The Grotesque in Church Art :: The Artistic Quality of Church Grotesques.

The Artistic Quality of Church Grotesques.

The grotesque has been pronounced a false taste, and not desirable to be perpetuated. Reflection upon the causes and meanings of Gothic grotesque will shew that perpetuation is to be regretted for other than artistic reasons. If the taste be false yet the work is valuable on historic grounds, for what it teaches of its own time and much more for what it hints of earlier periods of which there is meagre record anywhere. Therefore it would be well not to confuse the student of the future with our clever variations of imperfectly understood ideas. Practically the grotesque and emblematic period ended at the Reformation; and it was well.

But while leaving the falseness of the taste for grotesques an open question, there is something to be said for them without straining fact. For it is certain that there is underlying Gothic grotesque ornament a unique and, if not understood, an uncopiable beauty, be the subject never so ugly. The fascinating element appear to be, first, the completeness of the genius which was exercised upon it. It not only conveys the travestying idea, but also sufficiently conveys the original thought travestied.

What is it at which we laugh? It shall be a figure which is of a kind generally dignified, now with no dignity; generally to be respected, but now commanding no respect; capable of being feared, but now inspiring no fear; usually lovable, but now provoking no love. It shall be a figure of which the preconceived idea was either worthy or dreadful—which suddenly we have presented to us shorn of its superior attributes. Ideals are unconsciously enshrined in the mind, and when images proclaiming themselves the same ideals appear in sharp degraded contrast—we laugh. Thus we affirm the correctness of the original judgments both as to the great and the contemptible imitating it, for laughter is the effect of appreciation of incongruity. Custom overrides nearly all, and blunts contrast of ideas, yet wit, darting here and there among men, ever finds fresh contrasts and fresh laughter.

DOG AND BONE, CHRISTCHURCH, HAMPSHIRE.

Further counts for something the excellence of the artistic management, which in the treatment of the most unpromising subjects filled the composition with beautiful lines. It was left to Hogarth’s genius to insist on the reality of “the line of beauty” as governing all loveliness, and he suggests that a perceptive recognition of this existed on the part of the classic sculptors. This applies to their work in general, but he also mentions their frequent addition of some curved object connected with the subject, as though it were a kind of key to the artistic composition. Whether consciously or not, the ancients used many such adjunctive curved lines, and Hogarth’s conclusions cannot be styled fanciful. The helmet, plume, and serpent-edged Ægis of Minerva, the double-bowed bolt and serpents of Jupiter, the ornaments of the trident, the aplustre and the twisted rope of Neptune, the bow and serpent of Apollo, the plume of Mars, the caduceus of Mercury, the ship-prow of Saturn, the gubernum or rudder of Venus, the drinking horn of Pan, together with many another form to be observed in particular works of the ancients, is each a definite and perfect example of the faultless line. Now, to repeat, many—an infinite number—of the ornaments of Gothic architecture, and not less the grotesque than any other description, are likewise composed of the most beautiful lines conceivable, either entirely, or combined with lines of abrupt and ungraceful turn that seem to deliberately provoke one’s artistic protest; and yet the whole composition shall, by its curious mixture of beauty and bizarre, its contrast of elegance with awkwardness, leave a real and unique sense of pleasure in the mind. Doubtless the root of this pleasure is the gratification of the mind at having secretly detected itself responding to the call of art to exercise itself in appreciative discrimination. This may be unconsciously done; and in a great measure the qualities which give the pleasure would be bestowed upon the work in similar happy unconsciousness of the exact why and wherefore. Often, as in the ancient statues, a small curved form is introduced as an appendage to a mediÆval grotesque.

HAWKS OR EAGLES? WELLINGBOROUGH, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE.

Thus we see that there are combinations of two kinds of contrast which make Gothic grotesques agreeable, the artistic contrasts among the mere lines of the carvings, and the significatory contrasts evolved by the meanings of the carvings.

As far back as the twelfth century, a critic of church grotesques recognized their combination of contrasts. This was St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who, speaking of the ecclesiastical decoration of his time, paid the grotesques of church art the exact tribute they so often merit; probably the greater portion of what he saw has given place to succeeding carvings, though of precisely the same characteristics. He calls them “a wonderful sort of hideous beauty and beautiful deformity.” He, moreover, put a question, many times since repeated by hundreds who never heard of him, asking the use of placing ridiculous monstrosities in the cloisters before the eyes of the brethren when occupied with their studies.

It is not possible to explain the “use” of perpetuating the barbarous symbols of a long-forgotten past; but it will be interesting to shew that there were actual causes accounting for their continued existence and their continued production, unknown ages after their own epoch.

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