IU~ll The MIT Press

Devouring Architecture Ruskins Insatiable Grotesque Author(s) Pau lette Singley

Source Assemblage No 32 (Apr 1997) pp 108-125 Publishe d by The MIT Press

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Paulette SingEey is an assistant professor of architecture at Iowa State University and a doctoral candidate in architectural history at Princeton University

Assemblage 3Z 108-125 copy 1997 by the

Massachusetts lnstilute ofTechnology

Paulette Singley Devouring Architecture Ruskins Insatiable Grotesque

Despite the perils involved with naming historical o rigins

- the comfort of a stable beginning the temptation of

clean chronological divisions and the promise of positive

progression - the grotesque thrives upon and embodies the

dilemma of beginnings and openings According to Giorgio

Vasari who documents its inaugural birth the grotesque

begins when it emerges from out of the subterranean cavshy

erns of eros Domus Aurea and breaks into the light of Reshy

naissance art theory Vasari narrates this discovery in the life

of M orto da Feltro

Morto restored the painting ofgrotesques in a manner more like the ancient than was achieved by any other painter and for this he deserves infinite praise in tha t it is after his example that they have been brought in our own day by the hands of Giovanni da Udine and other craftsmen to the great beauty and excellence that we see For although the said Giovanni and others have carshyried them to absolute perfection it is nonetheless true that the chief praise is due to Morto who was the first to bring them to light and to devote his whole attention to paintings of that kind which are called grotesques because they were found for the most part in the grottoes of the ruins of Rome1 1

As the aftermath of this mome ntous birth extensive scholarshy

ship on the grotesque in art and literature has been develshy

oped to such an extent that it would seem possible to

discuss this subject without repeating ad infinitum Vasari s

account of its origins 12 The etymon ofgrotto buried within

110

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This content downloaded from 12884125202 on Wed 29 Oct 2014 020004 AM All use subject to JSTOR Tem1s and Conditio ns

Singley

the grottesque however compels the repetition of Raphaels legendary descent into what has become an archetypal cave thereby reconstituting what emerged as a hybrid ornashymental motif composed ofdiverse animal vegetable and architectural fragments into the conundrum of architecshytural origins and the crisis of primary parturition n While Vitruvius ce111sures new fashions in Roman wall painting as early as the first century AD - a fashion eventually identishyfied as the third Pompeiian style - and confirms that the concept existed well before its incipient discovery and namshy

ing the compulsion to repeat the root meaning the etymoshylogical trap ofgrotto-esque renders a chthonic descent into a myth of eternal return every time we invoke the groshy

tesque we must return to the cave In this sense then the grotesque is both a stylistic category and the multitude of bizarre fantasies released when exploring architectures psychological underground

Thus a genealogy of grotesque architecture locates its Ursprung in Neros Domus Aurea It would encompass both the wall paintings and the jewel-encrusted rotating dining

hall The progeny of the Oomus would include not only the more famous examples of Leonardos caves Michelangelos tombs and Piranesis carceral visions but also such variants as the camera obscuragrotto in Alexander Popes garden the scabrous entry to Claude-Nicolas Ledouxs saltworks at Chaux or the hollow caverns of Jean-Jacques Lequeus Gothic House More recent explorations would involve such diverse architectures as the crooked grottoes of accushymulated detritus in Kurt Schwittterss Hannover Merzbau or the crocheted tissues of wire bone and beads in Jennifer Bloomer and Nina Hofers Tabbies of Bower In what might be coristrued as a hysterical list of references marshyshaled toward describing the diverse blossoms nestled in the captivating vines of the grotesque Mark Taylor alludes to a number of post-Vasarian theories Julia Kristevas abjection Derridas CT)plunumy Gturges Batailles informe Martin

Heideggers origins Immanuel Kants sublime Sigshymund Freuds unheimlich Mikhail Bakhtins carnival and Gianni Vattimos weak thought all explore cavernous marshygins of thought that insinuate a grotesque architecture Havshying evolved from a specific term referring to an ornamental device that allayed the horror vacui of Renaissance artists to a vague expression of something that is fantastically absurd or even sickening the grotesque - as demonstrated by the work of Schwitters or Bloomer - likewise has the power to expand its proper boundaries and entirely to engulf the edifice

Within the manifold descriptions of absorption rupture and excess that characterize the grotesque architectural body John Ruskins etiology of La Serenissima in The Stones ofVenice engages this expansion of meaning from an ornamental program to a delirious mental state that produces absurd and sickening artifacts Ruskin passes into the body of grotesque architecture through an ornamental mouth on the church of Santa Maria Formosa tlhat speaks to him of Venices fall into an unscrupulous pmsuit of pleasure to the extent that the architecture of the Veneshy

tian Renaissance

is among the lowest and bisest ever built by the hands of men being especially distinguished by a spirit of brutal mockery and insolent jest which exhausting itself in deformed and monshystrous sculpture can sometimes be hardly otherwise defined than as the perpetuation in stone of the ribaldries of drunkenshyness (11 135)14

In the chapter Grotesque Renaissance found in the third volume of The Stones titled The Fall from which this passhysage was taken Ruskin allegorizes the decline of the Venetian Republic through two elaborate legends buried within the church one being its foundatio11 and the other being the emergence of the Festival of the Twelve Maries Ruskin writes

The Bishop of Uderzo driven by the Lombards from his bishopshyric as he was praying beheld a vision of the Virgin ifother who ordered him to found a church in her honour in the place

111

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This content downloaded from 12884125202 on Wed 29 Oct 2014 020004 AM All use subject to JSTOR Tem1s and Conditio ns

Singley

the grottesque however compels the repetition of Raphaels legendary descent into what has become an archetypal cave thereby reconstituting what emerged as a hybrid ornashymental motif composed ofdiverse animal vegetable and architectural fragments into the conundrum of architecshytural origins and the crisis of primary parturition n While Vitruvius ce111sures new fashions in Roman wall painting as early as the first century AD - a fashion eventually identishyfied as the third Pompeiian style - and confirms that the concept existed well before its incipient discovery and namshy

ing the compulsion to repeat the root meaning the etymoshylogical trap ofgrotto-esque renders a chthonic descent into a myth of eternal return every time we invoke the groshy

tesque we must return to the cave In this sense then the grotesque is both a stylistic category and the multitude of bizarre fantasies released when exploring architectures psychological underground

Thus a genealogy of grotesque architecture locates its Ursprung in Neros Domus Aurea It would encompass both the wall paintings and the jewel-encrusted rotating dining

hall The progeny of the Oomus would include not only the more famous examples of Leonardos caves Michelangelos tombs and Piranesis carceral visions but also such variants as the camera obscuragrotto in Alexander Popes garden the scabrous entry to Claude-Nicolas Ledouxs saltworks at Chaux or the hollow caverns of Jean-Jacques Lequeus Gothic House More recent explorations would involve such diverse architectures as the crooked grottoes of accushymulated detritus in Kurt Schwittterss Hannover Merzbau or the crocheted tissues of wire bone and beads in Jennifer Bloomer and Nina Hofers Tabbies of Bower In what might be coristrued as a hysterical list of references marshyshaled toward describing the diverse blossoms nestled in the captivating vines of the grotesque Mark Taylor alludes to a number of post-Vasarian theories Julia Kristevas abjection Derridas CT)plunumy Gturges Batailles informe Martin

Heideggers origins Immanuel Kants sublime Sigshymund Freuds unheimlich Mikhail Bakhtins carnival and Gianni Vattimos weak thought all explore cavernous marshygins of thought that insinuate a grotesque architecture Havshying evolved from a specific term referring to an ornamental device that allayed the horror vacui of Renaissance artists to a vague expression of something that is fantastically absurd or even sickening the grotesque - as demonstrated by the work of Schwitters or Bloomer - likewise has the power to expand its proper boundaries and entirely to engulf the edifice

Within the manifold descriptions of absorption rupture and excess that characterize the grotesque architectural body John Ruskins etiology of La Serenissima in The Stones ofVenice engages this expansion of meaning from an ornamental program to a delirious mental state that produces absurd and sickening artifacts Ruskin passes into the body of grotesque architecture through an ornamental mouth on the church of Santa Maria Formosa tlhat speaks to him of Venices fall into an unscrupulous pmsuit of pleasure to the extent that the architecture of the Veneshy

tian Renaissance

is among the lowest and bisest ever built by the hands of men being especially distinguished by a spirit of brutal mockery and insolent jest which exhausting itself in deformed and monshystrous sculpture can sometimes be hardly otherwise defined than as the perpetuation in stone of the ribaldries of drunkenshyness (11 135)14

In the chapter Grotesque Renaissance found in the third volume of The Stones titled The Fall from which this passhysage was taken Ruskin allegorizes the decline of the Venetian Republic through two elaborate legends buried within the church one being its foundatio11 and the other being the emergence of the Festival of the Twelve Maries Ruskin writes

The Bishop of Uderzo driven by the Lombards from his bishopshyric as he was praying beheld a vision of the Virgin ifother who ordered him to found a church in her honour in the place

111

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Singley

the grottesque however compels the repetition of Raphaels legendary descent into what has become an archetypal cave thereby reconstituting what emerged as a hybrid ornashymental motif composed ofdiverse animal vegetable and architectural fragments into the conundrum of architecshytural origins and the crisis of primary parturition n While Vitruvius ce111sures new fashions in Roman wall painting as early as the first century AD - a fashion eventually identishyfied as the third Pompeiian style - and confirms that the concept existed well before its incipient discovery and namshy

ing the compulsion to repeat the root meaning the etymoshylogical trap ofgrotto-esque renders a chthonic descent into a myth of eternal return every time we invoke the groshy

tesque we must return to the cave In this sense then the grotesque is both a stylistic category and the multitude of bizarre fantasies released when exploring architectures psychological underground

Thus a genealogy of grotesque architecture locates its Ursprung in Neros Domus Aurea It would encompass both the wall paintings and the jewel-encrusted rotating dining

hall The progeny of the Oomus would include not only the more famous examples of Leonardos caves Michelangelos tombs and Piranesis carceral visions but also such variants as the camera obscuragrotto in Alexander Popes garden the scabrous entry to Claude-Nicolas Ledouxs saltworks at Chaux or the hollow caverns of Jean-Jacques Lequeus Gothic House More recent explorations would involve such diverse architectures as the crooked grottoes of accushymulated detritus in Kurt Schwittterss Hannover Merzbau or the crocheted tissues of wire bone and beads in Jennifer Bloomer and Nina Hofers Tabbies of Bower In what might be coristrued as a hysterical list of references marshyshaled toward describing the diverse blossoms nestled in the captivating vines of the grotesque Mark Taylor alludes to a number of post-Vasarian theories Julia Kristevas abjection Derridas CT)plunumy Gturges Batailles informe Martin

Heideggers origins Immanuel Kants sublime Sigshymund Freuds unheimlich Mikhail Bakhtins carnival and Gianni Vattimos weak thought all explore cavernous marshygins of thought that insinuate a grotesque architecture Havshying evolved from a specific term referring to an ornamental device that allayed the horror vacui of Renaissance artists to a vague expression of something that is fantastically absurd or even sickening the grotesque - as demonstrated by the work of Schwitters or Bloomer - likewise has the power to expand its proper boundaries and entirely to engulf the edifice

Within the manifold descriptions of absorption rupture and excess that characterize the grotesque architectural body John Ruskins etiology of La Serenissima in The Stones ofVenice engages this expansion of meaning from an ornamental program to a delirious mental state that produces absurd and sickening artifacts Ruskin passes into the body of grotesque architecture through an ornamental mouth on the church of Santa Maria Formosa tlhat speaks to him of Venices fall into an unscrupulous pmsuit of pleasure to the extent that the architecture of the Veneshy

tian Renaissance

is among the lowest and bisest ever built by the hands of men being especially distinguished by a spirit of brutal mockery and insolent jest which exhausting itself in deformed and monshystrous sculpture can sometimes be hardly otherwise defined than as the perpetuation in stone of the ribaldries of drunkenshyness (11 135)14

In the chapter Grotesque Renaissance found in the third volume of The Stones titled The Fall from which this passhysage was taken Ruskin allegorizes the decline of the Venetian Republic through two elaborate legends buried within the church one being its foundatio11 and the other being the emergence of the Festival of the Twelve Maries Ruskin writes

The Bishop of Uderzo driven by the Lombards from his bishopshyric as he was praying beheld a vision of the Virgin ifother who ordered him to found a church in her honour in the place

111

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assemblage 32

where he should see a white cloud rest And when he went out the white cloud went before him and on the place where ii rested he built a church and it was called the Church of St Mary the Beautiful [Santa Maria Formosa] from the loveliness of the form in which she had appeared in the vision (I I 137)

He reports that the church was consecrated in the midshyseventh century rebuilt in 864 and enriched with relics reshybuilt again after a fire in 1105 (or 11 75 according to another

source Ruskin mentions) and stood until 1689 when it was destroyed by an earthquake only to be restored by a rich merchant named Turrin Toroni Despite conflicting historishycal accounts ofSanta Maria Formosas history to Ruskin all that is necessary for the reader to know is that every vesshy

tige of the church in which the ceremony took place was deshystroyed at least as early as 1689 and that the ceremony itself having been abolished in the close of the fourteenth censhytury is only to be conceived as taking place within the more ancient church resembling St Marks (11 138) He directs the readers attention to the contrast between the former when it had its Byzantine church and its yearly procession of the Doge and the Brides and the later whe11 it had its

Renaissance church in the style of Sansovino and its yearly honouring is done away (11 138)

The yearly procession was a Venetian custom that brought about the legendary attack and rescue of brides in the year 943 During medieval times nobles were allowed to wed one day a year in a sacrament between god and man where every eye was invoked for its glance and every tongue for its prayers ( 11 139) Ruskins friend the poet Samuel Rogers describes a typical bride as covered with a veil transparent as the gossamer which fell from beneath a starry diadem and over a jewel on her dazzling neck15

As per medieval legend in the year 943 these jewels enshyticed Triestine pirates to enter the church ofSt Pietro di Castello to attack the laity a11d lo abduct the virgin brides In response ~o this attack the casseleri a group of trunk

makers or carpenters from the parish of Santa Maria Formosa rescued the brides and their dowry chests The possible translation of casseleri into casket makers inshytrigues Ruskin who writes if however the readier likes to substitute carpenters or house builders for casket-makers he may do so with great reason thereby placing the buildshying tradesmen at the center of the brides rescue and the restoration of social order (11 143)16 As a reward for their bravery the Doge promised to visit the church of the casseleri every year so that the festival of the 2nd of Februshyary after the year 943 seems to have been observed only in memory of the deliverance of the brides and nomiddot longer set apart for public nuptials (I I 140) From this event supposshyedly emerged the Festival of the Twelve Maries a threeshyday-long procession from San Marcos Cathedral to Santa Maria Formosa that featured as its central ornament twelve maidens dressed in silver and gold

In a more detailed account of the festival than Ruskin proshyvides Edward Muir explains that on 31 January (the date for parish priests to solemnize all betrothals from the previshyous year) the prince and the commune of Venice in an act of public charity sponsored weddings for twelve deserving but poor girls by offering them dowries and adorning them in gems17 It was both the dowries and the girls that attracted the Triestine pirates to enter the cathedral of San Pietro di Castello and make off with these treasures According to Muir while the rape of the Venetian and the Sabine women are both myths concerned with the problem of preserving group fertility the Venetian account emshyphasized the protective peaceful inward-looking order provided by a strong cohesive community18 The date attributed to the retrieval of the brides and their dowries 2 February corresponded with the day of the Purification of the Virgin or Candlemas a ceremony commemorating Marys postpartum purification and celebrating divine motherhood

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Despite the fact that every feature of the surrounding scene which was associated with that festival has been in succeedshying ages destToyed Ruskin nonetheless argues that the spot is still worth a pilgrimage in order to receive a painful lesson (11 144 ) He advises the reader to recall the ancient festivals to the Virgin where the daughters of Venice knelt yearly beshyfore examining the head that is carved on the base of the tower still dedicated to St Mary the Beautiful It is

A head - huge inhuman and monstrous - leering in bestial degradation too foul to be either pictured or described or to be beheld for more than an instant yet let it be cndllred for that inshystant for in that head is embodied the type of evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline and it is well that we should see and feel the full horror of it on this spot and know what pestilence it was that came and breathed upon her beauty until it melted away like the white cloud from the ancient fields of Santa Maria Formosa (I I 144-45)

After he isolates this particular head from the multitude inshyfesting Venice Ruskin lists the most contaminated buildshyings and rather cannily insists that we too should visit them His topography of degenerate architecture diverts the

tourists itinerary away from visiting the most beautiful or noteworthy sites into a survey of the most hideous His unique processional route leads us from the churches of San Moise (by Alessandro Tremignon in 1668) of Santa Maria Zobenigo (by Giuseppe Sardi in 1680) of St Eustachio (also known as San Stae by Domenico Rossi

in 1709) and of the Ospadeletto (by Baldassare Longhena in 1674) then to the Palazzo Corner della Regina (by

Domenico Rossi in 1724-27) the Palazzo Pesaro (also by Longhena begun in 1652) and finally to the Bridge of Sighs (by Antonio Contino in 1600)zo Each of the churches is encrusted with excessive secular ornamentation that swallows the facades they are supposed merely to emshybellish with sacred images In other words where the ornashymental program should subordinate itself as an extrinsic element or frame to the larger aesthetic representation of

the building here it consumes the buildings face as a lepshyrous growth that feeds off of stony flesh

By isolating the head on Santa Maria Formosa from the larger body of grotesque ornament Ruskin opens in The Stones ofVenice a tangible fissure toward which Mark Wigley has pointed me a fissure that we are about to enter First apart from Ruskins historical excursus of the virgin brides abduchon and the Virgin Mothers appearance that motivates his heated attack the facade of Santa Maria

Formosa appears restrained when compared with the other buildings just listed and the lonely head appears to be rather ordinary As a central antagonist within The Stones the head occupies a position in the book that its visage on

the church hardly seems to merit

Ruskin initiates his discussion on the grotesque Renaisshysance in an earlier chapter titled The alure of Gothic

where he simply tempts us with a quick allusion to this subject and then defers his explanation until the third volshyume21 ot only does this deferral allow him to maintain

the chronological sequence necessary to write the history of a rise and fall it also heightens his climactic outrage against

the Renaissance perversion of art and society In fact as his vivid language betrays the grotesque is one of Ruskins great passions22 The open molllth of the ornamental head acts as a closure to both The Stones and the Renaissance provoking the question as to why of all the innumerable open sores that may be found in Venetian architecture has Ruskin directed such energy toward censuring this particushylar head and then failing to represent it Despite his distinct instruction to gaze at the degraded image if only for an inshystant Ruskin nonetheless expresses profound ambivalence toward our looking at this object that is too hidemiddotous to be either pictured or described Instead of illustrating his text with the head on Santa Maria Formosa he substitutes a htad from tht foundation of the Palazzo Corner Regina

113

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Singley

Despite the fact that every feature of the surrounding scene which was associated with that festival has been in succeedshying ages destToyed Ruskin nonetheless argues that the spot is still worth a pilgrimage in order to receive a painful lesson (11 144 ) He advises the reader to recall the ancient festivals to the Virgin where the daughters of Venice knelt yearly beshyfore examining the head that is carved on the base of the tower still dedicated to St Mary the Beautiful It is

A head - huge inhuman and monstrous - leering in bestial degradation too foul to be either pictured or described or to be beheld for more than an instant yet let it be cndllred for that inshystant for in that head is embodied the type of evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline and it is well that we should see and feel the full horror of it on this spot and know what pestilence it was that came and breathed upon her beauty until it melted away like the white cloud from the ancient fields of Santa Maria Formosa (I I 144-45)

After he isolates this particular head from the multitude inshyfesting Venice Ruskin lists the most contaminated buildshyings and rather cannily insists that we too should visit them His topography of degenerate architecture diverts the

tourists itinerary away from visiting the most beautiful or noteworthy sites into a survey of the most hideous His unique processional route leads us from the churches of San Moise (by Alessandro Tremignon in 1668) of Santa Maria Zobenigo (by Giuseppe Sardi in 1680) of St Eustachio (also known as San Stae by Domenico Rossi

in 1709) and of the Ospadeletto (by Baldassare Longhena in 1674) then to the Palazzo Corner della Regina (by

Domenico Rossi in 1724-27) the Palazzo Pesaro (also by Longhena begun in 1652) and finally to the Bridge of Sighs (by Antonio Contino in 1600)zo Each of the churches is encrusted with excessive secular ornamentation that swallows the facades they are supposed merely to emshybellish with sacred images In other words where the ornashymental program should subordinate itself as an extrinsic element or frame to the larger aesthetic representation of

the building here it consumes the buildings face as a lepshyrous growth that feeds off of stony flesh

By isolating the head on Santa Maria Formosa from the larger body of grotesque ornament Ruskin opens in The Stones ofVenice a tangible fissure toward which Mark Wigley has pointed me a fissure that we are about to enter First apart from Ruskins historical excursus of the virgin brides abduchon and the Virgin Mothers appearance that motivates his heated attack the facade of Santa Maria

Formosa appears restrained when compared with the other buildings just listed and the lonely head appears to be rather ordinary As a central antagonist within The Stones the head occupies a position in the book that its visage on

the church hardly seems to merit

Ruskin initiates his discussion on the grotesque Renaisshysance in an earlier chapter titled The alure of Gothic

where he simply tempts us with a quick allusion to this subject and then defers his explanation until the third volshyume21 ot only does this deferral allow him to maintain

the chronological sequence necessary to write the history of a rise and fall it also heightens his climactic outrage against

the Renaissance perversion of art and society In fact as his vivid language betrays the grotesque is one of Ruskins great passions22 The open molllth of the ornamental head acts as a closure to both The Stones and the Renaissance provoking the question as to why of all the innumerable open sores that may be found in Venetian architecture has Ruskin directed such energy toward censuring this particushylar head and then failing to represent it Despite his distinct instruction to gaze at the degraded image if only for an inshystant Ruskin nonetheless expresses profound ambivalence toward our looking at this object that is too hidemiddotous to be either pictured or described Instead of illustrating his text with the head on Santa Maria Formosa he substitutes a htad from tht foundation of the Palazzo Corner Regina

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assemblage 32

made merely monstrous by exaggerations of eyeballs and cheeks as an example of the base grotesque and he comshy

pares it to another example of the base grotesque a Gothic lion symbol of Saint Mark from the Castelbarco Tomb in Verona ( l l 190) In this struggle between attraction and reshypulsion iconophobia and iconophilia Ruskin admonishes us to set our eyes briefly upon an image that is too lurid even for him to render visible in drawings or in words Deshyspite the potential to draw from Ruskins publication as a guidebook to Venice the primary role of The Stones was as

a discourse on English architecture culture and mores and it is this polemic of reform that severs Ruskins text from the physical exigencies of Venice

Or does it Despite his claim that the head is too vile even to describe in words Ruskin actually does convey enough illustrative details - such as huge inhuman monstrous and leering - for us to generate a vivid mental picture that might even surpass the horror of the actual head Furthershymore he describes the typical grotesque face as a tongue protruding from an expression of sneering mockery And

finally despite his promised silence he cannot contain himself from exclaiming that in the head on Santa Maria Formosa the teeth are represented as decayed (l l 162) His description however guarded inevitably overflows the boundaries of representation Ruskins advice actually to visit Venice operates as a rhetorical device that invites the reader on an imaginary voyage thus he covers his argument of social reform with the innocent jacket of a tourists guidebook IfRuskin had implored us never to set our eyes upon the profane image he would risk enhancing its erotic appeal by thus veiling it Instead with an expert sleight of hand he encourages us to examine an object that is entirely unavailable to our gaze - a skillful maneuver that also alshylows him to dodge the crisis of representing the disgusting or the ugly But most important by refusing to render the

head visible in The Stones Ruskin covers our naked eyes with his written hand

While my textual exegesis is overdetermined it could not possibly match the hyperbolic intensity of Ruskins words Three volumes are filled with what Tony Tanner describes as unblushing rhapsodic flightsn of prose and as extremeshyly vituperative even venomous writing23 If we follow Stephen Banns argument both the literary tradition of ekphrasis the classical convention for writing about art and

Horaces notion of Ut pictura poesis or as a painting so in poetry are central to our discussion of Ruskin and the groshytesque Bann explains that ekphrasis is a genre of writing parasitic upon a work of art dependent first of all on the

risky presumption that the visual work of art can be transshylated into the terms of verbal discourse without remainshyder14 While Bann argues that verbal descriptions cannot cover all aspects of an artwork and consequently must leave something out I would expand this discussion to arshygue that it is likewise possible for verbal description to overshyflow the limits of the artwork and to engulf it in a language of surplus While insufficient ekphrasis is a danger so too are superfluous descriptions which threaten the status of the artwork with a devouring language2

When writing amplifies to an excessive extent the content of a work of art it can swallow the work whole While it would be tempting and even meaningful to argue that Ruskins writing mirrors the grotesque subjects of his discusshysion his omission of the head in his publication allows him to circumvent neatly the possibilities of his own excessive prose Insofar as Geoffrey Galt Harpham concludes that the ambivalent presence of meaning within the ostensibly meaningless form constitutes the real threat and the real revolution of grottesche Ruskin responds to this semiotic ambivalence with his disturbed treatment of the head26

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The oscillation between lack and surplus that structures the paradox of representing the ugly also applies to descriptions of the terrifying in both cases to reproduceimitate in words the hideous or terrifying objects is to become them The conflictlllal relations sufficiencyinsufficiency surplus deficit abundanceshortage in terms of representation serve well to summarize the dilemma Kant encounters when writing about the sublime

Where fine art evidences its superiority is in the beautiful deshyscriptions it gives of things that in nature would be ugly or disshypleasing The Furies diseases devastations of war and the like can (as evils) be very beautifully described nay even represented in pictures One kind of ugliness alone is incapable of being repshyresented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic delight and consequently artistic beauty namely that which excites disgust21

Similarly it would seem that Ruskin actually writes of the sublime when comparing the noble with the ignoble workshy

man because the latter may make his creaturres disgusting but never fearful ( l l l 70)

Disgust and fear grotesque and sublime To emphasize this

distinction Ruskin calls forth the Furies to describe the worker who is not inspired by the sublimity of divine terror dividing the proper subjects of fear into modes of artistic temperament first predetermined or involuntary apathy secolld mockery and third diseased and ungoverned imaginativeness ( l l 166) Regarding involuntary or predetermined apathy he

distinguishes between the false and the true grotesque

In the true grotesque a man of naturally strong feeling is accishydentally or resolutely apathetic in the false grotesque a man naturally apathetic is forcing himself into te mporary excitement The horror which is expressed by the one comes upon him whether he will or not that which is expressed by the other is sought out by him and elaborated by his art ( 11 168)

In this respect the artisan of the false grotesque never felt any Divine fear he never shuddered when he heard the cry

from the burning towers of the earth Venga Medusa sl lo farem di smalto He is stone already and needs no gentle hand laid upon his eyes to save him ( 11 169)28 In this passhysage that Ruskin borrows from Dantes Inferno the gentle hand belongs to Virgil who is protecting the younger poet from the Gorgons petrifying gazeNThus when the Furies

screaming from the burning tower cry Let Medusa come and well turn him to stone it is in fact the poets hand that draws the protective veil over the observers eyes and encrypts the image within words But in The Stones Ruskin covers our view with a veil as transparent as gossamer and in so doing actually endows the head with libidinal energy In other words the failure of Ruskins iconophobia to conshy

struct the absence of compelling images as free from the seshyduction of absent images weaves a veil of desire This in a nutshell is the crisis of representation that the grotesque disshycloses when it intersects the rhetorical program ofekphrasis

Venga Medusa silo farem di smalto In Sigmund Freuds frequently cited essay Medusas Head To decapitate= To castrate The terror of Medusa is the fear of castration

linked to vision This fear occurs when a boy catches sight of the female genitals surrounded by hair and disshycovers the missing penis10 Both the head of Medusa and the vulva are apotropaic or counterphobic objects to the male gaze when openly displayed they produce a feeling of horror or petrifaction in the male viewer And indeed Ruskin writes it is not as the creating but as the seeing man that we are here contemplating the master of the true

grotesque (I I 169) While Freud refers to Rabelaiss story ofhow the devil took to flight when the woman showed him her vulva in a historical account of apotropaisrn in action during the 1848 revolution Parisian women were known to lift up their skirts and expose their pudenda as a defensive tactic11 Regarding the consequences of such an exposure Ann Bergren explains that after the male flees in

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fright he attempts to repress the wound without a trace32

In Ruskins case when he covers the swollen l ips of the sevshyered head with his own textual surplus he both erases and enhances the wound The possibilities of an apotropaic architecture suggest an application of Freuds analysis to Ruskins grotesque object of desire now viewed as a vagina that leers in bestial degradation Rather than a castration it is a grotesque cave or vagina dentata from which effuses the liquid succubus ofa perforated interior that turns the male citizens of Venice into Ruskin s stones while endowing the women with phallic power A form of invagination that refers to multiple folds and an open interior Ruskins grotesque overlaps the intrauterine space of architectural origins no longer the inviolate origins of virgin betrothal and immaculate conception but alluding to the necessity of postpartum purification

The grotesque also overlaps the uterine disease of hysteria and the implications of mental disorders to which accordshying to Ruskin all artists are subject If we return to the quesshytion ofapathy discussed above Ruskin himself describes the grotesque as belonging in part to diseased and ungoverned imaginativeness

The grotesque which comes to all men in a disturbed dream is the most intelligible of this kind but also the most ignoble the imagination in this instance being entirely deprived ofall aid from reason and incapable ofself-government I believe howshyever that the noblest forms of imaginative power are also in some sort ungovernable and have in them something of the character of dreams so that the vision of whatever kind comes uncalled ancl will not submit itself to the seer but conquers him and forces him to speak as a prophet having no power over his words or thoughts Only if the whole man be trained pershyfectly and his mind calm consistent and powerful the vision which comes to him is seen as in a perfect mirror serenely and in consistence with the rational powers but if the mind be imshyperfect and ill trained the vision is seen as in a broken mirror with strange distortions and discrepancies all the passions of the heart breathing upon it in cross ripples till hardly a trace of it remains unbroken ( 11 178-79)1

The grotesq ue mask at Santa Maria Formosa and the face of a male hysteric

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Although the image of the broken mirror reflects the inteshy

rior ofAlexander Popes garden grotto lined with shards of

sparkling glass I have cited this passage for its classical allushysion to artistic madness and the symptomology of the groshytesque mind that produces it While the head ofSanta

Maria Formosa in Ruskins analysis reflects the mind of a

suffering artist it is Jean-Martin Charcot writing in Les Dif(onnes et les malades dans [art of 1889 who directly

links the head with the visage of a male hysteric and in so doing returns the grotesque from the fantasies of disturbed

minds to the field of natural representation So important is the head to the argument Charcot proffers in this publicashytion that he opens the first chapter titled Les Grotesques

by explaining that the grotesque mask on the Church of

Santa Maria Formosa is his point ofdeparture and by citing Ruskins powerful description quoted above from The

Stones ofVenice A head- huge inhuman and monshy

strous- leering in bestial degradation too foul to be either

pictured or described or to be beheld for more than an inshystantH Charcot sees the signs of convulsion ~n works of art

as representing actual physioaogical disturbances While

artists may idealize and normalize their subjects they also serve to decipher deformities into pathologies As Georges

Didi-Huberman writes

The work of art interprets the symptom in the sense that it reproshyduces it This is the case of the famous grotesque mask from the Church of Santa Maria Formosa in Venice where Charcot recshyognized none other than a facial spasm of a special nature often found in male or female hysteric subjects with a semiparalysis of the limbs and exhibiting such distinctive characteristics that it is impossible to confuse it with any other spasmodic facial disorshyder Charcot names it hemispasme glossolabie hysterique and having it in front of his eyes at Salpetriere has Richer jointly engrave the Venetian mask and the portrait of one of his hysterishycal patients as two interpretations of the same role of the same form H

Charcot specifically aligns Ruskins head with the physical etiologies of hysteria traditionally a female malady now loshy

cated in the male face And while this reproduction of the head on the church ofSanta Maria Formosa is a striking

analog to Ruskins Stones Charcot offers even further reshy

search on the Venetian Renaissance in Les Demoniaques dans art where he analyzes a reproduction ofVittore

Carpaccios painting Miracle ofthe True Cross that he titles

Le Patriache ltle grade delivre un demoniaque

The scene occurs on the banks of the Grand Canal -0f Venice in the ground floor of a palazzo Here is a mise-en-scene ably arshyranged to strike the imagination of the people and which pershymits a large number of dignitaries to assist the miracle At the foot of the palazzo the crowd is already numerous it is continushyally enlarged by the curious who arrive by water and in the disshytance by the pr-0cession crossing the bridge The Grand Canal is covered by gondolas Within the loggia surrounded by clerics and clergy holding large altar candles a young boy is in torment his mouth is open his head is ben1 back and turned to one side His appearance is more one of a young choreic or of one showshying the symptoms of the dance of Saint-Guy than a patient in the grip of a hystero-epileptic seizure The patriarch presents him the cross31gt

Charcot finds something close to the symptoms of epileptic

hysteria characterized by an open mouth within Carpacshycios depictiolll of an exorcism The thin line between art

and reality that Charcot observes haunted Ruskin who had

proposed writing a complete guide to Carpaccios work and who obsessed on the likeness between St Ursula and the

object of his affections Rose La Touche to the brink of his

own madness 37

The open and salivating mouth ofCarpaccios hysteric

metaphorically linked to a dyspeptic stomach and flatulent anus describes a grotesque body gorging in carnival invershysion and excessive appetite We might recall that the elaboshyrate dining hall of Neros Domus Aurea was precisely such a site for feasting and feeding A strong proponent of the poshy

tential for revolutionary transgressions inspired by Rabelaiss carnival Mikhail Bakhtin describes the grotesque as walls turned to flesh in a world where the human body is used as

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Singley

Although the image of the broken mirror reflects the inteshy

rior ofAlexander Popes garden grotto lined with shards of

sparkling glass I have cited this passage for its classical allushysion to artistic madness and the symptomology of the groshytesque mind that produces it While the head ofSanta

Maria Formosa in Ruskins analysis reflects the mind of a

suffering artist it is Jean-Martin Charcot writing in Les Dif(onnes et les malades dans [art of 1889 who directly

links the head with the visage of a male hysteric and in so doing returns the grotesque from the fantasies of disturbed

minds to the field of natural representation So important is the head to the argument Charcot proffers in this publicashytion that he opens the first chapter titled Les Grotesques

by explaining that the grotesque mask on the Church of

Santa Maria Formosa is his point ofdeparture and by citing Ruskins powerful description quoted above from The

Stones ofVenice A head- huge inhuman and monshy

strous- leering in bestial degradation too foul to be either

pictured or described or to be beheld for more than an inshystantH Charcot sees the signs of convulsion ~n works of art

as representing actual physioaogical disturbances While

artists may idealize and normalize their subjects they also serve to decipher deformities into pathologies As Georges

Didi-Huberman writes

The work of art interprets the symptom in the sense that it reproshyduces it This is the case of the famous grotesque mask from the Church of Santa Maria Formosa in Venice where Charcot recshyognized none other than a facial spasm of a special nature often found in male or female hysteric subjects with a semiparalysis of the limbs and exhibiting such distinctive characteristics that it is impossible to confuse it with any other spasmodic facial disorshyder Charcot names it hemispasme glossolabie hysterique and having it in front of his eyes at Salpetriere has Richer jointly engrave the Venetian mask and the portrait of one of his hysterishycal patients as two interpretations of the same role of the same form H

Charcot specifically aligns Ruskins head with the physical etiologies of hysteria traditionally a female malady now loshy

cated in the male face And while this reproduction of the head on the church ofSanta Maria Formosa is a striking

analog to Ruskins Stones Charcot offers even further reshy

search on the Venetian Renaissance in Les Demoniaques dans art where he analyzes a reproduction ofVittore

Carpaccios painting Miracle ofthe True Cross that he titles

Le Patriache ltle grade delivre un demoniaque

The scene occurs on the banks of the Grand Canal -0f Venice in the ground floor of a palazzo Here is a mise-en-scene ably arshyranged to strike the imagination of the people and which pershymits a large number of dignitaries to assist the miracle At the foot of the palazzo the crowd is already numerous it is continushyally enlarged by the curious who arrive by water and in the disshytance by the pr-0cession crossing the bridge The Grand Canal is covered by gondolas Within the loggia surrounded by clerics and clergy holding large altar candles a young boy is in torment his mouth is open his head is ben1 back and turned to one side His appearance is more one of a young choreic or of one showshying the symptoms of the dance of Saint-Guy than a patient in the grip of a hystero-epileptic seizure The patriarch presents him the cross31gt

Charcot finds something close to the symptoms of epileptic

hysteria characterized by an open mouth within Carpacshycios depictiolll of an exorcism The thin line between art

and reality that Charcot observes haunted Ruskin who had

proposed writing a complete guide to Carpaccios work and who obsessed on the likeness between St Ursula and the

object of his affections Rose La Touche to the brink of his

own madness 37

The open and salivating mouth ofCarpaccios hysteric

metaphorically linked to a dyspeptic stomach and flatulent anus describes a grotesque body gorging in carnival invershysion and excessive appetite We might recall that the elaboshyrate dining hall of Neros Domus Aurea was precisely such a site for feasting and feeding A strong proponent of the poshy

tential for revolutionary transgressions inspired by Rabelaiss carnival Mikhail Bakhtin describes the grotesque as walls turned to flesh in a world where the human body is used as

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assemblage 32

a building material where we can no longer distinguish the arch itectural boundaries between body and building inside

and outside frame and subject Quoting Rabelaiss characshy

ter Panurge from Gargantua and Pantagruel Bakhtin deshyscribes a delirious reversal of body and building parts I

have observed that the pleasure-twats ofwomen in this part

of the world are much cheaper than stones therefore the

walls of the city should be built of twats38 In Bakhtins groshytesque carnival the lower apertures of waste reach into the

upper regions of taste through a mouth that when opened

reduces the face to a gaping orifice and also transforms Ruskins masking of the head into the writing-ltgtver of the

oral capacity If as Bakhtin argues the grotesque body may

be translated into an architecture ofgaping passages and tushy

mescent towers the head on Santa Maria Formosa engages

in a dialogue with the campa nile where the mingling of phallic and vaginal topoi borders on fornication Let us reshy

call too that this was the only church in Venice dedicated

to the Virgin the legendary retrieval of the brides and their

little boxes19 Thus this particular site represents what hapshypens when voluptuous desire erodes the fraternal bonds of

the control of reproduction through marriage

From pageants dedicated to sharing a communal Eucharist

placed upon tongues that spoke the word of the Lord to the festivals transubstantiation into moist tongues licking loose

lips Ruskin marks the specific moment ofVenetian decline with the death of the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo in 1423 and

the ensuing year of festival From then onward the Veneshytians drank with deeper thirst from the fountains of forbidshy

den pleasure and dug for springs hitherto unknown in the dark places of the earth (I I 195) Ruskins rather oblique reference to digging invokes the etymological origins of the grotesque alil archaeology that takes us inside the cavern at which we have thus far only gaped

Given the linguistic dilemma of discussing the grotesque without referring to its archetypal origins Walter Benjamin

also succumbs to the compulsion to repeat

The discovery of the secret storehouse of invention is attributed to Ludovico da Feltre called ii Morto because of his grotesque underground activities as a discoverer And thanks to the mediashytion of an anchorite of the same name (in ET A Hoffmanns Die Serapionsbriider) the antique painter who was picked from Plinys much discussed passage 0111 decorative paintillg as the classic of the grotesque the balcony-painter Serapion has also been used in literature as the personification ofthe subterrashynean-fantastic the occult-spectral For even at that time the enigmatically mysterious character of the effect of the grotesque seems to have been associated with its subterraneanly mysterious origin in buried ruins and catacombs The word is not derived from grotta in the literal sense but from the burial in the sense of concealment - which the cave or grotto expresses The enigshymatic was therefore part of its effect from the very beginning For this the eighteenth century still had the expression das Verkrochene [that which has crept away) Winckelmanns posishytion is not so very far removed from this However severely he criticizes the stylistic principles of baroque allegory40

I will close with Benjamins opening in the ground The

chthonic journey into the crypt and its originary status as arshy

chitecture inhabits Ruskins text as the subterranean fanshy

tastic and thmiddote occult-spectral By entering the grotto and

transgressing the Vitruvian canon of propriety and mimesis in representation late Renaissance artists ruptured the conshytinuity between cinquecento humanism and Roman classishy

cism by liberating the free and inventive license that the grotesque signified~1 Ruskin unlike our previous litany of

theorists does not directly return us to the cave through Vasaris originary account Rather he constructs a new defishynition of the grotesque and its concomitant vines that disshy

places it from the grotto and locates it in ornament covering the buildings fa~ade And yet by examining themiddot mouth of the head on Santa Maria Formosa the Venetians as well as

Ruskin entered a similar passage spiraling downward into

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Singley

the forbidden depths of the mind Ruskin like Vitruvius shywho disparages slender stalks with heads of men and of animals attached to half the body - laments that groshytesque ornament is the fruit ofgreat minds who can draw the human head perfectly yet cut it off and hang it by the hair at the end of a garland ( 11 170)12 Despite such proshytests against the dismembered and hybrid body the disturbshying awareness that a fragmented rather than whole body

has always lurked within the classical temple contaminates both Ruskin s and Vitruviuss treatisesH When this ornashyment begins to show its teeth or to overflow beyond its tolershyated cavity as a libidinous body drunk from grapevines that choke the edifice when it is too full to be contained and bursts forth in unrestrained fecundity then the cracks ofarshy

chitecture dilate and the grotesque presents its brown and bloody head in an originary moment no longer stable clean or progressive

oles I Vilruvius On Architecture trans Frank Granger (New York Putnam 1934) 105 On tl1e style of painting Vilruvius describes see Frances K Barasch The Grotesque A Study in Meanings (The I lague Mouton 1971 ) Barasch Clltplains the termishynology of Pompeiian wall painlings The Ornale st) le vhich Vitruvius condemned preceded the fantastic style known todagt as the Grotesque the Fantastic or the Intricate SI)le Until the nineteenth century both Augustan and Tit us fantastic styles were regarded as one Eighteenthshyand nineteenth-century restorations at Pompeii and I lerculaneum and certiin remarks in Vitruvius enmiddot abled August ~lau and others to identify four stages in the ancient art of Rome as well as Pompe11 I ) The Incrustation Sl)bullle c second century BC 2) The Architectural Slyle c first century sc 3) The Ornate Style (Landscape Style in Grangers translation ofVitruvius) which overlapped the second midshyAuguslan period to 11gt 63 this was Vitruvius period 4) The Fantastic or lntricale Style iO 63- 79 Cf Eugenic Strong Ari in Ancient Rome (New York 1899) Nineshytcenth-ltenlury arl historians Alfred Woltmann and Kirl Woermann fa Or the tenn grotesque for the third sl) le Most of the painting of llerculaneum and Pompeii exhibit the later grolcsque sl) Jc with which Vitruvius finds fault so bitshyterly (quoted in Barisch The Groshytesque 29)

2 Suetonius Hidory ofthe Twelve CaSors trans Philemon I lolland (1606 reprint ew York AMS Press 1967) 2 124- 25

3 Ciorgio Vasari Lives ofthe Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Arshy

119

chitects trans Caston du C de Vere 10 vols (London Philip Lee Warner 1912-15) 8 75

4 As cited by Ewa Kuryluk Salome and udos in the Cave ofSex The Grotesque Origins Iconography Techniques (Evanston Northwestshyern University Press 1987) 105 Also see John Serie A Plan ofMr Popes Gorden (Berkeley University ofCalifornia Press 1982) On Popes grotto as an optical device see Jurgis Baltruiaitis Aberrotiona An Essay on the Legend ofFomu trans Richard Miller (Cambridge Mass The MIT Press 1989) Kuryluk cites another description of Popes grotto by uan observer from

1ewcastle lo multipl) this Dishyversity and still more increase the Delight Mr Pope s poetick Genius has introduced a kind of Machinshyery which performs the same Part in the Grotto that supernal Powers and incorporeal Beings act in the heroick Species of Poetry This is effected by disposing Plates of Looking glass in the obscure Parts of the Roof and Sides of the Cave where a sufficient Force of Light is wanting to discover the Deception while the othEr Puts the Rills Fountains Flints Pebbles ampc being duly illuminated are so reflected by the various posited Mirrors as without exposing the Cause Ccry Object is multiplied and its Position represented in a surprising Diersity Cast your E)es upwird and OU half shudder to see Cataracts ofWater Precipitating Oer )Our head from impending Stones and Rocks while salient Spouts rise in rapid Streams at your reel Around you are equally surshyprised with flowing Rilllets and rolling Waters that rush over airey Precipices and break amongst Heaps of ideal Flinls and Spar

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assemblage 32

Thus by a line Taste and happy Management of Nalure you are presented wilh an indistinguisha hie Mixture of Rcallities and Imagery ( 105--6)

5 Johann Joachim Winckelmann Winckelmann Writings on Art ed David Irwin (London Phaidon 1972) 84-85

6 The Works ofohn Ruskin ed E T Cook and Alexander Weddermiddot bum 39 Ols (London George Allen 1904) II 161--02 Subseshyquent references in the text lo Ruskins writings will be lo the 01shyumc and page numbers of the Lishybra) Edition

7 Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World trans Il~l~nc lsOlsky (Bloomington Indiana Univcrsi ly Press 1984) 31- 32 Bakhlin conshytinues What is lhe character of these ornaments TI1ey impressed the connoisseurs by lhe extremely fanciful free and playful treatment of plant animal and human fonns These forms seemed to be inlerwoshyven as if giving birth to each olhcr The borderlines that dilbullide the kingdoms of nature in the usual picture of the world were boldI) inshyfringed eilher was Ihere lhe usual static presentation of reality There wis no longer the movement offinshyished forms vegelable or animal in a finished stable world instead the inner movemenl ofbeing itself bullbullmiddotas expressed in the passing ofone form into the other in the eer incompleted character of being This ornamental mlerpla) revealed an extreme lighlness and freedom ofartistic fantasy a g~) almosl laughing libertinag The gay tone of the new ornament was grasped and brilliantly rendered by Raphael and his pupils in their grotesque decoration of the Vatican loggias (32)

8 Manfredo Tafuri Theories and History ofArchitecture trans Giorgio Verrecchia (New York llarper and Row 1980) 17

9 Mark Taylor ~Nuclear Architecshyture or Fabulous Architecture or Tragic Architecture or Dionysian Architecture or Assemblage 11 (April 1990) 14 Taylor applies his theOI) of the grotesque archishytectural body lo the work of Peter Eisenman writing that Eisenmans gaping architecture - like all such gaps - is grotesque Does this grotesque other hamiddote an)1hing lo do with a tomb or crypt ( 14)

10 Jennifer Bloomer Architecture and the Text The (S)crypts ofoyce and Piraneti (New l laen Yale University Press 1993) 49

11 Vasari Lfres 5 229 Vasari also writes He was a melancholy pershyson and was constantly studying the antiquities and seeing among them seclions of vaults and ranges ofwalls adorned with grotesques he liked these so much that he never ceased from examining them 1-fe was never lired indeed of exshyamining all thal he could find beshylow the ground in Rome in the way ofancient grottoes with vaults inshynumerable (227)

12 On the origins of the grotesque sec also Geoffrey Galt Harpham On the Grotesque Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton Princeton Unhmiddotersitr Press 1982) 27 Harpham writes bullmiddotMore because ofthe setting than because ofany qualities inherent in the designs thcmsekes a consensus soon emergecl according to which the designs were called grottesche - ofor pertaining lo underground caves Like Vitruviuss judgment this naming is a mistake pregnanl with truth for although the designs

were never intended to be undershyground nor cros palace a grotto 1he word is perfect 111c Latin form ofgrotta is probably cnipta (cf crypt) which in turn derives form the Creek Krnpth a vault one of the cognates is Krupteig to hide Grotesque then githers into itself suggestions of the underground of burial and ofsecrec( (27)

13 Br architectural origins I am in part invoking Abb~ Laugiers little rustic hut and his dismissal of the cave Laugier writes 1 he sabullOlge 111 his leafy shelter does not know how to protecl himself from the unshycomfortable damp that penetrates everywhere he creeps inlo a ncarb) cave and find mg it di) he praises himself for his discovery But soon the darkness and foul air surroundmiddot ing him make his 5lay unbearable again (Marc-Anloinc Laugier An Essay ot1 Archilecture trans Wolfgang 1lemnann Los Angeles 1-lennessey and Ingalls 1977) 11 ) On the symbolic relationship beshytween the cave and the female body Kuryluk writes The Euroshypean spnbolism of the cave as a dwelling-place of mythical femininshyil) personifying fertility and regenshyeration of earth and water was established in Crecce I lomcr speaks of the elemental architecture created by nature and of life origimiddot nating from it llis image inspires endless fantasy as in Porphyriuss extensive commcnlal) on the cave of naiads 111 the Odrssey The length of Ihis m)$tical text conCS the significance Porph) rius attribshyuted to lhe grotto as a metaphor for the spirit of the earth and lhe m)Sshytcrics of prOltrPation TIHbull luminous gods incarnations ofsunlight and reason visil the cabulle but its pcrmamiddot nent inhabitants are the shadow the unconscious and lhc female Nature is a she and in her sublerrashy

120

nean chambers dwell all great godshydesses like Venus and Diana (Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex 100) Kuryluk ilso explains that the shell is one of the emshyblems of the grotesque not only in architecture but also in the decorashytive arts The predilection for it reshyflects both its inherent qualities and the universal reverie provoked by the miraculous creation ofsnails which produce houses of their own substance - as if from nothingness Being an intimate enclosure the shell has been regarded as the S)mmiddot

bol of the vagina and the uterus hence ii can be middotiewed as a miniashyture grotto ( 103)

14 Ruskins accusation ofdrunkshyenness alludes to a set of iconoshygraphic relationships between grotesque ~nes and ripe grapes that Slephen Bann The Trne Vine Ot1 Visual Representation and the Westmiddot em Tradition (Cambridge Camshybridge University Press 1989) oullines beautifully Crapes are the origin of one of the most prevashylenl myths about representalion in the West the story of the Creek painter Zexius whose skill was so great than even the birds flew down lo peck at lhe deceptive patches of pigment crafted by his brush (6) He continues the motif of the grape vine in its infinite varicl) of decoratimiddote uses seems to concretize in a particular way the qualil)middot of being present in sensuous abunshydance This feature can be traced in the painted designs of the Creek and Etruscan pottery of the ancient world where there is often a precise painter) expression of lhc exubershyance of the vine motif (Exuxr ance we might note is a word related etymologically lo uber the Latin word meaning abundant) (7) And finally The representashytion of the grape differentiated

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assemblage 32

Thus by a line Taste and happy Management of Nalure you are presented wilh an indistinguisha hie Mixture of Rcallities and Imagery ( 105--6)

5 Johann Joachim Winckelmann Winckelmann Writings on Art ed David Irwin (London Phaidon 1972) 84-85

6 The Works ofohn Ruskin ed E T Cook and Alexander Weddermiddot bum 39 Ols (London George Allen 1904) II 161--02 Subseshyquent references in the text lo Ruskins writings will be lo the 01shyumc and page numbers of the Lishybra) Edition

7 Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World trans Il~l~nc lsOlsky (Bloomington Indiana Univcrsi ly Press 1984) 31- 32 Bakhlin conshytinues What is lhe character of these ornaments TI1ey impressed the connoisseurs by lhe extremely fanciful free and playful treatment of plant animal and human fonns These forms seemed to be inlerwoshyven as if giving birth to each olhcr The borderlines that dilbullide the kingdoms of nature in the usual picture of the world were boldI) inshyfringed eilher was Ihere lhe usual static presentation of reality There wis no longer the movement offinshyished forms vegelable or animal in a finished stable world instead the inner movemenl ofbeing itself bullbullmiddotas expressed in the passing ofone form into the other in the eer incompleted character of being This ornamental mlerpla) revealed an extreme lighlness and freedom ofartistic fantasy a g~) almosl laughing libertinag The gay tone of the new ornament was grasped and brilliantly rendered by Raphael and his pupils in their grotesque decoration of the Vatican loggias (32)

8 Manfredo Tafuri Theories and History ofArchitecture trans Giorgio Verrecchia (New York llarper and Row 1980) 17

9 Mark Taylor ~Nuclear Architecshyture or Fabulous Architecture or Tragic Architecture or Dionysian Architecture or Assemblage 11 (April 1990) 14 Taylor applies his theOI) of the grotesque archishytectural body lo the work of Peter Eisenman writing that Eisenmans gaping architecture - like all such gaps - is grotesque Does this grotesque other hamiddote an)1hing lo do with a tomb or crypt ( 14)

10 Jennifer Bloomer Architecture and the Text The (S)crypts ofoyce and Piraneti (New l laen Yale University Press 1993) 49

11 Vasari Lfres 5 229 Vasari also writes He was a melancholy pershyson and was constantly studying the antiquities and seeing among them seclions of vaults and ranges ofwalls adorned with grotesques he liked these so much that he never ceased from examining them 1-fe was never lired indeed of exshyamining all thal he could find beshylow the ground in Rome in the way ofancient grottoes with vaults inshynumerable (227)

12 On the origins of the grotesque sec also Geoffrey Galt Harpham On the Grotesque Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton Princeton Unhmiddotersitr Press 1982) 27 Harpham writes bullmiddotMore because ofthe setting than because ofany qualities inherent in the designs thcmsekes a consensus soon emergecl according to which the designs were called grottesche - ofor pertaining lo underground caves Like Vitruviuss judgment this naming is a mistake pregnanl with truth for although the designs

were never intended to be undershyground nor cros palace a grotto 1he word is perfect 111c Latin form ofgrotta is probably cnipta (cf crypt) which in turn derives form the Creek Krnpth a vault one of the cognates is Krupteig to hide Grotesque then githers into itself suggestions of the underground of burial and ofsecrec( (27)

13 Br architectural origins I am in part invoking Abb~ Laugiers little rustic hut and his dismissal of the cave Laugier writes 1 he sabullOlge 111 his leafy shelter does not know how to protecl himself from the unshycomfortable damp that penetrates everywhere he creeps inlo a ncarb) cave and find mg it di) he praises himself for his discovery But soon the darkness and foul air surroundmiddot ing him make his 5lay unbearable again (Marc-Anloinc Laugier An Essay ot1 Archilecture trans Wolfgang 1lemnann Los Angeles 1-lennessey and Ingalls 1977) 11 ) On the symbolic relationship beshytween the cave and the female body Kuryluk writes The Euroshypean spnbolism of the cave as a dwelling-place of mythical femininshyil) personifying fertility and regenshyeration of earth and water was established in Crecce I lomcr speaks of the elemental architecture created by nature and of life origimiddot nating from it llis image inspires endless fantasy as in Porphyriuss extensive commcnlal) on the cave of naiads 111 the Odrssey The length of Ihis m)$tical text conCS the significance Porph) rius attribshyuted to lhe grotto as a metaphor for the spirit of the earth and lhe m)Sshytcrics of prOltrPation TIHbull luminous gods incarnations ofsunlight and reason visil the cabulle but its pcrmamiddot nent inhabitants are the shadow the unconscious and lhc female Nature is a she and in her sublerrashy

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nean chambers dwell all great godshydesses like Venus and Diana (Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex 100) Kuryluk ilso explains that the shell is one of the emshyblems of the grotesque not only in architecture but also in the decorashytive arts The predilection for it reshyflects both its inherent qualities and the universal reverie provoked by the miraculous creation ofsnails which produce houses of their own substance - as if from nothingness Being an intimate enclosure the shell has been regarded as the S)mmiddot

bol of the vagina and the uterus hence ii can be middotiewed as a miniashyture grotto ( 103)

14 Ruskins accusation ofdrunkshyenness alludes to a set of iconoshygraphic relationships between grotesque ~nes and ripe grapes that Slephen Bann The Trne Vine Ot1 Visual Representation and the Westmiddot em Tradition (Cambridge Camshybridge University Press 1989) oullines beautifully Crapes are the origin of one of the most prevashylenl myths about representalion in the West the story of the Creek painter Zexius whose skill was so great than even the birds flew down lo peck at lhe deceptive patches of pigment crafted by his brush (6) He continues the motif of the grape vine in its infinite varicl) of decoratimiddote uses seems to concretize in a particular way the qualil)middot of being present in sensuous abunshydance This feature can be traced in the painted designs of the Creek and Etruscan pottery of the ancient world where there is often a precise painter) expression of lhc exubershyance of the vine motif (Exuxr ance we might note is a word related etymologically lo uber the Latin word meaning abundant) (7) And finally The representashytion of the grape differentiated

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from the remaining iconography by its materiality and (almost) its lishyquidity suggests an implicit metshyonymic connection between the container and the contained - beshytween the dots and pools of pigshyment and the invigorating flow of wine (8)

15 Samuel Rogers Italy in The Poetical Works ofRogm CarnpbfI Montgorntry (Philadelphia J Grigg 1836) 5 I Rogers devotes a section of this poem to The Brides of Venice The phrases I am quotshying come from a pusagc that reads

At noon a distant murmur through the crowd

Rising and rolling on announced their coming

And nebuller from the first was to be seen

Such splendor or such beauty Two and two

(The richest tapestry unrold before them)

First came the Brides in all their loveliness

Each in her veil and by two brideshymaids followd

Only less lovely who behind her bore The precious caskets that within

containd The dowry and the presents On

she moved her eyes cast down and holding in

her hand A fan that gently waved of ostrichshy

fcathers Her veil transparent as the

goS$1mer Fell from beneath a starry diadem And on her dazzling neck a jewel

shone Ruby ordiamond or dark amethyst A jewelld chain in many a windshy

ing wreath Wreathing her gold brocade

16 While Ruskin translates casseleri into the building trades the other

possible translation of the word as casket makers suggests my menshytioning Freuds essay The Theme of the Three Caskets of 1913 (in Sigmund Freud Collected Papers ed and trans James Strachey vol 4 [London Hogarth Press 1950)) This story involves a scene from Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice in which Portias suitor will be determined by his proper selecmiddot tion of a casket containing her portrait As Freud points out Shakespeare borrows this story of weddings and chests from a talc in the Cesta Rornanorvm Ofthe three men selecting between three casshykets in Shakespeares tale Freud writes If we had to do with a dream it would occur at once to us that caskets are also women symbols of the essential thing in woman and therefore of a woman herself like boxes large or small baskets and so on (245-56) Refershyring lo the three sisters in King Lear Freud co111cludes his analysis of the caskets One might say that lhe three inevitable relations man has with woman are here repremiddot sented that wilh the mother who bears him with the companion of his bed and board and wilh the destroyer Or ii is the three forms taken on by the figure of the mother as life proceeds lhe molher herself the beloved who is chosen aAer her pattern and finally the Mother Earth who receimiddotes him againbull (256)

17 Edward Muir Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton Princeton University Press 1981) 135 As Muir clarifies this legend or fabrication explained a preexistshying ritual In the fifteenth and sixshyteenth centuries it was generally believed that the annual ceremoshynies at the church of Santa Maria Formosa had begun in the tenth

century as a celelgtration of a victory over pirates An anonymous chronicle composed al the end of the fifteenth century perhaps the most detailed account of the legshyend claims that since ancient times on January 31 the day of the transfer of Saint Mark the prince and commune gave dowries to and sponsored weddings for twelve deshyserving but poor )Oung girls in a ceremony conducted by the Bishop at his cathedral of San Pietro di Castello One year a group of Triestine pirates tempted by the girls their dowries and the gems lith hich the prince adorned them for the occasion stole their way inlo the cathedral after attackshying and wounding or killing many of the assembled worshippers the pirates fled the cathedral with the bejeweled brides and their dowry boxes escaping aboard boats they had hidden outside Quickly assemshybling a fleet the Venetian menfolk pursued them to a sma ll port near Caorle - to th is day called the Porto de lie Donielle - where lhe Triestines had anchored to divide lhe spoils First to board the pirate craA the casseleri (either cabinetshymakers or carpenters) of the parish of Santa Maria Formosa fought valiantly killed all the Triestincs threw the corpses without cereshymony into the sea and burned the ships Returning with brides dowries and treasures intact the carseeri won honors for the victory which occurred on February 2 the day of the Purification of the Virshygin or Candlemas To reward the casseleri the doge agreed that he and his successors would visit Santa Maria Formosa each year following vespers on the eve of the Purificashytion and for mass of lhe feast da) itselr ( 135-56)

18 Ibid 137

19 lbid 140 Also see Tony Tanner Venice Desired (Oxford Blackwell 1992) As Tanner obshyserves a fiercely intransigent Protestant at the time Ruskin was constantly having trouble with the Mariolatry (indeed the female alshytogether) and more generally the undeniable fact that it was Catholishycism which had inspired or informshyed much of the art and architecture he most admired (while Protestantshyism seemed to nourish little or noner (94) Given this bias Muirs observations regarding the cult of Mary in Venice will help to account for Ruskins position regarding Santa Maria Formosa Muir explains that the Venetians indeed assiduously venerated the Virgin Mary Her cult was so popumiddot lar and so ancient that like many other cities Venice was often idenshytified as the city of the Virgin He also writes that the Festival of the Marys paraphrased the peculiar status of women in trecento Venemiddot tian society In two recent articles Stanley Chojnacki has shown that women especially patrician ladies had a distinctive and important soshycial and economic influence that contributed to the harmony and stability of Venetian society In a patrician regime such as that of Venice a complex of attitudes legal precepts and rules of inheritance served to protect the patriline as the foundation of society In Venice a woman had a curious status she was exiled from the patriline when she received her dowry - in theory her share of the patrimony - so that the absence ofan obligatory orientation toward her paternal kin permitted her to mediate between two patrilines allied through her in marriage Thus wvmen contribshyuted in particular to the strength and stability of the patriciate by

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bonding together various patrician lineages Moreover through their ability to make bequests dispose of their own dowries in their wills and invest independently in business women were able to exert psychoshylogical pressure on their male kin and to express personal preferences without regard to lineage (Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice 150shy51 )

20 In the entry on the Ospadcletto Church in the 0 lndex to The Stones Ruskin writes The most monstrous example of the Groshytesque Renaissance which there is in Venice the sculptures on its fmade representing masses ofdisshyeased figures and swollen fruit It is almost worth devoting an hour to the successive examination of five buildings as illustrative of the last degradation of the Renaissance S Moise is the most clumsy S Maria Zobcnigo the most impious S Eustachio the most ridiculous the Ospadeletto the most monstrous and the head at S Maria Formosa the most foul t 11 397) Also see Arnold Whitticllt ed Ruskins Venice (London George Godwin 1976) 195-56

21 In volume two The Sea Stoshyries chapter six The 1ature of Gothic of The Stones Ruskin ofshyfers a hierarchy for the characshyteristic or moral elements of the Gothic building as I savageness 2 changefulness 3 naturalism 4 groshytesqueness 5 rigidity and 6 redunshydancy ( 11 79) To th is he adds the qualities of the Gothic builder I savageness or rudeness 2 love of change 3 lmlte of nature 4 disshyturbed imagina tion 5 obstinacy and 6 generosity Th us the groshytesque and a disturbed imagination are aligned While he carefully exshyplains what he means by each of

these separate characteristics when he arrives at the grotesque he writes The fourth essential eleshyment of the Gothic mind was above stated to be the sense of the GROshyTESQUE but I shall endeavor to define this most curious and subtle character until we have occasion to examine one of the divisions of the Renaissance schools which was morbidly influenced by it It is the less necessary to insist upon it here because every reader familiar with Gothic architecture must undershystand what I mean and will l believe have no hesitation in adshymitting that the tendency to delight in the fantastic and ludicrous as well as in sublime images is a universal instinct of the Gothic imagination ( I I 203) It is imporshytant to note that Ruskin is attracted to the grotesque of the Gothic peshyriod There is jest - perpetual careless and not infrequently obshyscene - in the most noble work of the Goth ic periods and it becomes therefore of the greatest possible importance to examine into the nashyture and essence of the Grotesque itself and to ascertain in what reshyspect it is that the jesting ofart in its highest flight differs from its jesting in its utmost degradation ( 11 11 3) Also see Barbara Maria Stafford Illiterate Monuments The Ruin as Dialectic of Broken Classic The Age oflohnson Stafford observes Especially noteworthy is Ruskins construct of the natural grotesque which for him is close to a total comprehensive art capable of bringshying into con junction the multiple oppositions of the world the one with the many the divine with the monstrous ( 3)

22 Similarly on Ruskins relationshyship with Venice Tanner writes in Venice Desired Jn Venice with his young wife Effie their marriage

unconsummated his abstinence could hardly be further from Byrons dissipation Whereas Effie enjoyed the available social life Ruskin preferred to avoid it and atshytended on sufferan ce suffering His business was with those under-canal vaults and mud-buried porticoes I might have said his assignation shyfor Ruskin seems to have literally crawled and climbed over the whole ruined body ofa city peering with his incomparable eye into evshyery darkened nook and cranny high and low gently picking over the abandoned stones ofdecaying palshyaces gliding into and down the darkest and dingiest canals It would be too easy and not particushylarly illuminating to talk of a masmiddot sive displacement of the activities of the marriage bed into the explorashytion of the city B11t if the word means anything at all there can be no doubt that Ruskins most intense love-affair was with Venice and his writings about her from the first to last manifest at their extreme the positive and negative efflorescences of the unresting desire which the very idea image memory of the city aroused in him (68-69)

23 Ibid 72 81

24 Bann The True Vine 28 39

25 Julia Kristcva lowers ofHorror An Essay in Abiection trans Leon S Roudiez (New York Columbia University Press 1982) 40 Kristeva develops this concept when descrilgtshying a little girl frightened ofbeing eaten up by a dog who spoke more intense) the more frightened she became Kristeva writes Through the mouth that I fill with words instead of my mother whom I miss from now on more than ever I elaborate that want and the agressivity that accompanies it by saying It turns oul that under the

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circumstances oral activity which produces that linguistic signifier coincides with the theme of devourshying which the dog metaphor has a first claim on But one is rightfully led to suppose that any verbalizing activity whether or not it names a phobic object related to orality is an attempt to introject the incorposhyrated items In that sense verbalizashytion has always been confronted with the ab-jcct that the phobic object is (4 l )

With the grotesque we find a deshyvouring architecture - what Pirro Ligorio refers to as la insatiabilita - an architecture that can conshysume itself Regarding this specific reference and the Renaissance unshyderstanding of the grotesque sec David Summers Michelangelo and the lA11guage ofAri (Princeton Princeton University Press 1981) Summerss research indicates that the cinquccento attitude toward the grotesque was by no means uniform he discusses the writings of Ligorio Sebastiano Serlio am1d G P Lomazshyzo on this subject Grolleschi are made to bring omazement and marvel (stupore el maraviglia) to miserable mortals to signify as much as may be possible the pregnancy and fullness of the intellect and its meanings to accommodate the insatiability (a insatiabilita) of the various and strange concetti drawn from the so great variety that is created in things At the same time those moderns misunderstand such paintings who call them merely grottesche et insogni et stravaganti pitture anzi mostruose He argues that they do and should conceal mysteries this attempt to give grolleschi an allegorical significance is at base an attempt to subject them to decorum Ligorio generally reshyjects the kind of free and fantastic

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construction for which grotteschi stood for him they are not audaciae but rather a mode ofsymshybolic thought Ligorio almost alshyways writes of Michelangelo himself with respect but like Vasari in the second edition he heaps coals on the heads of his followers the Michelagnolastri whose license in both painting and architecture he abhors Ligorios attitudes toward grotteschi and toward the question of invention in general were in short (al least at the time he wrote) precisely parallel The question of the relation ofpure ornamental inshyvention to the invention or allegory deserves careful separate attention In his discussion ofgrotteschi Serlio stressed freedom ofinvention within definite architectural frameshyworks Lomazzo stresses in addishytion the possibilities for significance ofsuch inventions calling them enigmas or ciphers or Egyptian figures called hieroglyphics to sigshynify some coricetlo or perisiero under another form (sotto aIre figure) as we do in emblems and imprese grotleschi arc most suitable to the expression ofall meaning because they include tutto quello che si puo trovare et imagimare (496-67)

26 Harpham Ori the Grotesque 31

27 Immanuel Kant The Critique ofudgmerit trans James Creed Meredith (Oxford Clarendon Press 1989) 173 While the subject of the grotesque in relation to the sublime is beyond the scope and inshytention of this essa) I will offer one or two observations on this subject that will help to place Ruskin in this larger theoretical context Ruskin specifically refers to the subshylime in his analysis of the grotesque as a distinct aesthetic category The reader is a ]ways to keep in

mind that if the objects of horror in which the terrible grotesque finds its materials were contemplated in their true light and with the entire energy of the soul they would cease to be grotesque and become altoshygether sublime ( 11 178) He also writes Now so far as the truth is seen by the imagination in its wholeness and quietness the vision is sublime but so far as it is narshyrowed and broken by the inconsisshytencies of the human capacity it becomes grotesque (I I 181 ) Similarly Victor Hugo in Dramas Oliver Cromwell (Philadelphia George Barrie and Son 1896) disshycusses the close proximity between the grotesque and the sublime the ugly exists beside the beautiful the misshapen beside the graceful the grotesque beside the sublime evil with good darkness with light (25) But unlike Ruskin Hugo secs this as a necessary and inherent reshylationship modern genius springs from the fruitful union of the groshytesque type and the sublime (27) ror Hugo the grotesque serves as a glass through which to examine the sublime as a means ofcontrast the grotesque is imiddotn our judgment the richest source of inspiration that nature can throw open to art (32) See also Suzanne Cuerlac The Impersonal Sublime Hugo Baudelaire Lautriamorit (Stanford Stanford University Press 1990) It is ofcourse with Kant that the groshytesquesublime receives its philoshysophical elaboration As Kant writes in The Critique o(udgme11t the sublime is a feeling ofdispleasure arising from the inadequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic estimashytion ofmagnitude to attain to its estimation by reason and a simultashyneously awakened pleasure arising from this very judgment of the inadshyequacy of the greatest faculty of

sense being in accord with ideas of reason so far as the effort to attain these is for us a law (I 06 ) This pleasure involves the mind set in motion versus the mind set in restshyful contemplation a movement comparable to a vibration ie with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same Object (107) Aproshypos of Ruskin Kant discusses the sensation ofsublime fear we may look on an object as fearful and yet not be afraid of it because one who is in a state offear can no more play the part ofa judge in the subshylime of nature than one captivated by inclination and appetite can of the beautiful ( 110) As with Ruskin who will distinguish beshytween the noble and ignoble groshytesque in terms of the interested and the apathetic artisan Kant writes Every affection of the STRE 1UOUS 1YPE (such that is as excites the consciousness ofour power of overcoming every resisshytance Ianimus stremwsj) is aestheshytically sublime eg anger een desperation (the rage offorom hope but not faint-hearted despair) On the other hand affection of the LANGUID TYPE (which converts the very effort of resistance into an object ofdispleasure lariimus lariguidus)) has nothing noble about it though ii may take its rank as possessing beauty of the sensuous order ( 125) Pertinent to Ruskins sermonizing Kant invokes the prishymary crisis of representing the subshylime perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish law than the commandment Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth or under the earth ampc (127) Kant explains that this law is based on the foar that we will fail to adshy

equately represent the image and then render it lifeless and cold Kant specifically mentions the groshytesque when writing that thus Enshyglish taste in gardens and fantastic taste in furniture push the freedom of imagination to the verge of what is grotesque - the idea being that in this divorce from all constraint of rules the precise instance is being afforded where taste can exhibit its perfection in projects of the imagishynation to the fullest extent (88) Fishynally Kant describes an ornamental motif that fits our earlier descripshytions of the grotesque So designs a la grecque foliage for framework or on wall-papers ampc have no intrinshysic meaning they represent nothing - no Object under a definite conshycept - and arc free beauties We may also rank in the same class what in music are called fantasias (without a theme) and indeed all music that is not sel to words (72)

28 Tanner Venice Desired also cites this significant passage in The Stones observing that Ruskin burshyies Venice under the Bible drawing on scriptural wrath and prophecy to inscribe at once its damnation and annihilation (118)

29 Ruskin takes this line from canto 9 of Dantes lnfemo The secshytion containing this quotation reads in full bullAnd more he said but I have it not in memory for my eye had wholly drawn me to the high tower with the glowing summit where all at once three hellish blood-stained Furies had instantly risen up They had the parts and bearing of women and they were girt with greenest hydras For hair they had little serpents and ccrastes bound about their savage temples And he who well recognized the handmaids of the queen ofeternal lamentation said to me See the

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fierce Erinyesl That is Megaera on the left she that wails on the right is Alecto Tisiphoe is in the

middle and with that he was silent Each was tearing at her breast with her nails and they were beating themselves with their hands and crying out so loudly that in fear I pressed close to the poet Let Meshydusa come and well turn him to stone they all cried looking downshyward Poorly did we avenge the asshysault ofTheseus Turn your back and keep your e)eS shut for should the Gorgon show herself and )OU

see her there would be no returnshying above Thus said the master and he himself turned me round

and not trusting to my hands covshyered my face wi th his own hands as well 0 OU who have sound undershystanding mark the doctrine that is hidden under the veil of the strange verses And now there came over the turbid waves a crash ofFearful sound at which both shores trembled a sound as ofa wind violent from conflicting heats which strikes the forest and with

unchecked course shatters the branches beats them down and sweeps them away haughtily drivshying onward in its cloud of dust and putting wild beasts and shepherds to Oight (Dante Alighieri The Dishyvine Comedy trans Charles Singleshyton vol I [Princeton Princeton University Press 19701 90-93)

30 Sigmund Freud Medusas Head (1922) in Collected Papers vol 5 (London Hogarth Press 1952) 105

31 Ibid 106 On the 1848 revolushytion see Neil Hertz Medusas Head Male Hysteria Under Politimiddot cal Pressure in The End ofthe Line ampsays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime ( ew York Columbia University Press 1985)

32 Ann Bergren Baubo and Helen Gender in the Irreparable Wound in Drawing Building Text Essays in Arcliitectural Theory ed Andrea Kah111 (New York Princeton Architectural Press 1991) I IO

33 In a footnote to this paragraph Ruskin adds This opposition ofart to inspiration is long and graceshyfully dwelt upon by Plato in his Phredrus using in the course of his argument almost the words of St Paul It is the testimony of the ancients that the madness which is ofCod is a nobler thing than the wisdom which is ofmen and again He who sets himself to any work

with which the Muses have to do without madness thinking that by art alone he can do his work sufficiently will be found vain and incapable and the work of tempershyance and rationa lism will be thrust aside and obscured by that of inspiration

34 Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer Les Di(fonnes et es malades da11s art (1889 reprint Amstershydam B M Israel 1972) I Une tete enorme inhumaine et monstrueuse dit-il ricanante dunc espression qui la ravale au niveau de la brute trop abjecte pour etre representee ou decrite etmiddot quon ne saurait contempler au dela de quelques instants On pent y voir lindke de cette comshyplaisance acontempler la degradashytion de la brute et lexpression du sarcasm bestial qui est je crois letat desprit le plus deplorable ou lhomme puisse ltlesccndre

35 Georges Didi-Huberman Charcot lhistoire et art Imitashytion de la croix el demon de imitashytion in Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer Les Demoniaques dans art (1887 reprint Paris Macula

1984) 169 Translation from the French by Jeffrey Balmer

36 Charcot Les Demoniaques 24 (m emphasis) Debora Silvermans article on Charcots hallucinatory interior (filled wi1h arabesques) A Fin de Siecle Interior and the Psyche The Soul Box of Dr JeanshyMartin Charcot Daidalos 28 (June 1988) brought my attention to these comparative images She writes Charcot was particularly fascinated by artistic creativity he was celebrated b) his contemporarshyies Sigmund Frelld among them for transposing artistic categories to medicine and for creating a new visual language ofdiagnosis His yearnings for an artistic career were pressed into the service of his medishycal practice Charcol invented a new visual language for diagnosis the clinical-picture method which was his greatest contribution as a clinician (27)

37 See john Dixon llunt The Wider Sea A Life ofohn Ruskin (London J M Dent 1982) Hunt explains that the death of Rose La Touchc only intensified rather than mitigated Ruskins obsession during the winter of 1876-77 his study ofCarpaccios St Ursula cycle became so entwined with his thought of Rose that the virginshymartyr and the Irish girl merged in his precariously stablc mind (199) Ruskin copied the Dream ofSt Ursula that had been put in a speshycial room for his disposal The sleeping saint and the sleeping Rose La Touche merged fitfully in Ruskins mind The painting seemed so real that he could at times convince himself that it was Rose simply sleeping (365) This delusion continued until Rose actually appea red to Ruskin in a miraculous apparition

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38 Bakhtin Rabelais and His World 313 As Bakhtin argues all the features of the human face are instrumental to the grotesque but the most important ofall human features is the mouth It dominates all else The grotesque face is actushyally reduced to the gaping mouth the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss (317) He observes that the gaping mouth is related to the lower bodil) stratum it is the open gate leading downward into the bodily

underworld T he gaping mouth is related to the image ofswallowing this most ancient symbol ofdeath and destrnction At the same time a series of banquet images are also linked to the mouth (325) And once again Birth and death are the gaping jaws ofthe earth and the mothers open womb Further on gaping human and animal mouths will enter into the picture (329)

39 In of terms the vaginal orifice and the spoken word Bakhtin also mentions Denis Diderots Les Biioux indiscrets a story in which womens vaginas literally speak of their sexual secrets The English translation of Diderots work The Indiscreet ewels takes us back to the gems adorning 1he brides as well as their little ooxes as metshyonymical references to their anatomy

40 Walter Benjamin The Origin of Gennan Tragic Drama trans John Osborne (New York Verso 1977) 171 Benjamin is referring to a secshytion in the Natural History where Pliny writes On the other hand A picture b)bull Serapio says Varro covshyered the whole of the Maenian Balshyconies at the place beneath the Old Shops Serapio was a most successshyful scene-painter but he could not paint a human being ( atural

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History trans H Rackman [Camshybridge Mass Harvard University Press 1912] bk 35 I 13)

4 1 Also see Barasch The GroshytesqueBy 1524 grottesche became associated with anti-Vitruvianism The fantastic style was clea rly a deshyviation from classical conceptions of reality from the perfected forms of the ancients which had their basis in nature and from the standard of moral and philosophical simplicity by Vitruvius (30) In compa rison to the Vitruvian point ofview Barasch sets up Vasari as his theoretical counterpart The Vasarian posishytion which many ofhis readers held was essentially this The masshyters of the fourteenth century (the second age ofpainting had introshyduced rule order proportion draughtsmanship and manner and in so doing had rendered a great service lo the progress of painting but in the third and greatest age of painters architects and sculptors the artists seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities were able to attain the perfection of the arts (3 I ) This perfection consisted ofaccepting freedom within the rules

42 Ruskin writes If we can draw the human head perfectly and are masters of its expression and its beauty we have no business to cut it off and hang it up b)bull the hair at the end ofa garland Ifwe can draw the human body in the perfection ofits grace and movement we have no business to take awar its limbs and tem1inate it with a bunch of leaves

43 Indeed without cxactlysaying so Vitruvius actually licenses this contamination when he inscribes the well-built male body in a circle and simultaneously extends the anshy

thropomorphic analogy to the orshyders he describes an architecture of multiple ornamental bodies

Figure C redits

Engravings from Jean-Martin Charshycot and Paul Richer Les Di(onnes et es malades dans art ( 1889 reprint Amsterdam B M Israel 1972)

Photographs by Paulette Singley

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bonding together various patrician lineages Moreover through their ability to make bequests dispose of their own dowries in their wills and invest independently in business women were able to exert psychoshylogical pressure on their male kin and to express personal preferences without regard to lineage (Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice 150shy51 )

20 In the entry on the Ospadcletto Church in the 0 lndex to The Stones Ruskin writes The most monstrous example of the Groshytesque Renaissance which there is in Venice the sculptures on its fmade representing masses ofdisshyeased figures and swollen fruit It is almost worth devoting an hour to the successive examination of five buildings as illustrative of the last degradation of the Renaissance S Moise is the most clumsy S Maria Zobcnigo the most impious S Eustachio the most ridiculous the Ospadeletto the most monstrous and the head at S Maria Formosa the most foul t 11 397) Also see Arnold Whitticllt ed Ruskins Venice (London George Godwin 1976) 195-56

21 In volume two The Sea Stoshyries chapter six The 1ature of Gothic of The Stones Ruskin ofshyfers a hierarchy for the characshyteristic or moral elements of the Gothic building as I savageness 2 changefulness 3 naturalism 4 groshytesqueness 5 rigidity and 6 redunshydancy ( 11 79) To th is he adds the qualities of the Gothic builder I savageness or rudeness 2 love of change 3 lmlte of nature 4 disshyturbed imagina tion 5 obstinacy and 6 generosity Th us the groshytesque and a disturbed imagination are aligned While he carefully exshyplains what he means by each of

these separate characteristics when he arrives at the grotesque he writes The fourth essential eleshyment of the Gothic mind was above stated to be the sense of the GROshyTESQUE but I shall endeavor to define this most curious and subtle character until we have occasion to examine one of the divisions of the Renaissance schools which was morbidly influenced by it It is the less necessary to insist upon it here because every reader familiar with Gothic architecture must undershystand what I mean and will l believe have no hesitation in adshymitting that the tendency to delight in the fantastic and ludicrous as well as in sublime images is a universal instinct of the Gothic imagination ( I I 203) It is imporshytant to note that Ruskin is attracted to the grotesque of the Gothic peshyriod There is jest - perpetual careless and not infrequently obshyscene - in the most noble work of the Goth ic periods and it becomes therefore of the greatest possible importance to examine into the nashyture and essence of the Grotesque itself and to ascertain in what reshyspect it is that the jesting ofart in its highest flight differs from its jesting in its utmost degradation ( 11 11 3) Also see Barbara Maria Stafford Illiterate Monuments The Ruin as Dialectic of Broken Classic The Age oflohnson Stafford observes Especially noteworthy is Ruskins construct of the natural grotesque which for him is close to a total comprehensive art capable of bringshying into con junction the multiple oppositions of the world the one with the many the divine with the monstrous ( 3)

22 Similarly on Ruskins relationshyship with Venice Tanner writes in Venice Desired Jn Venice with his young wife Effie their marriage

unconsummated his abstinence could hardly be further from Byrons dissipation Whereas Effie enjoyed the available social life Ruskin preferred to avoid it and atshytended on sufferan ce suffering His business was with those under-canal vaults and mud-buried porticoes I might have said his assignation shyfor Ruskin seems to have literally crawled and climbed over the whole ruined body ofa city peering with his incomparable eye into evshyery darkened nook and cranny high and low gently picking over the abandoned stones ofdecaying palshyaces gliding into and down the darkest and dingiest canals It would be too easy and not particushylarly illuminating to talk of a masmiddot sive displacement of the activities of the marriage bed into the explorashytion of the city B11t if the word means anything at all there can be no doubt that Ruskins most intense love-affair was with Venice and his writings about her from the first to last manifest at their extreme the positive and negative efflorescences of the unresting desire which the very idea image memory of the city aroused in him (68-69)

23 Ibid 72 81

24 Bann The True Vine 28 39

25 Julia Kristcva lowers ofHorror An Essay in Abiection trans Leon S Roudiez (New York Columbia University Press 1982) 40 Kristeva develops this concept when descrilgtshying a little girl frightened ofbeing eaten up by a dog who spoke more intense) the more frightened she became Kristeva writes Through the mouth that I fill with words instead of my mother whom I miss from now on more than ever I elaborate that want and the agressivity that accompanies it by saying It turns oul that under the

122

circumstances oral activity which produces that linguistic signifier coincides with the theme of devourshying which the dog metaphor has a first claim on But one is rightfully led to suppose that any verbalizing activity whether or not it names a phobic object related to orality is an attempt to introject the incorposhyrated items In that sense verbalizashytion has always been confronted with the ab-jcct that the phobic object is (4 l )

With the grotesque we find a deshyvouring architecture - what Pirro Ligorio refers to as la insatiabilita - an architecture that can conshysume itself Regarding this specific reference and the Renaissance unshyderstanding of the grotesque sec David Summers Michelangelo and the lA11guage ofAri (Princeton Princeton University Press 1981) Summerss research indicates that the cinquccento attitude toward the grotesque was by no means uniform he discusses the writings of Ligorio Sebastiano Serlio am1d G P Lomazshyzo on this subject Grolleschi are made to bring omazement and marvel (stupore el maraviglia) to miserable mortals to signify as much as may be possible the pregnancy and fullness of the intellect and its meanings to accommodate the insatiability (a insatiabilita) of the various and strange concetti drawn from the so great variety that is created in things At the same time those moderns misunderstand such paintings who call them merely grottesche et insogni et stravaganti pitture anzi mostruose He argues that they do and should conceal mysteries this attempt to give grolleschi an allegorical significance is at base an attempt to subject them to decorum Ligorio generally reshyjects the kind of free and fantastic

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Singley

construction for which grotteschi stood for him they are not audaciae but rather a mode ofsymshybolic thought Ligorio almost alshyways writes of Michelangelo himself with respect but like Vasari in the second edition he heaps coals on the heads of his followers the Michelagnolastri whose license in both painting and architecture he abhors Ligorios attitudes toward grotteschi and toward the question of invention in general were in short (al least at the time he wrote) precisely parallel The question of the relation ofpure ornamental inshyvention to the invention or allegory deserves careful separate attention In his discussion ofgrotteschi Serlio stressed freedom ofinvention within definite architectural frameshyworks Lomazzo stresses in addishytion the possibilities for significance ofsuch inventions calling them enigmas or ciphers or Egyptian figures called hieroglyphics to sigshynify some coricetlo or perisiero under another form (sotto aIre figure) as we do in emblems and imprese grotleschi arc most suitable to the expression ofall meaning because they include tutto quello che si puo trovare et imagimare (496-67)

26 Harpham Ori the Grotesque 31

27 Immanuel Kant The Critique ofudgmerit trans James Creed Meredith (Oxford Clarendon Press 1989) 173 While the subject of the grotesque in relation to the sublime is beyond the scope and inshytention of this essa) I will offer one or two observations on this subject that will help to place Ruskin in this larger theoretical context Ruskin specifically refers to the subshylime in his analysis of the grotesque as a distinct aesthetic category The reader is a ]ways to keep in

mind that if the objects of horror in which the terrible grotesque finds its materials were contemplated in their true light and with the entire energy of the soul they would cease to be grotesque and become altoshygether sublime ( 11 178) He also writes Now so far as the truth is seen by the imagination in its wholeness and quietness the vision is sublime but so far as it is narshyrowed and broken by the inconsisshytencies of the human capacity it becomes grotesque (I I 181 ) Similarly Victor Hugo in Dramas Oliver Cromwell (Philadelphia George Barrie and Son 1896) disshycusses the close proximity between the grotesque and the sublime the ugly exists beside the beautiful the misshapen beside the graceful the grotesque beside the sublime evil with good darkness with light (25) But unlike Ruskin Hugo secs this as a necessary and inherent reshylationship modern genius springs from the fruitful union of the groshytesque type and the sublime (27) ror Hugo the grotesque serves as a glass through which to examine the sublime as a means ofcontrast the grotesque is imiddotn our judgment the richest source of inspiration that nature can throw open to art (32) See also Suzanne Cuerlac The Impersonal Sublime Hugo Baudelaire Lautriamorit (Stanford Stanford University Press 1990) It is ofcourse with Kant that the groshytesquesublime receives its philoshysophical elaboration As Kant writes in The Critique o(udgme11t the sublime is a feeling ofdispleasure arising from the inadequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic estimashytion ofmagnitude to attain to its estimation by reason and a simultashyneously awakened pleasure arising from this very judgment of the inadshyequacy of the greatest faculty of

sense being in accord with ideas of reason so far as the effort to attain these is for us a law (I 06 ) This pleasure involves the mind set in motion versus the mind set in restshyful contemplation a movement comparable to a vibration ie with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same Object (107) Aproshypos of Ruskin Kant discusses the sensation ofsublime fear we may look on an object as fearful and yet not be afraid of it because one who is in a state offear can no more play the part ofa judge in the subshylime of nature than one captivated by inclination and appetite can of the beautiful ( 110) As with Ruskin who will distinguish beshytween the noble and ignoble groshytesque in terms of the interested and the apathetic artisan Kant writes Every affection of the STRE 1UOUS 1YPE (such that is as excites the consciousness ofour power of overcoming every resisshytance Ianimus stremwsj) is aestheshytically sublime eg anger een desperation (the rage offorom hope but not faint-hearted despair) On the other hand affection of the LANGUID TYPE (which converts the very effort of resistance into an object ofdispleasure lariimus lariguidus)) has nothing noble about it though ii may take its rank as possessing beauty of the sensuous order ( 125) Pertinent to Ruskins sermonizing Kant invokes the prishymary crisis of representing the subshylime perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish law than the commandment Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth or under the earth ampc (127) Kant explains that this law is based on the foar that we will fail to adshy

equately represent the image and then render it lifeless and cold Kant specifically mentions the groshytesque when writing that thus Enshyglish taste in gardens and fantastic taste in furniture push the freedom of imagination to the verge of what is grotesque - the idea being that in this divorce from all constraint of rules the precise instance is being afforded where taste can exhibit its perfection in projects of the imagishynation to the fullest extent (88) Fishynally Kant describes an ornamental motif that fits our earlier descripshytions of the grotesque So designs a la grecque foliage for framework or on wall-papers ampc have no intrinshysic meaning they represent nothing - no Object under a definite conshycept - and arc free beauties We may also rank in the same class what in music are called fantasias (without a theme) and indeed all music that is not sel to words (72)

28 Tanner Venice Desired also cites this significant passage in The Stones observing that Ruskin burshyies Venice under the Bible drawing on scriptural wrath and prophecy to inscribe at once its damnation and annihilation (118)

29 Ruskin takes this line from canto 9 of Dantes lnfemo The secshytion containing this quotation reads in full bullAnd more he said but I have it not in memory for my eye had wholly drawn me to the high tower with the glowing summit where all at once three hellish blood-stained Furies had instantly risen up They had the parts and bearing of women and they were girt with greenest hydras For hair they had little serpents and ccrastes bound about their savage temples And he who well recognized the handmaids of the queen ofeternal lamentation said to me See the

123

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assemblage 32

fierce Erinyesl That is Megaera on the left she that wails on the right is Alecto Tisiphoe is in the

middle and with that he was silent Each was tearing at her breast with her nails and they were beating themselves with their hands and crying out so loudly that in fear I pressed close to the poet Let Meshydusa come and well turn him to stone they all cried looking downshyward Poorly did we avenge the asshysault ofTheseus Turn your back and keep your e)eS shut for should the Gorgon show herself and )OU

see her there would be no returnshying above Thus said the master and he himself turned me round

and not trusting to my hands covshyered my face wi th his own hands as well 0 OU who have sound undershystanding mark the doctrine that is hidden under the veil of the strange verses And now there came over the turbid waves a crash ofFearful sound at which both shores trembled a sound as ofa wind violent from conflicting heats which strikes the forest and with

unchecked course shatters the branches beats them down and sweeps them away haughtily drivshying onward in its cloud of dust and putting wild beasts and shepherds to Oight (Dante Alighieri The Dishyvine Comedy trans Charles Singleshyton vol I [Princeton Princeton University Press 19701 90-93)

30 Sigmund Freud Medusas Head (1922) in Collected Papers vol 5 (London Hogarth Press 1952) 105

31 Ibid 106 On the 1848 revolushytion see Neil Hertz Medusas Head Male Hysteria Under Politimiddot cal Pressure in The End ofthe Line ampsays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime ( ew York Columbia University Press 1985)

32 Ann Bergren Baubo and Helen Gender in the Irreparable Wound in Drawing Building Text Essays in Arcliitectural Theory ed Andrea Kah111 (New York Princeton Architectural Press 1991) I IO

33 In a footnote to this paragraph Ruskin adds This opposition ofart to inspiration is long and graceshyfully dwelt upon by Plato in his Phredrus using in the course of his argument almost the words of St Paul It is the testimony of the ancients that the madness which is ofCod is a nobler thing than the wisdom which is ofmen and again He who sets himself to any work

with which the Muses have to do without madness thinking that by art alone he can do his work sufficiently will be found vain and incapable and the work of tempershyance and rationa lism will be thrust aside and obscured by that of inspiration

34 Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer Les Di(fonnes et es malades da11s art (1889 reprint Amstershydam B M Israel 1972) I Une tete enorme inhumaine et monstrueuse dit-il ricanante dunc espression qui la ravale au niveau de la brute trop abjecte pour etre representee ou decrite etmiddot quon ne saurait contempler au dela de quelques instants On pent y voir lindke de cette comshyplaisance acontempler la degradashytion de la brute et lexpression du sarcasm bestial qui est je crois letat desprit le plus deplorable ou lhomme puisse ltlesccndre

35 Georges Didi-Huberman Charcot lhistoire et art Imitashytion de la croix el demon de imitashytion in Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer Les Demoniaques dans art (1887 reprint Paris Macula

1984) 169 Translation from the French by Jeffrey Balmer

36 Charcot Les Demoniaques 24 (m emphasis) Debora Silvermans article on Charcots hallucinatory interior (filled wi1h arabesques) A Fin de Siecle Interior and the Psyche The Soul Box of Dr JeanshyMartin Charcot Daidalos 28 (June 1988) brought my attention to these comparative images She writes Charcot was particularly fascinated by artistic creativity he was celebrated b) his contemporarshyies Sigmund Frelld among them for transposing artistic categories to medicine and for creating a new visual language ofdiagnosis His yearnings for an artistic career were pressed into the service of his medishycal practice Charcol invented a new visual language for diagnosis the clinical-picture method which was his greatest contribution as a clinician (27)

37 See john Dixon llunt The Wider Sea A Life ofohn Ruskin (London J M Dent 1982) Hunt explains that the death of Rose La Touchc only intensified rather than mitigated Ruskins obsession during the winter of 1876-77 his study ofCarpaccios St Ursula cycle became so entwined with his thought of Rose that the virginshymartyr and the Irish girl merged in his precariously stablc mind (199) Ruskin copied the Dream ofSt Ursula that had been put in a speshycial room for his disposal The sleeping saint and the sleeping Rose La Touche merged fitfully in Ruskins mind The painting seemed so real that he could at times convince himself that it was Rose simply sleeping (365) This delusion continued until Rose actually appea red to Ruskin in a miraculous apparition

124

38 Bakhtin Rabelais and His World 313 As Bakhtin argues all the features of the human face are instrumental to the grotesque but the most important ofall human features is the mouth It dominates all else The grotesque face is actushyally reduced to the gaping mouth the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss (317) He observes that the gaping mouth is related to the lower bodil) stratum it is the open gate leading downward into the bodily

underworld T he gaping mouth is related to the image ofswallowing this most ancient symbol ofdeath and destrnction At the same time a series of banquet images are also linked to the mouth (325) And once again Birth and death are the gaping jaws ofthe earth and the mothers open womb Further on gaping human and animal mouths will enter into the picture (329)

39 In of terms the vaginal orifice and the spoken word Bakhtin also mentions Denis Diderots Les Biioux indiscrets a story in which womens vaginas literally speak of their sexual secrets The English translation of Diderots work The Indiscreet ewels takes us back to the gems adorning 1he brides as well as their little ooxes as metshyonymical references to their anatomy

40 Walter Benjamin The Origin of Gennan Tragic Drama trans John Osborne (New York Verso 1977) 171 Benjamin is referring to a secshytion in the Natural History where Pliny writes On the other hand A picture b)bull Serapio says Varro covshyered the whole of the Maenian Balshyconies at the place beneath the Old Shops Serapio was a most successshyful scene-painter but he could not paint a human being ( atural

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Singley

History trans H Rackman [Camshybridge Mass Harvard University Press 1912] bk 35 I 13)

4 1 Also see Barasch The GroshytesqueBy 1524 grottesche became associated with anti-Vitruvianism The fantastic style was clea rly a deshyviation from classical conceptions of reality from the perfected forms of the ancients which had their basis in nature and from the standard of moral and philosophical simplicity by Vitruvius (30) In compa rison to the Vitruvian point ofview Barasch sets up Vasari as his theoretical counterpart The Vasarian posishytion which many ofhis readers held was essentially this The masshyters of the fourteenth century (the second age ofpainting had introshyduced rule order proportion draughtsmanship and manner and in so doing had rendered a great service lo the progress of painting but in the third and greatest age of painters architects and sculptors the artists seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities were able to attain the perfection of the arts (3 I ) This perfection consisted ofaccepting freedom within the rules

42 Ruskin writes If we can draw the human head perfectly and are masters of its expression and its beauty we have no business to cut it off and hang it up b)bull the hair at the end ofa garland Ifwe can draw the human body in the perfection ofits grace and movement we have no business to take awar its limbs and tem1inate it with a bunch of leaves

43 Indeed without cxactlysaying so Vitruvius actually licenses this contamination when he inscribes the well-built male body in a circle and simultaneously extends the anshy

thropomorphic analogy to the orshyders he describes an architecture of multiple ornamental bodies

Figure C redits

Engravings from Jean-Martin Charshycot and Paul Richer Les Di(onnes et es malades dans art ( 1889 reprint Amsterdam B M Israel 1972)

Photographs by Paulette Singley

125

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Singley

construction for which grotteschi stood for him they are not audaciae but rather a mode ofsymshybolic thought Ligorio almost alshyways writes of Michelangelo himself with respect but like Vasari in the second edition he heaps coals on the heads of his followers the Michelagnolastri whose license in both painting and architecture he abhors Ligorios attitudes toward grotteschi and toward the question of invention in general were in short (al least at the time he wrote) precisely parallel The question of the relation ofpure ornamental inshyvention to the invention or allegory deserves careful separate attention In his discussion ofgrotteschi Serlio stressed freedom ofinvention within definite architectural frameshyworks Lomazzo stresses in addishytion the possibilities for significance ofsuch inventions calling them enigmas or ciphers or Egyptian figures called hieroglyphics to sigshynify some coricetlo or perisiero under another form (sotto aIre figure) as we do in emblems and imprese grotleschi arc most suitable to the expression ofall meaning because they include tutto quello che si puo trovare et imagimare (496-67)

26 Harpham Ori the Grotesque 31

27 Immanuel Kant The Critique ofudgmerit trans James Creed Meredith (Oxford Clarendon Press 1989) 173 While the subject of the grotesque in relation to the sublime is beyond the scope and inshytention of this essa) I will offer one or two observations on this subject that will help to place Ruskin in this larger theoretical context Ruskin specifically refers to the subshylime in his analysis of the grotesque as a distinct aesthetic category The reader is a ]ways to keep in

mind that if the objects of horror in which the terrible grotesque finds its materials were contemplated in their true light and with the entire energy of the soul they would cease to be grotesque and become altoshygether sublime ( 11 178) He also writes Now so far as the truth is seen by the imagination in its wholeness and quietness the vision is sublime but so far as it is narshyrowed and broken by the inconsisshytencies of the human capacity it becomes grotesque (I I 181 ) Similarly Victor Hugo in Dramas Oliver Cromwell (Philadelphia George Barrie and Son 1896) disshycusses the close proximity between the grotesque and the sublime the ugly exists beside the beautiful the misshapen beside the graceful the grotesque beside the sublime evil with good darkness with light (25) But unlike Ruskin Hugo secs this as a necessary and inherent reshylationship modern genius springs from the fruitful union of the groshytesque type and the sublime (27) ror Hugo the grotesque serves as a glass through which to examine the sublime as a means ofcontrast the grotesque is imiddotn our judgment the richest source of inspiration that nature can throw open to art (32) See also Suzanne Cuerlac The Impersonal Sublime Hugo Baudelaire Lautriamorit (Stanford Stanford University Press 1990) It is ofcourse with Kant that the groshytesquesublime receives its philoshysophical elaboration As Kant writes in The Critique o(udgme11t the sublime is a feeling ofdispleasure arising from the inadequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic estimashytion ofmagnitude to attain to its estimation by reason and a simultashyneously awakened pleasure arising from this very judgment of the inadshyequacy of the greatest faculty of

sense being in accord with ideas of reason so far as the effort to attain these is for us a law (I 06 ) This pleasure involves the mind set in motion versus the mind set in restshyful contemplation a movement comparable to a vibration ie with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same Object (107) Aproshypos of Ruskin Kant discusses the sensation ofsublime fear we may look on an object as fearful and yet not be afraid of it because one who is in a state offear can no more play the part ofa judge in the subshylime of nature than one captivated by inclination and appetite can of the beautiful ( 110) As with Ruskin who will distinguish beshytween the noble and ignoble groshytesque in terms of the interested and the apathetic artisan Kant writes Every affection of the STRE 1UOUS 1YPE (such that is as excites the consciousness ofour power of overcoming every resisshytance Ianimus stremwsj) is aestheshytically sublime eg anger een desperation (the rage offorom hope but not faint-hearted despair) On the other hand affection of the LANGUID TYPE (which converts the very effort of resistance into an object ofdispleasure lariimus lariguidus)) has nothing noble about it though ii may take its rank as possessing beauty of the sensuous order ( 125) Pertinent to Ruskins sermonizing Kant invokes the prishymary crisis of representing the subshylime perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish law than the commandment Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth or under the earth ampc (127) Kant explains that this law is based on the foar that we will fail to adshy

equately represent the image and then render it lifeless and cold Kant specifically mentions the groshytesque when writing that thus Enshyglish taste in gardens and fantastic taste in furniture push the freedom of imagination to the verge of what is grotesque - the idea being that in this divorce from all constraint of rules the precise instance is being afforded where taste can exhibit its perfection in projects of the imagishynation to the fullest extent (88) Fishynally Kant describes an ornamental motif that fits our earlier descripshytions of the grotesque So designs a la grecque foliage for framework or on wall-papers ampc have no intrinshysic meaning they represent nothing - no Object under a definite conshycept - and arc free beauties We may also rank in the same class what in music are called fantasias (without a theme) and indeed all music that is not sel to words (72)

28 Tanner Venice Desired also cites this significant passage in The Stones observing that Ruskin burshyies Venice under the Bible drawing on scriptural wrath and prophecy to inscribe at once its damnation and annihilation (118)

29 Ruskin takes this line from canto 9 of Dantes lnfemo The secshytion containing this quotation reads in full bullAnd more he said but I have it not in memory for my eye had wholly drawn me to the high tower with the glowing summit where all at once three hellish blood-stained Furies had instantly risen up They had the parts and bearing of women and they were girt with greenest hydras For hair they had little serpents and ccrastes bound about their savage temples And he who well recognized the handmaids of the queen ofeternal lamentation said to me See the

123

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assemblage 32

fierce Erinyesl That is Megaera on the left she that wails on the right is Alecto Tisiphoe is in the

middle and with that he was silent Each was tearing at her breast with her nails and they were beating themselves with their hands and crying out so loudly that in fear I pressed close to the poet Let Meshydusa come and well turn him to stone they all cried looking downshyward Poorly did we avenge the asshysault ofTheseus Turn your back and keep your e)eS shut for should the Gorgon show herself and )OU

see her there would be no returnshying above Thus said the master and he himself turned me round

and not trusting to my hands covshyered my face wi th his own hands as well 0 OU who have sound undershystanding mark the doctrine that is hidden under the veil of the strange verses And now there came over the turbid waves a crash ofFearful sound at which both shores trembled a sound as ofa wind violent from conflicting heats which strikes the forest and with

unchecked course shatters the branches beats them down and sweeps them away haughtily drivshying onward in its cloud of dust and putting wild beasts and shepherds to Oight (Dante Alighieri The Dishyvine Comedy trans Charles Singleshyton vol I [Princeton Princeton University Press 19701 90-93)

30 Sigmund Freud Medusas Head (1922) in Collected Papers vol 5 (London Hogarth Press 1952) 105

31 Ibid 106 On the 1848 revolushytion see Neil Hertz Medusas Head Male Hysteria Under Politimiddot cal Pressure in The End ofthe Line ampsays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime ( ew York Columbia University Press 1985)

32 Ann Bergren Baubo and Helen Gender in the Irreparable Wound in Drawing Building Text Essays in Arcliitectural Theory ed Andrea Kah111 (New York Princeton Architectural Press 1991) I IO

33 In a footnote to this paragraph Ruskin adds This opposition ofart to inspiration is long and graceshyfully dwelt upon by Plato in his Phredrus using in the course of his argument almost the words of St Paul It is the testimony of the ancients that the madness which is ofCod is a nobler thing than the wisdom which is ofmen and again He who sets himself to any work

with which the Muses have to do without madness thinking that by art alone he can do his work sufficiently will be found vain and incapable and the work of tempershyance and rationa lism will be thrust aside and obscured by that of inspiration

34 Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer Les Di(fonnes et es malades da11s art (1889 reprint Amstershydam B M Israel 1972) I Une tete enorme inhumaine et monstrueuse dit-il ricanante dunc espression qui la ravale au niveau de la brute trop abjecte pour etre representee ou decrite etmiddot quon ne saurait contempler au dela de quelques instants On pent y voir lindke de cette comshyplaisance acontempler la degradashytion de la brute et lexpression du sarcasm bestial qui est je crois letat desprit le plus deplorable ou lhomme puisse ltlesccndre

35 Georges Didi-Huberman Charcot lhistoire et art Imitashytion de la croix el demon de imitashytion in Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer Les Demoniaques dans art (1887 reprint Paris Macula

1984) 169 Translation from the French by Jeffrey Balmer

36 Charcot Les Demoniaques 24 (m emphasis) Debora Silvermans article on Charcots hallucinatory interior (filled wi1h arabesques) A Fin de Siecle Interior and the Psyche The Soul Box of Dr JeanshyMartin Charcot Daidalos 28 (June 1988) brought my attention to these comparative images She writes Charcot was particularly fascinated by artistic creativity he was celebrated b) his contemporarshyies Sigmund Frelld among them for transposing artistic categories to medicine and for creating a new visual language ofdiagnosis His yearnings for an artistic career were pressed into the service of his medishycal practice Charcol invented a new visual language for diagnosis the clinical-picture method which was his greatest contribution as a clinician (27)

37 See john Dixon llunt The Wider Sea A Life ofohn Ruskin (London J M Dent 1982) Hunt explains that the death of Rose La Touchc only intensified rather than mitigated Ruskins obsession during the winter of 1876-77 his study ofCarpaccios St Ursula cycle became so entwined with his thought of Rose that the virginshymartyr and the Irish girl merged in his precariously stablc mind (199) Ruskin copied the Dream ofSt Ursula that had been put in a speshycial room for his disposal The sleeping saint and the sleeping Rose La Touche merged fitfully in Ruskins mind The painting seemed so real that he could at times convince himself that it was Rose simply sleeping (365) This delusion continued until Rose actually appea red to Ruskin in a miraculous apparition

124

38 Bakhtin Rabelais and His World 313 As Bakhtin argues all the features of the human face are instrumental to the grotesque but the most important ofall human features is the mouth It dominates all else The grotesque face is actushyally reduced to the gaping mouth the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss (317) He observes that the gaping mouth is related to the lower bodil) stratum it is the open gate leading downward into the bodily

underworld T he gaping mouth is related to the image ofswallowing this most ancient symbol ofdeath and destrnction At the same time a series of banquet images are also linked to the mouth (325) And once again Birth and death are the gaping jaws ofthe earth and the mothers open womb Further on gaping human and animal mouths will enter into the picture (329)

39 In of terms the vaginal orifice and the spoken word Bakhtin also mentions Denis Diderots Les Biioux indiscrets a story in which womens vaginas literally speak of their sexual secrets The English translation of Diderots work The Indiscreet ewels takes us back to the gems adorning 1he brides as well as their little ooxes as metshyonymical references to their anatomy

40 Walter Benjamin The Origin of Gennan Tragic Drama trans John Osborne (New York Verso 1977) 171 Benjamin is referring to a secshytion in the Natural History where Pliny writes On the other hand A picture b)bull Serapio says Varro covshyered the whole of the Maenian Balshyconies at the place beneath the Old Shops Serapio was a most successshyful scene-painter but he could not paint a human being ( atural

This content downloaded from 12884 125202 on Wed 29 Oct 2014 020004 AM All use subject to JSTOR Tem1s and Conditio ns

Singley

History trans H Rackman [Camshybridge Mass Harvard University Press 1912] bk 35 I 13)

4 1 Also see Barasch The GroshytesqueBy 1524 grottesche became associated with anti-Vitruvianism The fantastic style was clea rly a deshyviation from classical conceptions of reality from the perfected forms of the ancients which had their basis in nature and from the standard of moral and philosophical simplicity by Vitruvius (30) In compa rison to the Vitruvian point ofview Barasch sets up Vasari as his theoretical counterpart The Vasarian posishytion which many ofhis readers held was essentially this The masshyters of the fourteenth century (the second age ofpainting had introshyduced rule order proportion draughtsmanship and manner and in so doing had rendered a great service lo the progress of painting but in the third and greatest age of painters architects and sculptors the artists seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities were able to attain the perfection of the arts (3 I ) This perfection consisted ofaccepting freedom within the rules

42 Ruskin writes If we can draw the human head perfectly and are masters of its expression and its beauty we have no business to cut it off and hang it up b)bull the hair at the end ofa garland Ifwe can draw the human body in the perfection ofits grace and movement we have no business to take awar its limbs and tem1inate it with a bunch of leaves

43 Indeed without cxactlysaying so Vitruvius actually licenses this contamination when he inscribes the well-built male body in a circle and simultaneously extends the anshy

thropomorphic analogy to the orshyders he describes an architecture of multiple ornamental bodies

Figure C redits

Engravings from Jean-Martin Charshycot and Paul Richer Les Di(onnes et es malades dans art ( 1889 reprint Amsterdam B M Israel 1972)

Photographs by Paulette Singley

125

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assemblage 32

fierce Erinyesl That is Megaera on the left she that wails on the right is Alecto Tisiphoe is in the

middle and with that he was silent Each was tearing at her breast with her nails and they were beating themselves with their hands and crying out so loudly that in fear I pressed close to the poet Let Meshydusa come and well turn him to stone they all cried looking downshyward Poorly did we avenge the asshysault ofTheseus Turn your back and keep your e)eS shut for should the Gorgon show herself and )OU

see her there would be no returnshying above Thus said the master and he himself turned me round

and not trusting to my hands covshyered my face wi th his own hands as well 0 OU who have sound undershystanding mark the doctrine that is hidden under the veil of the strange verses And now there came over the turbid waves a crash ofFearful sound at which both shores trembled a sound as ofa wind violent from conflicting heats which strikes the forest and with

unchecked course shatters the branches beats them down and sweeps them away haughtily drivshying onward in its cloud of dust and putting wild beasts and shepherds to Oight (Dante Alighieri The Dishyvine Comedy trans Charles Singleshyton vol I [Princeton Princeton University Press 19701 90-93)

30 Sigmund Freud Medusas Head (1922) in Collected Papers vol 5 (London Hogarth Press 1952) 105

31 Ibid 106 On the 1848 revolushytion see Neil Hertz Medusas Head Male Hysteria Under Politimiddot cal Pressure in The End ofthe Line ampsays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime ( ew York Columbia University Press 1985)

32 Ann Bergren Baubo and Helen Gender in the Irreparable Wound in Drawing Building Text Essays in Arcliitectural Theory ed Andrea Kah111 (New York Princeton Architectural Press 1991) I IO

33 In a footnote to this paragraph Ruskin adds This opposition ofart to inspiration is long and graceshyfully dwelt upon by Plato in his Phredrus using in the course of his argument almost the words of St Paul It is the testimony of the ancients that the madness which is ofCod is a nobler thing than the wisdom which is ofmen and again He who sets himself to any work

with which the Muses have to do without madness thinking that by art alone he can do his work sufficiently will be found vain and incapable and the work of tempershyance and rationa lism will be thrust aside and obscured by that of inspiration

34 Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer Les Di(fonnes et es malades da11s art (1889 reprint Amstershydam B M Israel 1972) I Une tete enorme inhumaine et monstrueuse dit-il ricanante dunc espression qui la ravale au niveau de la brute trop abjecte pour etre representee ou decrite etmiddot quon ne saurait contempler au dela de quelques instants On pent y voir lindke de cette comshyplaisance acontempler la degradashytion de la brute et lexpression du sarcasm bestial qui est je crois letat desprit le plus deplorable ou lhomme puisse ltlesccndre

35 Georges Didi-Huberman Charcot lhistoire et art Imitashytion de la croix el demon de imitashytion in Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer Les Demoniaques dans art (1887 reprint Paris Macula

1984) 169 Translation from the French by Jeffrey Balmer

36 Charcot Les Demoniaques 24 (m emphasis) Debora Silvermans article on Charcots hallucinatory interior (filled wi1h arabesques) A Fin de Siecle Interior and the Psyche The Soul Box of Dr JeanshyMartin Charcot Daidalos 28 (June 1988) brought my attention to these comparative images She writes Charcot was particularly fascinated by artistic creativity he was celebrated b) his contemporarshyies Sigmund Frelld among them for transposing artistic categories to medicine and for creating a new visual language ofdiagnosis His yearnings for an artistic career were pressed into the service of his medishycal practice Charcol invented a new visual language for diagnosis the clinical-picture method which was his greatest contribution as a clinician (27)

37 See john Dixon llunt The Wider Sea A Life ofohn Ruskin (London J M Dent 1982) Hunt explains that the death of Rose La Touchc only intensified rather than mitigated Ruskins obsession during the winter of 1876-77 his study ofCarpaccios St Ursula cycle became so entwined with his thought of Rose that the virginshymartyr and the Irish girl merged in his precariously stablc mind (199) Ruskin copied the Dream ofSt Ursula that had been put in a speshycial room for his disposal The sleeping saint and the sleeping Rose La Touche merged fitfully in Ruskins mind The painting seemed so real that he could at times convince himself that it was Rose simply sleeping (365) This delusion continued until Rose actually appea red to Ruskin in a miraculous apparition

124

38 Bakhtin Rabelais and His World 313 As Bakhtin argues all the features of the human face are instrumental to the grotesque but the most important ofall human features is the mouth It dominates all else The grotesque face is actushyally reduced to the gaping mouth the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss (317) He observes that the gaping mouth is related to the lower bodil) stratum it is the open gate leading downward into the bodily

underworld T he gaping mouth is related to the image ofswallowing this most ancient symbol ofdeath and destrnction At the same time a series of banquet images are also linked to the mouth (325) And once again Birth and death are the gaping jaws ofthe earth and the mothers open womb Further on gaping human and animal mouths will enter into the picture (329)

39 In of terms the vaginal orifice and the spoken word Bakhtin also mentions Denis Diderots Les Biioux indiscrets a story in which womens vaginas literally speak of their sexual secrets The English translation of Diderots work The Indiscreet ewels takes us back to the gems adorning 1he brides as well as their little ooxes as metshyonymical references to their anatomy

40 Walter Benjamin The Origin of Gennan Tragic Drama trans John Osborne (New York Verso 1977) 171 Benjamin is referring to a secshytion in the Natural History where Pliny writes On the other hand A picture b)bull Serapio says Varro covshyered the whole of the Maenian Balshyconies at the place beneath the Old Shops Serapio was a most successshyful scene-painter but he could not paint a human being ( atural

This content downloaded from 12884 125202 on Wed 29 Oct 2014 020004 AM All use subject to JSTOR Tem1s and Conditio ns

Singley

History trans H Rackman [Camshybridge Mass Harvard University Press 1912] bk 35 I 13)

4 1 Also see Barasch The GroshytesqueBy 1524 grottesche became associated with anti-Vitruvianism The fantastic style was clea rly a deshyviation from classical conceptions of reality from the perfected forms of the ancients which had their basis in nature and from the standard of moral and philosophical simplicity by Vitruvius (30) In compa rison to the Vitruvian point ofview Barasch sets up Vasari as his theoretical counterpart The Vasarian posishytion which many ofhis readers held was essentially this The masshyters of the fourteenth century (the second age ofpainting had introshyduced rule order proportion draughtsmanship and manner and in so doing had rendered a great service lo the progress of painting but in the third and greatest age of painters architects and sculptors the artists seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities were able to attain the perfection of the arts (3 I ) This perfection consisted ofaccepting freedom within the rules

42 Ruskin writes If we can draw the human head perfectly and are masters of its expression and its beauty we have no business to cut it off and hang it up b)bull the hair at the end ofa garland Ifwe can draw the human body in the perfection ofits grace and movement we have no business to take awar its limbs and tem1inate it with a bunch of leaves

43 Indeed without cxactlysaying so Vitruvius actually licenses this contamination when he inscribes the well-built male body in a circle and simultaneously extends the anshy

thropomorphic analogy to the orshyders he describes an architecture of multiple ornamental bodies

Figure C redits

Engravings from Jean-Martin Charshycot and Paul Richer Les Di(onnes et es malades dans art ( 1889 reprint Amsterdam B M Israel 1972)

Photographs by Paulette Singley

125

This content downloaded from 12884 125202 on Wed 29 Oct 2014 020004 AM All use subject to JSTOR Tem1s and Conditions

Singley

History trans H Rackman [Camshybridge Mass Harvard University Press 1912] bk 35 I 13)

4 1 Also see Barasch The GroshytesqueBy 1524 grottesche became associated with anti-Vitruvianism The fantastic style was clea rly a deshyviation from classical conceptions of reality from the perfected forms of the ancients which had their basis in nature and from the standard of moral and philosophical simplicity by Vitruvius (30) In compa rison to the Vitruvian point ofview Barasch sets up Vasari as his theoretical counterpart The Vasarian posishytion which many ofhis readers held was essentially this The masshyters of the fourteenth century (the second age ofpainting had introshyduced rule order proportion draughtsmanship and manner and in so doing had rendered a great service lo the progress of painting but in the third and greatest age of painters architects and sculptors the artists seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities were able to attain the perfection of the arts (3 I ) This perfection consisted ofaccepting freedom within the rules

42 Ruskin writes If we can draw the human head perfectly and are masters of its expression and its beauty we have no business to cut it off and hang it up b)bull the hair at the end ofa garland Ifwe can draw the human body in the perfection ofits grace and movement we have no business to take awar its limbs and tem1inate it with a bunch of leaves

43 Indeed without cxactlysaying so Vitruvius actually licenses this contamination when he inscribes the well-built male body in a circle and simultaneously extends the anshy

thropomorphic analogy to the orshyders he describes an architecture of multiple ornamental bodies

Figure C redits

Engravings from Jean-Martin Charshycot and Paul Richer Les Di(onnes et es malades dans art ( 1889 reprint Amsterdam B M Israel 1972)

Photographs by Paulette Singley

125

This content downloaded from 12884 125202 on Wed 29 Oct 2014 020004 AM All use subject to JSTOR Tem1s and Conditions