CHAPTER IX.
GROTESQUE FACES AND FIGURES.—PREVALENCE OF THE TASTE FOR UGLY AND GROTESQUE FACES.—SOME OF THE POPULAR FORMS DERIVED FROM ANTIQUITY; THE TONGUE LOLLING OUT, AND THE DISTORTED MOUTH.—HORRIBLE SUBJECTS: THE MAN AND THE SERPENTS.—ALLEGORICAL FIGURES: GLUTTONY AND LUXURY.—OTHER REPRESENTATIONS OF CLERICAL GLUTTONY AND DRUNKENNESS.—GROTESQUE FIGURES OF INDIVIDUALS, AND GROTESQUE GROUPS.—ORNAMENTS OF THE BORDERS OF BOOKS.—UNINTENTIONAL CARICATURE; THE MOTE AND THE BEAM.
The grimaces and strange postures of the jougleurs seem to have had great attractions for those who witnessed them. To unrefined and uneducated minds no object conveys so perfect a notion of mirth as an ugly and distorted face. Hence it is that among the common peasantry at a country fair few exhibitions are more satisfactory than that of grinning through a horse-collar. This sentiment is largely exemplified in the sculpture especially of the middle ages, a long period, during which the general character of society presented that want of refinement which we now observe chiefly in its least cultivated classes. Among the most common decorations of our ancient churches and other mediæval buildings, are grotesque and monstrous heads and faces. Antiquity, which lent us the types of many of these monstrosities, saw in her Typhons and Gorgons a signification beyond the surface of the picture, and her grotesque masks had a general meaning, and were in a manner typical of the whole field of comic literature. The mask was less an individual grotesque to be laughed at for itself, than a personification of comedy. In the middle ages, on the contrary, although in some cases certain forms were often regarded as typical of certain ideas, in general the design extended no farther than the forms which the artist had given to it; the grotesque features, like the grinning through the horse-collar, gave satisfaction by their mere ugliness. Even the applications, when such figures were intended to have one, were coarsely satirical, without any intellectuality, and, where they had a meaning beyond the plain text of the sculpture or drawing, it was not far-fetched, but plain and easily understood. When the Anglo-Saxon drew the face of a bloated and disfigured monk, he no doubt intended thereby to proclaim the popular notion of the general character of monastic life, but this was a design which nobody could misunderstand, an interpretation which everybody was prepared to give to it. We have already seen various examples of this description of satire, scattered here and there among the immense mass of grotesque sculpture which has no such meaning. A great proportion, indeed, of these grotesque sculptures appears to present mere variations of a certain number of distinct types which had been handed down from a remote period, some of them borrowed, perhaps involuntarily, from antiquity. Hence we naturally look for the earlier and more curious examples of this class of art to Italy and the south of France, where the transition from classical to mediæval was more gradual, and the continued influence of classical forms is more easily traced. The early Christian masons appear to have caricatured under the form of such grotesques the personages of the heathen mythology, and to this practice we perhaps owe some of the types of the mediæval monsters. We have seen in a former chapter a grotesque from the church of Monte Majour, near Nismes, the original type of which had evidently been some burlesque figure of Saturn eating one of his children. The classical mask doubtless furnished the type for those figures, so common in mediæval sculpture, of faces with disproportionately large mouths; just as another favourite class of grotesque faces, those with distended mouths and tongues lolling out, were taken originally from the Typhons and Gorgons of the ancients. Many other popular types of faces rendered artificially ugly are mere exaggerations of the distortions produced on the features by different operations, such, for instance, as that of blowing a horn.
The practice of blowing the horn, is, indeed, peculiarly calculated to exhibit the features of the face to disadvantage, and was not overlooked by the designers of the mediæval decorative sculpture. One of the large collection of casts of sculptures from French cathedrals exhibited in the museum at South Kensington, has furnished the two subjects given in our cut No. 95. The first is represented as blowing a horn, but he is producing the greatest possible distortion in his features, and especially in his mouth, by drawing the horn forcibly on one side with his left hand, while he pulls his beard in the other direction with the right hand. The force with which he is supposed to be blowing is perhaps represented by the form given to his eyes. The face of the lower figure is in at least comparative repose. The design of representing general distortion in the first is further shown by the ridiculously unnatural position of the arms. Such distortion of the members was not unfrequently introduced to heighten the effect of the grimace in the face; and, as in these examples, it was not uncommon to introduce as a further element of grotesque, the bodies, or parts of the bodies, of animals, or even of demons.
No. 95. Grotesque Monsters.
No. 96. Diabolical Mirth.
No. 97. Making Faces.