Editing Grotesque (section)

{{Short description|Art style}}
{{Other uses}}

[[File:Michelangelo Buonarroti - Studies - WGA15523.jpg|thumb|upright=0.9|Grotesque studies, [[Michelangelo]]]]
Since at least the 18th century (in French and German, as well as English), '''grotesque''' has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as [[Halloween]] masks. In art, performance, and literature, however, ''grotesque'' may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes an audience feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as [[sympathy|sympathetic]] [[pity]].

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]]),<ref name="Online Etymology Dictionary">{{cite web|url=http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=grotesque |title=OED-Grotesque etymology |publisher=Etymonline.com |access-date=2014-12-15}}</ref> an extravagant style of [[Roman wall painting (200 BC–AD 79)|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 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 (European art)|arabesque]] and [[moresque]] for types of decorative patterns using curving foliage elements.

Rémi Astruc<ref>Rémi Astruc, Le Renouveau du grotesque dans le roman du xxe siècle. Essai d'anthropologie littéraire, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2010, 280 p. (ISBN 978-2-8124-0170-1).</ref> has argued that although there is an immense variety of motifs and figures, the three main tropes of the grotesque are doubleness, [[hybridity]] and metamorphosis.<ref>Astruc R. (2010), Le Renouveau du grotesque dans le roman du XXe siècle, Paris, Classiques Garnier.</ref> 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.{{Citation needed lead|date=July 2012}} <!--tags removed: for citations in this summary, see main treatment below-->