Kommerell, Victor
Metamorphosed Margins

The Case for a Visual Rhetoric of the Renaissance Grottesche under the Influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Der Autor untersucht Motive und Kompositionen der 'Grottesche'-Ornamente insbesondere mit Blick auf die Ovid-Rezeption und analysiert ihr zeitgenössisches Verständnis an sieben Fallbeispielen. The Grottesche, Renaissance ornament, came out of the grotto in the 1480's in Rome - inspired by the Ancient Roman wall paintings discovered in the 'buried' Domus Aurea - just as Ovid's "Metamorphoses" reached a much wider readership in Italy and in Europe. As primary source for all'anticha (hi)stories and meaning, the "Metamorphoses" fuelled artistic imagination and meaning expressed in Grottesche compositions and motifs for a good part of their 200-year life. The unique ornament entered many art forms, covering Europe; and was revived in the 1700's and 1900's. In 1500's Italy, these ornamental margins belonged to a larger phenomenon, the 'Pagan Dream'. Ovid's "Metamorphoses", and other mythological handbooks, notably shaped artists' visual choices and informed patrons' reading of alla grottesca art work. They noted 'underlying', invisible 'concetti' visualised at the ornamental margins, also described in Ovid's plots: The Laws of Nature, life cycles, metamorphosis, the power of passion. This book makes an argument about what the Grottesche had meant to their 15th and 16th century contemporaries by looking at seven locations. 248 Seiten mit 115 Abb., broschiert (Studien zur Kunstgeschichte; Band 173/Olms Verlag 2008)