Quotes About Grotesques

I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.

If you are trying to write realistic fiction and you people it extensively with overdrawn characters, you're working against yourself. You can occasionally get away with filling books and stories with grotesques, but unless your name's Carson McCullers it gets tricky. A less obvious form of caricature consists of giving an otherwise ordinary character a trait or attribute or mannerism on which the reader may focus his attention.

The worst of it was, he had come to like the Jacobeans, in all their sophipathic insanity. They might be grotesaries, caricatures, larger than life and full of violence-but they were also shockingly generous and, sometimes, shockingly funny.

You have only to look, you who still have your sight, at the capitals of your cloister." And he motioned with his hand beyond the window, toward the church. "Before the eyes of monks intent on meditation, what is the meaning of those ridiculous grotesques, those monstrous shapes and shapely monsters?

With his finely honed ability to see both beauty and ugliness, Leonardo was able to create a satirical combination in his grotesques. As he wrote in his notes for his treatise on painting, "If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies within his power to create them; and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, buffoonish, or ridiculous, or pitiable, he can be lord thereof." 20

Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…