Beauty, the Grotesque, and the Mystery of Creative Flow
How to access the beauty we all share
It always starts by accident
Back in the 15th century, they tell us, a young man went out walking on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. He tripped and fell into a hole, and found himself in a kind of cave decorated with stunning art.
When he found his way out of the cave, he told his friends and family, and before long, news of the cave spread throughout Renaissance Rome.
It wasn’t really a cave. Instead, it was part of the vast buried palace of the Emperor Nero, the Domus Aurea he had built after this devastating fire that swept away the existing buildings and created space for his new project.
The word grotesque comes from this discovery. The English word comes from the Italian grottesca, which was used to describe the extravagant decorative art being found in caves, or grotte. The caves in question were in fact the seemingly endless buried rooms of the Domus Aurea, Nero’s Golden House.
Before long, the biggest artists of the day were having laborers dig into the roof of the palace and lower them down on boards so they could study the weird Roman art by torchlight.