Grotesque
/ɡroʊˈtɛsk/adjective
Distorted or absurd in a way that is comic and repellent at once.
The Greek roots
Literally: “of the cave”
The story of the word
Around 1480 Romans digging on the Esquiline broke through into the buried rooms of Nero's Golden House and found walls painted with impossible hybrids of plant, animal and human. The rooms felt like caves, grotte, so the style was called grottesca, and the caves trace back through Latin crypta to the Greek word for a hidden vault. Raphael copied the motifs into the Vatican loggias; only later did the word slide from a decorative style to anything deformed or grimly ridiculous.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Italian → French → English
- First recorded
- 1560s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The whole scene was grotesque, and nobody in the room would say so.
Carved grotesques run along the cornice, one of them clearly a portrait of somebody.