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Item Number: 57434
Title: Metamorphosed Margins: The Case for a Visual Rhetoric of the Renaissance Grottesche under the Influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses
Author: Kommerell, Victor
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9783487136936
Description: Hildesheim: Olms, 2008. 24cm., pbk., 248pp., 115 illus. English text. Publisher's summary: The Grottesche, Renaissance ornament, came out of the grotto in the 1480’s in Rome - inspired by the Ancient Roman wall paintings discovered in the ‘buried’ Domus Aurea - just as Ovid’s Metamorphoses reached a much wider readership in Italy and in Europe. As primary source for all’anticha (hi)stories and meaning, the Metamorphoses fuelled artistic imagination and meaning expressed in Grottesche compositions and motifs for a good part of their 200-year life. The unique ornament entered many art forms, covering Europe; and was revived in the 1700’s and 1900’s. In 1500’s Italy, these ornamental margins belonged to a larger phenomenon, the 'Pagan Dream'. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and other mythological handbooks, notably shaped artists’ visual choices and informed patrons’ reading of alla grottesca art work. They noted 'underlying', invisible 'concetti' visualised at the ornamental margins, also described in Ovid’s plots: The Laws of Nature, life cycles, metamorphosis, the power of passion. This book makes an argument about what the Grottesche had meant to their 15th and 16th century contemporaries by looking at 7 locations, still visitable today. Hamburg-based researcher Victor Kommerell has written an engaging account of his findings, which invites art and cultural historians, Italy lovers and ‘educational tourists’ to delve into the often neglected margins. (Studien zur Kunstgeschichte, 173)
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