Architectural Ornament in Human Forms
The root of the word grotesque is grotta or grotto. Grotta, in turn, comes from the Latin word grupta or crypta, krypte in Greek, which referred to an underground passage or cave. Starting with this clue, we might reason that grotesques are copies of mythical freakish creatures that the ancient Greeks and Romans used as models for the images that decorate caves and sea grottoes. But the origin of the grotesque appears not to have come from an ancient custom, but rather a misunderstanding of ancient ruins.
In the excavations of Roman ruins, particularly those of the Emperor Nero’s Golden House on the Esquiline Hill that were carried out in 1488, wall paintings of fantastic creatures and plants were found in rooms that were underground because they were covered by later buildings. The paintings inspired a form of decoration called “grotesque” because the buried rooms were assumed to be caves.
Entranced by what they thought they had discovered in the Golden House, the Romans constructed artificial grottos, that became prototypes for those created in the Renaissance in such famous sites as the Boboli gardens. The concept spread throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and to England in the Classical Revival period of the 18th century.
Male and female heads were fashioned after traditional representations of gods, goddesses, heroes, and the typically female personifications of virtues such as justice and truth. The bearded male heads with long tangles locks of hair and fierce expressions may be Titans, the secondary race of gods spawned by Uranus and Gaea and capable of bearing heavy load.
Female heads, sometimes with torsos, often bear garlands of fruit and flowers. They were used on office buildings despite the absence of any ties from the urban world of getting and spending to rural celebrations of the seasons and the bounty of agriculture.
Below we see a weary-looking young woman shouldering a heavy load of fruit and vegetables. She probably represents one of the four seasons, but it is not clear which one. Prosperity and abundance were the commonly used symbols on buildings of commerce and finance. This plaque is one of many terra cotta reliefs produced for the 1926 Hunter-Dulin Building by Gladding McBean, whose terra cotta manufacturing company opened in Lincoln, California, in 1875 and is still in operation.
1 Powell Street
Whatever their provenance, human heads were surely intended to humanize buildings and bring good fortune to their occupants. The designers who created the heads shown below probably modeled them on their friends.
1347 McAllister Street
1298 Sacramento Street
Real people were also models for the figures personifying electrical energy and its use, as shown below. They appear on either side of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company sign above the arched entrance to its 1925 office building on Market Street. The use of such symbols also conveyed PG&E’s ownership of the buildings to passersby. The sculptor, Edgar Walter, was well known, as were the architects, Bakewell and Brown.
245 Market Street
The style of the representations of human beings we see most often on 19th century buildings in American cities was based on prototypes from the Classical age of ancient Greece and Rome. The 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels in Paris broadened this frame of reference with its exhibits of decorative elements from around the world. Exotic vocabularies of ornament found through archaeological discoveries such as Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt in 1925 and the contemporary excavations in Mesoamerica that revealed the Mayan art forms, were widely published. Egyptian and Mayan reliefs and paintings rendered their subjects in more linear, less naturalistic styles, and these influenced fashion as well as pictorial and sculptural styles.
301 Pine Street
The muscular woman raising her arm to allow a miniature steam engine to pass underneath it is rendered in the Art Deco style used in the design of the 1930 Pacific Stock Exchange Club by Miller and Pfleuger. The emblematic use of transportation and other man-made energy systems was also a sign of modern times. Humankind’s dedication to unleashing nature’s energy was often portrayed by rendering people as embodiments of energy. The figures flanking the entrance shown below merge with the radiating lines of force that they strain to harness of release.
1220 Noe Street
The female figures shown below are located above the colonnade of Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts, which he designed for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Instead of facing outward, Maybeck’s women turn their backs on the world and appear to be brooding into coffin-like planters that never contained plants, although that was his intention. By his own account, Maybeck thought that the fine arts had a melancholy tone so he designed the women and the monumental urns to create a pensive mood.
Palace of Fine Arts, Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915
The text is divided into the following chapters:
- HUMAN FORMS,
- ANIMAL and BIRD FORMS,
- HERALDRY and EMBLEMS,
- PLANT FORMS, and the most decorated features of buildings:
- ROOFS, COLUMNS, WINDOWS and DOORS.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2011 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
A marvelous exploration/explanation of architectural ornament — like a sort of “Tales of the City” in stone and terra cotta! I leaned a lot and especially liked this description of the support figures:
“Their contorted faces and postures express the discomfort they experience because of their predicament.”
I want to link to this in one of my own future posts…
Many thanks.
A brilliant introductory essay and a much overdue topic to be explored by one who has walked the walk! Particularly appropos as places begin to tire of ornament-less architecture and promote its return as “civic art” which tends to be devoid of narrative and often unrelated to location and context. I will be compulsively returning to the site to read the next “chapter.”
Jay Claiborne
A wonderful insight into our urban built texture. So helpful to understand details as meaningful expression of the culture and time that they were built. As modernists we appreciate the function and form of details, but we would be ungrounded without the context and meaning provided by the past.
Thank you Sally for this illuminating piece, and for the welcomed reminder to look up and ponder not just the beauty but also the meaning of our built environment. I look forward to my next trip downtown – will definitely have this essay in mind as I keep an eye out for these stone and concrete urban inhabitants.
And I look forward to your next chapter!
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