‘Silhouette’ isn’t so much a word one says as whispers. By stripping away its sense of shadowy mystery and retaining only its hint of hideousness, our modern usage of ‘grotesque’ has muted the word’s edgy magic.
‘Grotto’ in turn gave birth to ‘ grottesco’ (or ‘resembling a grotto’). The space itself was labelled a ‘ grotto’ (meaning ‘cave’) for the manner in which it was accessed by the many visitors it soon attracted (including Michelangelo and Raphael), who were variously lowered down by ropes or left to crawl inside. Imagine the child’s shock when he found himself surrounded by an elaborate braid of arabesque patterns into which were woven a macabre menagerie of hybrid human-beasts. The dark chamber into which the boy collapsed was a basement of the fabled first-Century Domus Aurea – an elaborate compound built by Emperor Nero after the great fire of 64 AD. It’s thought that the word ‘grotesque’ likely owes its origin to weird wall designs that were rediscovered in Rome in the early 15th Century when a young boy fell through a fissure in the city’s Esquiline Hill. But this particular kind of ghastly nastiness has an intriguing cultural backstory – one that plunges us deep below ground and into the time-buried rooms of a long-lost palace. To the modern ear, calling something ‘grotesque’ is just a swankier way of saying it’s grim and nasty. What follows is a brief exploration of some of the more fascinating coinages of words that have long since eased their way from their artistic origins into casual conversation. To dig deeper into the biographies of such ordinary words as ‘silhouette’, ‘panorama’ and ‘dude’ is to uncover surprising histories that change the way we understand and appreciate their resonance and ever-evolving meaning. Rather, ‘landscape’ was created to denote a painterly illusion of such rural reality: the rendering in pigment on canvas of a 2D replica of hills and fields, rivers and trees – not the thing itself.Ī quick glance back at the words we use every day to discuss our experience of the world reveals a hidden reliance on language hatched by art and artists. The word itself was devised in the early 17th Century not to describe an actual out-of-doors expanse of inland terrain or a gardener’s manicuring of a natural scene. How black women were whitewashed by artīefore anyone ever walked through a ‘landscape’, an artist painted one. Which came first, the chicken or the Fabergé egg – the world itself, or the artistic expressions we use to see and describe it? While it is always observed with surprise when reality appears to imitate art, in fact the world of painting, drawing, and sculpture is responsible for giving us a great deal of the language with which we understand and articulate our experience of being in the universe.
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