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.
- 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
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