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So I've caught you!" said his wife, coming brightly into the room. She was a buxom woman of forty-three. Her black hair was elaborately done for the day, but she wore a roomy peignoir instead of a frock; it was Chinese, in the Imperial yellow, inconceivably embroidered with flora, fauna, and grotesques.
The medallions in every case are surrounded by a broadly painted coloured pattern of grotesques, also by assistants, but probably to a large extent designed by Signorelli, for they are extremely characteristic of his preoccupation with the human form and with movement.
There are in his company imps and grotesques, and fauns and satyrs, who come summoned by his piping. Sometimes, as in "Eve," the poem of the mystery of womanhood, he is purely beautiful, but I find myself going back to his men and women; and I hope he will not be angry with me when I say I prefer his tinker drunken to his Deity sober.
The grotesques on the bases are of good design, and the drill holes of the marble cutting are simply left to tell their story of how the work was done, instead of being cut away and hidden as in later work. May they not have been designed in Michael Angelo’s time, possibly for the brackets on the cornice of the panelling behind the tombs? On the altar is the inscription: PAULUS V. PONT. MAX.
In the first, the grotesque heads in the mouldings are like the dull grotesques Michael Angelo appears to have designed in the architecture of the Tomb of Julius and on the armour of the captains in this chapel. In the second, the four-horned skulls of rams on the sides of the supports of the sarcophagi are very feeble and poor in design.
The cartouche came to divide the border into medallions, to apportion space for the various motives; but with a far less subtle art than that of the older men who traced their airy arbours and trailed their dainty vines and set their delicate grotesques, in a manner half playful and wholly charming. But when the cartouche appeared, what is the effect?
In the thirteenth century, this is always possible; but in much later times, and in the Renaissance, the grotesques simply became comic and degraded, and lacking in humour: in a later chapter this idea will be developed further.
The present "star" resembles in outline one of the grotesques used by Hogarth to illustrate his theories in his "Analysis of Beauty," and one is inclined to laugh at her awkwardness when she walks; nor is it easy to admire when she whirls round like a dancing dervish, the tutu mounting higher and becoming more and more rectangular the faster she goes. Mlle.
But lovely beyond all others, in the venerable aspect of the countenance, is the figure of S. Romualdo, which is on that high-altar. They also executed other pictures there, but it must suffice to have spoken of these. Ridolfo painted grotesques on the vaulting of the Green Chamber in the Palace of Duke Cosimo, and some landscapes on the walls, which much pleased the Duke.
Under Alexander VI the so-called 'Grotesques, that is, the mural decorations of the ancients, were discovered, and the Apollo of the Belvedere was found at Porto d'Anzio. Under Julius II followed the memorable discoveries of the Laocoon, of the Venus of the Vatican, of the Torso of the Cleopatra. The palaces of the nobles and the cardinals began to be filled with ancient statues and fragments.
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