La nouveauté des grotesques dans la culture italienne du XVIe siècle

While most specialists agree that the grotesques constitute nothing else but a language borrowed from ancient, classical art and initially adapted to the decorative functions of Renaissance palaces and churches, this article, which presents a rapid survey of the themes developped at length in a book published in 1997, is arguing exactly the contrary. Namely, that the then extremely popular grotesque paintings progressively detached themselves from references to ancient, classical models in order to find new resources in the variegated cultural ground of the 16th century (from rhetoric to curiosity cabinets, from the burlesque to natural, encyclopaedic history) and to become a privileged mode of expression of the Renaissance imagination. In this paper, the author puts particular emphasis on the density, the variety and the surprising capacity for innovation and invention of this form of paradigmatic Mannerist culture