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64-633: The English word first appears in the 1560s as a noun borrowed from French, itself originally from the Italian grottesca (literally "of a cave" from the Italian grotta , 'cave'; see grotto ), an extravagant style of ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered at Rome at the end of the fifteenth century and subsequently imitated. The word was first used of paintings found on the walls of basements of ruins in Rome that were called at that time le Grotte ('the caves'). These 'caves' were in fact rooms and corridors of

128-614: A loggia corridor space in the Apostolic Palace open to the elements on one side, were decorated around 1519 by Raphael 's large team of artists, with Giovanni da Udine the main hand involved. Because of the relative unimportance of the space, and a desire to copy the Domus Aurea style, no large paintings were used, and the surfaces were mostly covered with grotesque designs on a white background, with paintings imitating sculptures in niches, and small figurative subjects in

192-556: A symmetrical pattern around some form of architectural framework, though this may be very flimsy. Such designs were fashionable in ancient Rome , especially as fresco wall decoration and floor mosaic. Stylized versions, common in Imperial Roman decoration, were decried by Vitruvius (c. 30 BC) who, in dismissing them as meaningless and illogical, offered the following description: For example, reeds are substituted for columns, fluted appendages with curly leaves and volutes take

256-735: A "way out". The term " Theatre of the Grotesque " refers to an anti- naturalistic school of Italian dramatists, writing in the 1910s and 1920s, who are often seen as precursors of the Theatre of the Absurd . Characterized by ironic and macabre themes of daily life in the World War 1 era. Theatre of the Grotesque was named after the play 'The Mask and the Face' by Luigi Chiarelli, which was described as 'a grotesque in three acts.' Friedrich Dürrenmatt

320-473: A cave, or grotte in Italian. The palace's wall decorations in fresco and delicate stucco were a revelation. The first appearance of the word grottesche appears in a contract of 1502 for the Piccolomini Library attached to the duomo of Siena . They were introduced by Raphael Sanzio and his team of decorative painters, who developed grottesche into a complete system of ornament in

384-465: A direct continuation of the medieval traditions of the drolleries in the border decorations or initials in illuminated manuscripts . From this the term began to be applied to larger caricatures, such as those of Leonardo da Vinci , and the modern sense began to develop. It is first recorded in English in 1646 from Sir Thomas Browne : "In nature there are no grotesques". By extension backwards in time,

448-800: A formal introduction to classical values and to the dangers of grotesque or mixed form. Indeed, the departure from classical models of order, reason, harmony, balance and form opens up the risk of entry into grotesque worlds. Accordingly, British literature abounds with native grotesquerie, from the strange worlds of Spenser 's allegory in The Faerie Queene to the tragi-comic modes of 16th-century drama. (Grotesque comic elements can be found in major works such as King Lear .) Literary works of mixed genre are occasionally termed grotesque, as are "low" or non-literary genres such as pantomime and farce. Gothic writings often have grotesque components in terms of character, style and location. In other cases,

512-604: A horse is given legs made of leaves, a man has crane's legs, with countless other impossible absurdities; and the bizarrer the painter's imagination, the higher he was rated". Vasari recorded that Francesco Ubertini, called "Bacchiacca" , delighted in inventing grotteschi , and (about 1545) painted for Duke Cosimo de' Medici a studiolo in a mezzanine at the Palazzo Vecchio "full of animals and rare plants". Other 16th-century writers on grottesche included Daniele Barbaro , Pirro Ligorio and Gian Paolo Lomazzo . In

576-488: A new shape with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll , when a girl meets fantastic grotesque figures in her fantasy world. Carroll manages to make the figures seem less frightful and fit for children's literature , but still utterly strange. Another comic grotesque writer who played on the relationship between sense and nonsense was Edward Lear . Humorous, or festive nonsense of this kind has its roots in

640-475: A revival of Ancient Roman style. This large array provided a repertoire of elements that were the basis for later artists across Europe. In Michelangelo's Medici Chapel Giovanni da Udine composed during 1532–1533 "most beautiful sprays of foliage, rosettes and other ornaments in stucco and gold" in the coffers and "sprays of foliage, birds, masks and figures", with a result that did not please Pope Clement VII Medici , however, nor Giorgio Vasari , who whitewashed

704-417: A rustic porch, or a rocky overhang. Inside, they are decorated as a temple or with fountains, stalactites , and imitation gems and shells (sometimes made in ceramic); herms and mermaids, mythological subjects suited to the space; and naiads , or river gods whose urns spilled water into pools. Damp grottoes were cool places to retreat from the Italian sun, but they also became fashionable in the cool drizzle of

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768-541: A sense of the grotesque clash of opposites. In a similar fashion, Ernst Friedrich (1894–1967), founder of the Berlin Peace Museum, an anarchist and a pacifist, was the author of War Against War (1924) which used grotesque photographs of mutilated victims of the First World War in order to campaign for peace. Southern Gothic is a genre frequently identified with grotesques and William Faulkner

832-470: A tablet or candelabrum might provide a focus; frames were extended into scrolls that formed part of the surrounding designs as a kind of scaffold, as Peter Ward-Jackson noted. Light scrolling grotesques could be ordered by confining them within the framing of a pilaster to give them more structure. Giovanni da Udine took up the theme of grotesques in decorating the Villa Madama , the most influential of

896-411: Is a major author of contemporary grotesque comedy plays. In architecture the term "grotesque" means a carved stone figure. Grotesques are often confused with gargoyles , but the distinction is that gargoyles are figures that contain a water spout through the mouth, while grotesques do not. Without a water spout, this type of sculpture is also known as a chimera when it depicts fantastical creatures. In

960-476: Is also related by a historical accident to the word grotesque . In the late 15th century, Romans accidentally unearthed Nero 's Domus Aurea on the Palatine Hill , a series of rooms, decorated with designs of garlands, slender architectural framework, foliage, and animals. The rooms had sunk underground over time. The Romans who discovered this historical monument found it very strange, partly because it

1024-620: Is an immense variety of motifs and figures, the three main tropes of the grotesque are doubleness, hybridity and metamorphosis. Beyond the current understanding of the grotesque as an aesthetic category, he demonstrated how the grotesque functions as a fundamental existential experience. Moreover, Astruc identifies the grotesque as a crucial, and potentially universal, anthropological device that societies have used to conceptualize alterity and change. In art, grotesques are ornamental arrangements of arabesques with interlaced garlands and small and fantastic human and animal figures, usually set out in

1088-511: Is at this point that a grotesque creature such as Frankenstein's monster begins to be presented more sympathetically as the outsider who is the victim of society. But the novel also makes the issue of sympathy problematic in an unkind society. This means that society becomes the generator of the grotesque, by a process of alienation. In fact, the grotesque monster in Frankenstein tends to be described as "the creature". The grotesque received

1152-492: Is dug out under a rock or between two boulders, where subterranean air currents keep the room cool. Often a grotto had a second floor with another one or two rooms for the fermentation cask and tools of the vintage. In front of the grotto were a table and benches of stone, where the farmers could rest and refresh themselves. The popularity of artificial grottoes introduced the Mannerist style to Italian and French gardens of

1216-583: Is often cited as the leading exponent. Flannery O'Connor wrote, "Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one" ( Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction , 1960). In O'Connor's often-anthologized short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find , the Misfit, a serial killer, is clearly a maimed soul, utterly callous to human life, but driven to seek

1280-403: Is performed by a skillful artist." The delight of Mannerist artists and their patrons in arcane iconographic programs available only to the erudite could be embodied in schemes of grottesche , Andrea Alciato 's Emblemata (1522) offered ready-made iconographic shorthand for vignettes. More familiar material for grotesques could be drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses . The Vatican loggias ,

1344-488: Is simply a villain or a monster .) Obvious examples would include the physically deformed and the mentally deficient, but people with cringe-worthy social traits are also included. The reader becomes piqued by the grotesque's positive side, and continues reading to see if the character can conquer their darker side. In Shakespeare's The Tempest , the figure of Caliban has inspired more nuanced reactions than simple scorn and disgust. Also, in J. R. R. Tolkien 's The Lord of

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1408-610: The Domus Aurea , the unfinished palace complex started by Nero after the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, which had become overgrown and buried, until they were broken into again, mostly from above. Spreading from Italian to the other European languages, the term was long used largely interchangeably with arabesque and moresque for types of decorative patterns using curving foliage elements. Rémi Astruc has argued that although there

1472-627: The Loggias that are part of the series of Raphael's Rooms in the Vatican Palace , Rome. "The decorations astonished and charmed a generation of artists that was familiar with the grammar of the classical orders but had not guessed till then that in their private houses the Romans had often disregarded those rules and had adopted instead a more fanciful and informal style that was all lightness, elegance and grace." In these grotesque decorations

1536-889: The Virgin Mary , in outdoor gardens. Many Roman Catholics visit a grotto where Bernadette Soubirous saw apparitions of Our Lady of Lourdes . Numerous garden shrines are modeled after these apparitions. They can commonly be found displayed in gardens and churches , among other places (see Lourdes grotto ). The largest grotto is believed to be the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa . Architrave In classical architecture , an architrave ( / ˈ ɑːr k ɪ t r eɪ v / ; from Italian architrave  'chief beam', also called an epistyle ; from Ancient Greek ἐπίστυλον (epistylon)  'on

1600-484: The bizarro genre of fiction . Other contemporary writers who have explored the grotesque in pop-culture are John Docker , in the context of postmodernism; Cintra Wilson , who analyzes celebrity; and Francis Sanzaro , who discusses its relation to childbirth and obscenity. Alien Resurrection (1997) is the only film rated by the MPAA to have "grotesque images" in its rating description, mainly due to its depiction of

1664-486: The spurred "G"), whereas popular neo-grotesque typefaces include Arial , Helvetica , and Verdana . Grotto A grotto ( grot ) is a natural or artificial cave used by humans in both modern times and antiquity, and historically or prehistorically. Naturally occurring grottoes are often small caves near water that are usually flooded or often flooded at high tide . Sometimes, artificial grottoes are used as garden features . The Grotta Azzurra at Capri and

1728-599: The Île-de-France . In the Kuskovo Estate, there is the Grotto Pavilion, built between 1755 and 1761. Grottoes could also serve as baths; an example of this is at the Palazzo del Te , in the 'Casino della Grotta', where a small suite of intimate rooms is laid out around a grotto and loggetta (covered balcony). Courtiers once bathed in the small cascade that splashed over the pebbles and shells encrusted in

1792-492: The "genuine antibourgeois style". Some of the earliest written texts describe grotesque happenings and monstrous creatures. The literature of myth has been a rich source of monsters; from the one-eyed Cyclops from Hesiod 's Theogony to Homer's Polyphemus in the Odyssey . Ovid 's Metamorphoses is another rich source for grotesque transformations and hybrid creatures of myth. Horace 's Art of Poetry also provides

1856-487: The "grotesque" figures, in the ordinary conversational sense, commonly appear in the genre grotesque art , also known as fantastic art . One of the first uses of the term grotesque to denote a literary genre is in Montaigne's Essays . The Grotesque is often linked with satire and tragicomedy . It is an effective artistic means to convey grief and pain to the audience, and for this has been labeled by Thomas Mann as

1920-422: The 17th and 18th centuries the grotesque encompasses a wide field of teratology (science of monsters) and artistic experimentation. The monstrous, for instance, often occurs as the notion of play . The sportiveness of the grotesque category can be seen in the notion of the preternatural category of the lusus naturae , in natural history writings and in cabinets of curiosities. The last vestiges of romance, such as

1984-727: The Middle Ages, the term babewyn was used to refer to both gargoyles and grotesques. This word is derived from the Italian word babbuino , which means " baboon ". The word "grotesque", or "Grotesk" in German, is also frequently used as a synonym for sans-serif in typography . At other times, it is used (along with "neo-grotesque", "humanist", " lineal ", and "geometric") to describe a particular style or subset of sans-serif typefaces. The origin of this association can be traced back to English typefounder William Thorowgood , who introduced

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2048-528: The Newborn xenomorph and the failed clones of Ellen Ripley , who all featured grotesque human–alien ( hybrid ) characteristics. Grotesque manner also can be found at Disney's famous ride, The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, Walt Disney World and other theme parks, where some of its details may contain a symbolism of Memento Mori , Samsara's circle or themes describing the fragility of human existence, passions that baffle and how they could be avoided or find

2112-451: The Rings , the character of Gollum may be considered to have both disgusting and empathetic qualities, which fit the grotesque template. Victor Hugo 's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is one of the most celebrated grotesques in literature. Dr. Frankenstein's monster from Mary Shelley 's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus can also be considered a grotesque, as well as

2176-493: The airy well-spaced style used by the Romans and Raphael. Soon grottesche appeared in marquetry (fine woodwork), in maiolica produced above all at Urbino from the late 1520s, then in book illustration and in other decorative uses. At Fontainebleau Rosso Fiorentino and his team enriched the vocabulary of grotesques by combining them with the decorative form of strapwork , the portrayal of leather straps in plaster or wood moldings, which forms an element in grotesques. In

2240-598: The city, made to look natural. At the great Roman sanctuary of Praeneste south of Rome, the oldest portion of the primitive sanctuary was situated on the second lowest terrace, in a grotto in the natural rock where a spring developed into a well. According to tradition, Praeneste's sacred spring had a native nymph , who was honored in a grotto-like watery nymphaeum . In Ticino , the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, grottoes were places where wine and food were stored and preserved. They were built by exploiting

2304-410: The column') is the lintel or beam , typically made of wood or stone, that rests on the capitals of columns . The term can also apply to all sides, including the vertical members, of a frame with mouldings around a door or window. The word "architrave" has come to be used to refer more generally to a style of mouldings (or other elements) framing a door, window or other rectangular opening, where

2368-576: The different Classical orders . In the Tuscan order , it only consists of a plain face, crowned with a fillet , and is half a module in height. In the Doric and Composite order , it has two faces, or fasciae , and three in the Ionic and Corinthian order , in which it is 10/12 of a module high, though but half a module in the rest. The term architrave has also been used in academic writing to mean

2432-599: The environment described may be grotesque – whether urban ( Charles Dickens ), or the literature of the American south which has sometimes been termed " Southern Gothic ". Sometimes the grotesque in literature has been explored in terms of social and cultural formations such as the carnival(-esque) in François Rabelais and Mikhail Bakhtin . Terry Castle has written on the relationship between metamorphosis, literary writings and masquerade. Another major source of

2496-631: The floor and walls. Grottoes have also served as chapels , or at Villa Farnese at Caprarola, a little theater designed in the grotto manner. They were often combined with cascading fountains in Renaissance gardens. The grotto designed by Bernard Palissy for Catherine de' Medici 's château in Paris , the Tuileries , was renowned. There are also grottoes in the gardens designed by André Le Nôtre for Versailles . In England, an early garden grotto

2560-443: The fundamental part of something (a speech, a thought or a reasoning), or the basis upon which an idea, reasoning, thought or philosophy is built. Examples: In contemporary architecture and interior design, the term architrave also refers to the mouldings that frame doors and windows. Unlike classical architraves, which were primarily structural and often ornate, modern architraves are typically decorative and functional, concealing

2624-461: The gap between the wall and the door or window frame. Modern architraves are commonly made from: Modern architraves are available in a variety of styles to suit different interior design preferences: Modern architraves serve both aesthetic and practical purposes: Modern architraves are typically installed after the walls have been finished (plastered and painted) but before flooring is laid. They are often painted or finished to match or complement

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2688-429: The grotesque decor in 1556. Counter Reformation writers on the arts, notably Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti , bishop of Bologna, turned upon grottesche with a righteous vengeance. Vasari, echoing Vitruvius, described the style as follows: "Grotesques are a type of extremely licentious and absurd painting done by the ancients ... without any logic, so that a weight is attached to a thin thread which could not support it,

2752-490: The grotesque is in satirical writings of the 18th century. Jonathan Swift 's Gulliver's Travels provides a variety of approaches to grotesque representation. Corporeal hybridity is an essential marker in Swift. In poetry, the works of Alexander Pope provide many examples of the grotesque. In fiction, characters are usually considered grotesque if they induce both empathy and disgust. (A character who inspires disgust alone

2816-530: The grotto at Tiberius ' Villa Jovis in the Bay of Naples are examples of popular natural seashore grottoes. Whether in tidal water or high up in hills, grottoes are generally made up of limestone geology , where the acidity of standing water has dissolved the carbonates in the rock matrix as it passes through what were originally small fissures. The word grotto comes from Italian grotta , Vulgar Latin grupta , and Latin crypta ("a crypt "). It

2880-888: The grotto under Venusberg, which is figured in Wagner 's Tannhäuser . Although grottoes have largely fallen from fashion since the British Picturesque movement, architects and artists occasionally try to redefine the grotto in contemporary design works. Such examples include Frederick Kiesler 's Grotto of Meditation for New Harmony (1964), ARM'st post-modern Storey Hall (1995), Aranda/Lasch's Grotto Concept, (2005), DSDHA 's Potters Field Park Pavilions (2008) , Callum Moreton's Grotto pavilion (2010), and Antonino Cardillo 's Grottoes series (2013–2023). Today, artificial grottoes are purchased and built for ornamental and devotional purposes. They are often used as shrines in which to place statues of saints, particularly

2944-471: The home front became commonplace. The accompanying growth in the prosthetic industry struck contemporaries as creating a race of half-mechanical men and became an important theme in dadaist work.' The poetry of Wilfred Owen displays a poetic and realistic sense of the grotesque horror of war and the human cost of brutal conflict. Poems such as Spring Offensive and Greater Love combined images of beauty with shocking brutality and violence in order to produce

3008-459: The horizontal "head" casing extends across the tops of the vertical side casings where the elements join (forming a butt joint , as opposed to a miter joint ). In an entablature in classical architecture , it is the lowest part, below the frieze and cornice . The word is derived from the Greek and Latin words arche and trabs combined to mean "main beam". The architrave is different in

3072-446: The landscape gardens of Painshill Park , Stowe , Clandon Park , and Stourhead . Scott's Grotto is a series of interconnected chambers, extending 67 ft (20 metres) into the chalk hillside on the outskirts of Ware, Hertfordshire . Built during the late 18th century, the chambers and tunnels are lined with shells, flints, and pieces of colored glass. The Romantic generation of tourists might not actually visit Fingal's Cave , on

3136-399: The marvellous also provide opportunities for the presentation of the grotesque in, for instance, operatic spectacle. The mixed form of the novel was commonly described as grotesque – see for instance Fielding's "comic epic poem in prose" ( Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones ). Grotesque ornament received a further impetus from new discoveries of original Roman frescoes and stucchi at Pompeii and

3200-610: The meantime, through the medium of engravings the grotesque mode of surface ornament passed into the European artistic repertory of the 16th century, from Spain to Poland. A classic suite was that attributed to Enea Vico , published in 1540–41 under an evocative explanatory title, Leviores et extemporaneae picturae quas grotteschas vulgo vocant , "Light and extemporaneous pictures that are vulgarly called grotesques". Later Mannerist versions, especially in engraving, tended to lose that initial lightness and be much more densely filled than

3264-657: The mid-16th century. Two famous grottoes in the Boboli Gardens of Palazzo Pitti were begun by Vasari and completed by Ammanati and Buontalenti between 1583 and 1593. One of these grottoes originally housed the Prisoners of Michelangelo . Before the Boboli grotto, a garden was laid out by Niccolò Tribolo at the Medici Villa Castello , near Florence . At Pratolino , in spite of the dryness of

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3328-758: The morphology of rocks and boulders, to create rooms with a cool climate suitable for food, particularly milk and cheese, as well as potatoes, sausages, and wine storage. The importance of these cellars is demonstrated in their number; for example, there are 40 grotti in Maggia , no fewer in Moghegno , and about 70 in Cevio behind Case Franzoni. Some grotti have been opened to the public, as in Avegno , but most have lost their original character as they became rustic restaurants which serve basic local food and drink. A true grotto

3392-626: The new Roman villas. In the 16th century, such artistic license and irrationality was controversial matter. Francisco de Holanda puts a defense in the mouth of Michelangelo in his third dialogue of Da Pintura Antiga , 1548: "this insatiable desire of man sometimes prefers to an ordinary building, with its pillars and doors, one falsely constructed in grotesque style, with pillars formed of children growing out of stalks of flowers, with architraves and cornices of branches of myrtle and doorways of reeds and other things, all seeming impossible and contrary to reason, yet it may be really great work if it

3456-552: The other buried sites round Mount Vesuvius from the middle of the century. It continued in use, becoming increasingly heavy, in the Empire Style and then in the Victorian period, when designs often became as densely packed as in 16th-century engravings, and the elegance and fancy of the style tended to be lost. Artists began to give the tiny faces of the figures in grotesque decorations strange caricatured expressions, in

3520-437: The place of pediments, candelabra support representations of shrines, and on top of their roofs grow slender stalks and volutes with human figures senselessly seated upon them. Emperor Nero 's palace in Rome, the Domus Aurea , was rediscovered by chance in the late 15th century, buried in fifteen hundred years of land fill. Access into the palace's remains was from above, requiring visitors to be lowered into it using ropes as in

3584-487: The remote isle of Staffa in the Scottish Hebrides , but they have often heard of it, perhaps through Felix Mendelssohn 's " Hebrides Overture ", better known as " Fingal's Cave ", which was inspired by his visit. In the 19th century, when miniature Matterhorns and rock gardens became fashionable, a grotto was often found, such as at Ascott House . In Bavaria, Ludwig 's Linderhof contains an abstraction of

3648-569: The seventeenth century traditions of fustian, bombastic and satirical writing. During the nineteenth-century category of grotesque body was increasingly displaced by the notion of congenital deformity or medical anomaly. Building on this context, the grotesque begins to be understood more as deformity and disability, especially after the First World War , 1914–18. In these terms, the art historian Leah Dickerman has argued that "The sight of horrendously shattered bodies of veterans returned to

3712-590: The site, there was a Grotto of Cupid (surviving), with water tricks for the unsuspecting visitor. The Fonte di Fata Morgana ("Fata Morgana's Spring") at Grassina, not far from Florence, is a small garden building, built in 1573–74 as a garden feature in the extensive grounds of the Villa "Riposo" (rest) of Bernardo Vecchietti. It is decorated with sculptures in the Giambolognan manner. The outsides of garden grottoes are often designed to look like an enormous rock,

3776-453: The term "grotesque" and in 1835 produced 7-line pica grotesque —the first sans-serif typeface containing actual lowercase letters. An alternate etymology is possibly based on the original reaction of other typographers to such a strikingly featureless typeface. Popular grotesque typefaces include Franklin Gothic , News Gothic , Haettenschweiler , and Lucida Sans (although the latter lacks

3840-419: The term became also used for the medieval originals, and in modern terminology medieval drolleries, half-human thumbnail vignettes drawn in the margins, and carved figures on buildings (that are not also waterspouts, and so gargoyles ) are also called "grotesques". A boom in the production of works of art in the grotesque genre characterized the 1920–1933 period of German art . In contemporary illustration art,

3904-786: The title character, Erik in The Phantom of the Opera and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast . Other instances of the romantic grotesque are also to be found in Edgar Allan Poe , E. T. A. Hoffmann , in Sturm und Drang literature or in Sterne's Tristram Shandy . The romantic grotesque is far more terrible and sombre than the medieval grotesque, which celebrated laughter and fertility. It

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3968-809: The truth. The less obvious grotesque is the polite, doting grandmother who is unaware of her own astonishing selfishness. Another oft-cited example of the grotesque from O'Connor's work is her short story entitled A Temple of the Holy Ghost . The American novelist Raymond Kennedy is another author associated with the literary tradition of the grotesque. Contemporary writers of literary grotesque fiction include Ian McEwan , Katherine Dunn , Alasdair Gray , Angela Carter , Jeanette Winterson , Umberto Eco , Patrick McGrath , Jessica Anthony , Natsuo Kirino , Paul Tremblay , Matt Bell , Chuck Palahniuk , Brian Evenson , Caleb J. Ross (who writes domestic grotesque fiction), Richard Thomas and many authors who write in

4032-513: Was built at Wilton House in the 1630s, probably by Isaac de Caus . Grottoes were suitable for less formal gardens too. Pope's Grotto , created by Alexander Pope , is almost all that survives of one of the first landscape gardens in England, at Twickenham . Pope was inspired after seeing grottoes in Italy during a visit there. Efforts are underway to restore his grotto. There are grottoes in

4096-457: Was uncovered from an "underworld" source. This led the Romans of that era to give it the name grottesca , from which came the French grotesque . Grottoes were very popular in Greek and Roman culture. Spring-fed grottoes were a feature of Apollo's oracles at Delphi , Corinth , and Clarus . The Hellenistic city of Rhodes was designed with rock-cut artificial grottoes incorporated into

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