Decoration and ornament--Europe--History--16th century
Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres. Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating tensions - monstrosities even - that manifest themselves in a variety of ways. In some cases, dichotomies (between order and chaos, artificiality and nature, rational logic and imaginative creativity, etc.) may emerge. Elsewhere, a sense of agitation undermines structures of statuesque control or erupts into wild, unruly displays of constant genesis. The monstrosity of ornament is brought into play through strategies of hybridity and metamorphosis, or by the handling of scale, proportion, and space in ambiguous and discomforting ways that break with the laws of physical reality. An interest in strange exaggeration and curious artifice allows for such colossal ornamental attitude to thrive within early modern art.
Visual and material culture, 1300-1700 ;
Ornament and monstrosity in Early Modern art
Ambiguous delights: ornamental grotesques and femaile monstrosity in sixteenth-century Italy / Maria Fabricius Hansen -- Dissonant symphonies: the Villa d'Este in Tivoli and the grotesque / Luke Morgan -- Outside-in: the intrusion of ornament into sacred narrative / Tianna Helena Uchacz -- 'That savage should mate with tame': hybridity, indeterminacy, and the grotesque in the murals of San Miguel Arcángel (Ixmiquilpan, Mexico) / Barnaby Nygren -- Decoration in the desert: unsettling the order of architecture in the Certosa di San Martino / Maria-Anna Aristova -- Masquing/(un)masking: animation and the restless ornament of Fontainebleau / Lisa Andersen -- Sea-change: the whale in the Florentine Loggia / Chris Askholt Hammeken -- Ornament and agency: Vico's poetic monsters / Frances Connelly -- Trafficking the body: prolegomena to posthumanist theory of ornament to monstrosity / Jacob Wamberg.