Vol. 20 · No. 4 · Issue 65 · Winter 2002

Peter Eli Gordon
History, Harvard University

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Abstract

Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, Mary Whittall, trans. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001)

Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

In the Uffizi gallery in Florence, if you quit the main rooms, leaving behind Giotto and Lippi and the other masters of the Italian Renaissance, and if you then crane your neck to examine the ceilings of the three connecting halls running the length of the museum, you will be looking up at what survived of the gothic imagination in the midst of the renaissance-the so-called grotesques. These are the enchanting but also nightmarish miniatures of nature and mythology that decorate the hallway ceilings of the museum. There are forty-six rectangular bays, each of them populated with the bizarre offspring of the renaissance imagination: Bosch-like humans with bird-heads and beaks, overfed putti with dead geese slung over their shoulders, fan-tastic garden scenes with hanging trees, sculptures, and castles in the distance-all painted in a delicate, ornamental style but also with irreverence and a sense of creeping disorder. This is where the gothic went to hibernate when it was no longer in vogue. The grotesque as miniature, as decoration, looking down at you, gargoyle-like, from the stately hallways of the Medici offices. But there's nothing frightening about them, since nothing this small can evoke terror.