea Curiosities
Fragile Beasts
Form and Formlessness
Anthropomorphic Thinking
Bibliography
About the author
8. Ornament and Agency: Vico’s Poetic Monsters
Ornament that Insists on Speaking
Renaissance Embrace of Rogue Ornament
Vico’s Poetic Monsters
Corso and Ricorso: Resurgence of Ornament in Contemporary Art
Bibliography
About the author
Part IV A Historical Perspective
9. Trafficking the Body: Prolegomena to a Posthumanist Theory of Ornament and Monstrosity
Introduction
The Complexity Hierarchy between the Great Chain of Being (Space) and Evolution (Time)
The Inorganic
Ergon/Parergon
Monstrosity between Organisms and the Inorganic
Ornaments, Monstrosity, and the Grotesque
Islands (of Empathy) in a Nonhuman Ocean (of Abstraction)
Bibliography
About the author
Index
