Гротесковый орнамент в итальянском искусстве рубежа XV–XVI веков: историография и история

Abstract

Borrowed from the repertoire of ancient art, the grotesque was a favorite form of ornament of the Italian Renaissance. Rediscovered in the 1480s with the excavations of Nero’s Golden House, it rapidly gained popularity in painting and sculpture. The flexible decorative structure allowed to integrate exactly those symbolic objects or figures that had a programmatic meaning for an ensemble into the ornament and to assimilate the richest vocabulary of the decorative language of antiquity. Originally playing the role of a frame, a dividing element, or a decoration of illusory architecture, by the 1510s, it became an element that formed the composition. The article systematizes the historiography of the grotesque, from the fundamental research of N. Dacos (1961) to the essays of A. Chastel (1988), F. Morel (1997), and C. Guest (2015), specifies the research methods and its contexts. In parallel, the author traces the evolution of the functions of the grotesque ornament in Italian art during the 1480–1510s. During these three decades that coincided with the period of the most intense search in Renaissance art, the grotesque demonstrated the full breadth of its formal and semantic features, going from a purely ornamental element to a symbolically significant one and back again. The symbolic function of the grotesque in monumental painting and decorative sculpture has been analyzed on the example of two ensembles commissioned by Oliviero Caraffa: his chapel in the Roman church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, painted by Filippino Lippi (1488–1493), and the crypt of the cathedral in Naples, designed by Tommaso Malvito (1498–1506).