Most Classical scholars know that the term “grotesque” derives from the discovery of the frescoes of Nero’s Domus Aurea during the Renaissance among subterranean grottos. These Fourth Style pitture grottesche feature animal, human, and floral design elements often combined in creative, if unnatural, ways, and their ordered patterns made from novel and monstrous forms quickly became popularized by artists such as Luca Signorelli and in works like the Logetta of Cardinal Bibbiena. The aesthetics of the grotesque likewise became a topic of interest among artists and theorists, and this interest has continued to the current day, especially through the lenses of cultural theorists such as Bakhtin, Foucault, and Kristeva.[1]
Weiss’s monograph aims to reassert what makes the grotesque a useful category for understanding Neronian literary and visual culture. His work offers close readings of representative passages of Neronian literature in tandem with interpretations of paintings from Pompeii and the Domus Aurea that embody elements of the grotesque. For Weiss, the grotesque can be summed up as follows, “The most important trait that unifies all these ideas is the sense that reality has shifted, and a new universe of possibilities has opened” (18). This rather fuzzy definition of “grotesque” allows Weiss to group works under three primary themes, “Fantasy and Reality”, “Hybridity”, and “Ornament”. I found most of his readings to be challenging, rewarding, and smart, but worried, at times, that his conceptualization of the “grotesque” became too amorphous to enable truly novel readings.[2] Nevertheless, the combination of visual and verbal grotesque moments creates a fruitful dialogue that certainly made me reconsider the preponderance of such elements during the Neronian period.
Weiss begins with a fascinating discussion of the discovery of the frescoes in the Domus Aurea and how this discovery led to poetry about the find as well as a fad for such grottesche in Italian architecture and painting. He stresses that there was originally a spatial element of the grotesque deriving from the gloomy grottos underground, but that this element changed over time as various theorists bent the grotesque to their needs. Weiss finds Connelly’s idea of the grotesque as a Spielraum or “room to play” amenable for his study, “Slippage between the physical space of the grotto and the metaphorical space of the grotesque can yield a productive hermeneutics for evaluating Neronian spaces that functioned as venues for the conflation of fantasy and reality” (20).[3] This opening chapter sets the theoretical foundation for the study and highlights the contradictions and experimentation that the grotesque exemplifies. The following chapter attempts to chart how the grotesque operates in three case studies – the tale of Hostius Quadra in Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones, the peristyle of the Casa dei Dioscuri in Pompeii, and the ecphrasis of the grove in Seneca’s Thyestes. Weiss’s discussion of Hostius offers a sharp interpretation of this episode that stresses how the perception of fantasy and reality in such a grotesque space (his walls feature magnifying mirrors) may hinge on the eye of the beholder. The other case studies are less successful, as the frescoes in the peristyle may offer different representations of mythical trauma, but I was unconvinced that this “affords a venue for both ethical and aesthetic transgressions” (44).[4] Additionally, his discussion of the locus horridus in Thyestes covers ground well-trodden already by scholars such as Tarrant, Boyle, and Schiesaro.[5]
The following section focuses on responses to the hybridity of the grotesque, whether fear or laughter. Beginning with Vitruvius (7.5.3-4) and Horace’s Ars Poetica (1-9), Weiss stresses how grotesque features evoke repulsion (Vitruvius) or laughter (Horace). These two emotional responses are then traced in a series of examples, from the terrifying monstruous figures of the Domus Aurea and Lucan’s Erichtho, to Persius and flower-protomes (paintings in which animal figures emerge from flowers) in Pompeii, which were meant to provoke a smile. The primary take-away is that it is often difficult to reach a conclusive idea on what affect is intended, as figures like Erichtho straddle the divide between frightening and ridiculous: “The Erichtho episode demonstrates the terrifying power of grotesque hybridity as well as its potential to slip into the absurd” (89). When turning to more humorous examples of grotesque hybridity such as Petronius’ characters, Weiss stresses the bodily element of these individuals and how their forms “destabilize categories of age, species, gender and ethnicity by blending corporeal features that Roman norms traditionally kept distinct” (121). While one may laugh at Trimalchio’s absurd behavior, it also can be unsettling (I think of the uncanny “unheimlich” element, which Fellini exploited so well in his Satyricon). I expected Weiss to make more of the Satyricon’s own grotesque nature in its mixture of prose and poetry and the ways in which this hybrid text destabilizes high and low registers of expression, but he is more interested in the bizarre bodies and strange actions of Petronius’ characters.[6]
The final section tackles grotesque ornament in both Neronian literature and visual culture. Weiss sees ornamental flourish and affectation as part of the plus quam aesthetic that defines the verbal style of Seneca and Lucan as well as the anonymous Aetna poet, and can be traced visually in the Casa dell’Ara Massima and in certain rooms of the Domus Aurea. This sort of rhetorical hyperbole and artistic extravagance is explored in two chapters, “Cosmos and Chaos” and “Excess”.[7] Weiss offers a nuanced interpretation of the interaction between the grotesque frames in the Casa dell’Ara Massima and the figure of Narcissus in its pseudotablinum. Weiss believes that the destabilizing elements of the framing “help create a viewing experience that is both unsettling and pleasurable, and in this process approach the broader phenomenon of the grotesque” (159). His readings of Lucan’s proem and the speech of the Fury in Seneca’s Thyestes underscore the stylized syntax of these passages and the way they build dramatic suspense and tension. Weiss finds visual expression of such an aesthetic in Room 119 of the Domus Aurea, where grotesque ornamental bands surround a central panel showing Achilles on Scyros. For him, such an ornate compositional style can pervert or deconstruct meaning, “in which center and periphery, figural and ornamental, order and chaos are no longer stable categories” (190).
Weiss’s conclusion reiterates his findings and hints at further lines of inquiry, whether philosophical or political. I would add that he could have taken certain Augustan poets into more consideration as well; Ovid’s influence, especially through his Metamorphoses, looms large among Neronian poets, and his interest in flux, transformation, and grotesque destabilization is paramount.[8] That said, Weiss’s analysis of grotesque art in combination with Neronian literature is a valuable innovation that will be helpful for future scholars. This monograph certainly made me think more about grotesque genres, such as Menippean satire, and grotesque moments in Latin love elegy and Augustan poetry.[9] While I may not have been convinced by every reading, Weiss is an eloquent writer with an eye for (grotesque) details that may be passed over or underrated by others. This monograph offers a productive investigation of the grotesque and its various manifestations in the Neronian period.
Notes
[1] An excellent overview of these theorists can be found in Grotesque by J.D. Edwards and R. Graulund (Routledge, 2013), a work that Weiss does not cite.
[2] Unsurprisingly, scholars have often utilized the grotesque to understand Neronian authors and their style, see, e.g. G.A. Staley’s Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2010: 112-16), and W.R. Johnson, Momentary Monsters: Lucan and His Heroes (Cornell University Press, 1987: passim).
[3] F.S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
[4] The poor quality of a number of the figures (especially the Niobids) did not help the argument. In general, Weiss was let down by Routledge by the quality of the plates in this book, which is very unfortunate.
[5] A. Schiesaro, The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2003: 85-98), A. Schiesaro, “A Dream Shattered? Pastoral Anxieties in Senecan Drama,” in Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral, eds. M. Fantuzzi and T. Papanghelis (Brill, 2006: 427-50), R. J. Tarrant, Seneca’s Thyestes (Scholars Press, 1985: ad loc.), A.J. Boyle, Seneca: Thyestes (Oxford University Press, 2017: ad loc.). Weiss does not look at the play as a whole, which is problematic for his interpretation of the scene.
[6] See G.O. Hutchinson, Latin Literature from Seneca to Juvenal: A Critical Study (Oxford University Press, 1993: 20-23) for more on this aspect of Petronius. Weiss does cite V. Rimell, Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which informs his discussion of bodies as text and the text as a body, but the analysis does little with the poetry of the Satyricon and this novel’s generic amalgam.
[7] Such excess or extravagance has been seen as paradigmatic of Seneca (H. Slaney, The Senecan Aesthetic: A Performance History (Oxford University Press, 2016: 21-24) and of the period more generally (Hutchinson, op. cit. 111-44).
[8] Ovid is only discussed briefly in this book and grotesque elements in Horace, such as Canidia as a source for Erichtho, are underrepresented.
[9] Which recently has been covered, in part, by M. Pietropaolo, The Grotesque in Latin Love Elegy (Cambridge University Press, 2020).