Situations of the Grotesque Ornament in Church Art.
The places chosen for the execution of the work which, by reason of its intention or its want of conformity with what we now consider a true taste in art, may be styled Grotesque, do not seem to be in any marked degree different from the situations selected for other ornamental work. It may, however, be permitted to glance at those situations, and enquire as to such comparisons as they afford, though the conclusions to be arrived at must necessarily be loose and general.
In Norman work the chief iconographical interest is to be found in the capitals of pilasters and pillars, for here is often told a story of some completeness. Other places are the arches, chiefly of doorways; bosses of groining, and the horizontal corners of pillar plinths; exteriorly, the gargoyles are most full of meaning, seconded by the corbels of the corbel-table. We may expect in Norman grotesque some reference to ancient mystics; the forms are bold and rugged, such appearance of delicacy as exists being attained by interlacing lines in conventional patterns, with, also, the effect of distance upon repeating ornament.
APE CORBEL,
CARRYING ROOF TIMBER,
EWELME.
Transitional Norman retained all the characteristic ornament of the purer style, but with the development of Early English the grotesque for a time somewhat passed out of vogue, slight but eminently graceful modifications of the Corinthian acanthus supplying most of the places where strange beasts had formerly presented their bewildering shapes. It might not be impossible to connect this partial purification of ornament with a phase of church history.
But in some portions of structure, as the gargoyles, and in the woodwork of the choirs, the grotesque still held its own. As Early English grew distinctly into the Decorated, every available spot was enriched with carving. The collections (called “portfolios” elsewhere) of the old carvers would seem to have been ransacked and exhausted, all that had gone before receiving fresh rendering in wood and stone, while life and nature were now often called upon to furnish new material. The pointed arch remained, however, an undecorated sweep of mouldings, and the plinth corners were rarely touched; in fact there was here scarcely now the same squareness of space which before had asked for ornament. All the other places ornamented in Norman work were filled up in Decorated with the new designs of old subjects. The resting-places of ornament were multiplied; the dripstones of every kind of arch, and the capitals of every kind of pillar, whether in the arcading of the walls, the heaped-up richness of the reredos, or the single subject of the piscina, became nests of the grotesque. In a single group of sedilia all the architecture of a great cathedral may be seen in miniature, in arch, column, groined roof, boss, window-tracery, pinnacle, and finial, each part with its share of ornament, of grotesque. In the choirs the carvers had busied themselves with summoning odd forms from out the hard oak, till the croches or elbow-rests, the bench ends, the stall canopies, and below all, and above all, the misericordes, swarmed with all the ideas of Asia and Europe past and present. Musicians are everywhere, but most persistently on the intersections of the choir arches, and somewhat less so on those of the nave.
MISERICORDE—LION COMPOSITION, WELLINGBOROUGH.