A style of ornamental decoration or art that features fanciful, bizarre, or distorted figures and forms; the grotesque style.
From Italian grotesco, derived from grotta (grotto). Renaissance artists named this style after the weird decorative arts they found painted in ancient Roman grottoes.
When Renaissance explorers found frescoes in buried Roman ruins (grottoes), they copied the wild, imaginative designs and called them 'grotesque'—we're still using art vocabulary from buried buildings!
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