Paradigms of Renaissance Grotesques

This collection offers a set of new readings on the history, meanings, and cultural innovations of the grotesque as defined by various current critical theories and practices. Since the grotesque frequently manifests itself as striking incongruities, ingenious hybrids, and creative deformities of nature and culture, it is profoundly implicated in early modern debates on the theological, philosophical, and ethical role of images. This consideration serves as the central focus from which the articles in the collection then move outward along different lines of conceptualization, chronology, cultural relevance, place, and site. They cover a wide spectrum of artistic media, from prints to drawings, from sculptures to gardens, from paintings to stuccos. As they do this, they engage with, and bring together, theoretical perspectives from writers as diverse as Plato and Paleotti, Vitruvius and Vasari, Molanus and Montaigne. Whether travelling a short distance from Nero’s Domus Aurea to Raphael’s Vatican logge, or across the ocean from Italy to New Spain, this volume goes further than any previous study in defining the historic understanding of grotesque and, in so doing, providing us with a more nuanced resource for our understanding of an art form once viewed as peripheral.

"This book offers new readings of the history, meanings, and cultural innovations of the grotesque as defined by a diversity of current critical theories and practices anchored by solid, enlightening scholarship. The research presented in these essays is not only sound but impressive."
-Michael Giordano, Wayne State University

"This is an important study on the ever more interesting subject of the idea of the grotesque throughout the Renaissance. It deserves many readers."
-David Cast, Bryn Mawr College

DAMIANO ACCIARINO is Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and at the University of Toronto. He works on Renaissance Antiquarianism. He has published several articles concerning Renaissance grotesques on academic journals, such as Venezia Arte (2016), Storia dell’Arte (2016), Schede Umanistiche (2016), and the monograph Lettere sulle grottesche (1580–1581) (2018), for which he won the 2019 best book prize from the Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History.