Grotesque as Aesthetic Identity: from Medieval Illumination to Contemporary Art

This paper’s aim is offering a subjective vision on the grotesque as form of identity for human individuals ranging from at least Middle Ages until contemporary artistic manifestations. A traditional history of art becomes impossible when discovering a synchronous existence of a variety of art events that cannot be placed in parallel discursive lines, without grasping links and ramifications born from obvious similarities between formulas and procedures otherwise separated by long distances and time periods. The aesthetic category that seems best to transcribe the need of simultaneous and irrational perception of mundane reality is the grotesque – being, in my opinion, a good strategy for highlighting multiple purpose trends present in the environment as important factors of human identity configuration which, in a mechanistic way, dominated by reason, are often lost sight of. A historicist approach to the grotesque, however subjective, offers nothing else but a history of the meanings given to the word grotesque, term which designates a perpetual value of reality, stratified only in the physical and conceptual artifacts it has been associated with. Nonetheless it is useful as a micro-theory of the chaos which surrounds us and determines opposed dialectical positions such as order, hierarchy, and harmony