English
We tend to have a black and white vision of reality so that any new archaeological discovery is likely to either be dismissed, ignored or deactivated so you mark it as casual and unrepresentative, either being described as revolutionary and capable of creating a new paradigm when it is convenient.
In all likelihood the epithet “grotesque” (Grotta, an Italian word that means a cave or a crypt) comes from an accidental discovery that occurred in Rome during the height of the Renaissance (XV century) in the subsoil of the Titus hot water springs. There were a number of ornamental paintings whose essential features was in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin, author of the brilliant book The popular culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance an “a fantastic unusual and delicious mix of plants, animals and humans that intertwined and transformed fantastically together”
Since this type of art did not match the current renaissance ideas of aspiring to be synonymous of the recovery of the full civilization of antiquity, it was considered at first to be an anomaly, a product perhaps of the demented imagination of a solitary artist. Only with the passage of time, when more examples of this art was found in different parts of ancient Greece, they had to accept that the grotesque was a common manifestation in the classical natural world we lived in with what we considered that the time after his only aesthetic canon, pushing through the idea of ??historical overlaping of different forms that catch the substrates above the elements that are convenient for them due to political legitimacy reasons that have to do with the cultural prestige or the coincidence of tastes. Here too, history is always present and often and very rarely random fragments from history built stories about how things were in the past that are never outside the art of interpretation.
For example, general mentality think that the Greeks remain as the prototype of a serene, sober and balanced civilization despite the raucous original polychrome statues and temples, that the Renaissance was rational and followed a scientific mind, despite the importance that magic , alchemy, Hermeticism and Kabbalah played in their world, and that the Arabs did not draw human figures or animals ever, despite an increasing abundance of findings that can be argued as an exception to that rule, as an overall effect.
The last one was found at the Mirador de Lindaraja of the Alhambra in Granada. More than eighty polychromatic pieces representing vegetables, fantastic animals and human figures laced with verses from the Koran, which join the back of an alfarje ataujerado star at the Patio de los Leones which represents the image of a white-bearded man with a turban and whose head is on the body of what looks like a dog or cat
Paul Oilzum
These findings have stimulated a renewed interest in the Andalusian art. A great time to rent apartments in Seville and “rewrite” history.
Translated by: Marc
