Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art
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ambiguity
anxiety
artificiality
Category=AB
Category=AGA
early modern aesthetics
early modern and renaissance art
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
grotesque motifs
metamorphosis theory
ornament
paradoxes in decorative art
playfulness
sacred art analysis
spatial ambiguity
visual hybridity
Product details
- ISBN 9781041183778
- Weight: 520g
- Dimensions: 174 x 246mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres. Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating tensions - monstrosities even - that manifest themselves in a variety of ways. In some cases, dichotomies (between order and chaos, artificiality and nature, rational logic and imaginative creativity, etc.) may emerge. Elsewhere, a sense of agitation undermines structures of statuesque control or erupts into wild, unruly displays of constant genesis. The monstrosity of ornament is brought into play through strategies of hybridity and metamorphosis, or by the handling of scale, proportion, and space in ambiguous and discomforting ways that break with the laws of physical reality. An interest in strange exaggeration and curious artifice allows for such colossal ornamental attitude to thrive within early modern art.
Chris Askholt Hammeken has a PhD in Art History from Aarhus University.
Maria Fabricius Hansen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Copenhagen.
