Oh slave, there's a Bosche in my soup

[David Morris]

Grotesque and Rococo and LSD.  Dreams and nightmares dissolve our safe 
world, invade our mutton broth.  The barriers, borders of reality are let 
down, or breached.  From whence come these messages?

Still trippin' after all these years:

http://w1.xrefer.com/entry/143997
grotesque (Italian grotteschi)
A type of mural decoration, painted, carved, or moulded in stucco, which in 
the early 16th cent. spread from Italy to most countries in Europe. It was 
characterized by the use of floral motifs, animal and human figures, masks, 
etc., copied from the ornament found in Roman buildings (called grotte) such 
as the Domus Aurea of Nero, excavated c. 1500, the whole being imaginatively 
combined into fanciful and playful schemes. One of the earliest examples of 
'grotesque' ornament can be found in the frieze in Carlo Crivelli's 
Annunciation (NG, London, 1486). The grotesque style was distinguished by 
its disintegration of natural forms and the redistribution of the parts in 
accordance with the fantasy of the artist.

>From the later 17th cent. this kind of decoration was called arabesque in 
France and in elaboration of the earlier arabesques by Bérain and Audran it 
became a characteristic feature of the Rococo, though it lost much of its 
initial connection with the Roman motifs. The individual motifs of the 
grotteschi were brought in again by Classicists such as Piranesi and Robert 
Adam in the context of the Neoclassical movement and became an occasional 
feature in all the decorative arts. But the distinctive fanciful 
combinations of the Renaissance grotesques were not revived.

In France the word 'grotesque' was applied to literature and even to people 
fairly early in the 17th cent. and in 1694 it was defined by the 
Dictionnaire de l'Académie française as 'Bizarre, fantastique, extravagant, 
capricieux'. This extended sense of the word, which became current also in 
England after the Restoration, with its connotations of the ridiculous, 
absurd, and unnatural, carried implications of disapproval for the Age of 
Reason and by the time Neoclassicism was in vogue both the word and the 
style had acquired a pejorative sense. It was synonymous with the excessive, 
the preposterous, and the reprehensible. During the Gothic Revival and in 
certain phases of the Romantic movement the grotesque again came into repute 
though not in its original connotation. Poe's title Tales of the Grotesque 
and Arabesque (1839) is symptomatic of this change. Ruskin's treatment of 
the grotesque had the effect of establishing it as a respectable genre of 
art both in decoration and more widely, although he was unwilling to allow 
it a place in the higher branches of art. Of the original grotesque 'which 
first developed itself among the enervated Romans' he speaks only with 
disdain. For him the 'true grotesque' was that which revealed an insight 
into the dreadfulness of nature.

Thus the word 'grotesque', originating as a technical term designating a 
late Roman type of decoration and a Renaissance decorative style based upon 
it, came to imply whatever is incongruous with the accepted norm whether in 
life or in art.

David Morris

>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>
>Yes even twinkling through the mutton broth at the bottom of one's spoon, 
>are these,-- well, stories,-- Battles, religious Events, Personages with 
>rapt Phizzes standing about in Rays from above, pointing aloft at who knows 
>what, violent scenes of martyrdom from the religious wars of the previous 
>century, obscure moral instructions written in all but-unreadable 
>lettering, and in Dutch withal,-- framing the potatoes on one's plate, or 
>encircling some caudal Stufatta being passed from eater to eater, and 
>rotated as it goes, so that each gets to view a separate episode of some 
>forever obscure doctrinal dispute....MD.83

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