Studying Gargoyles and Grotesques
Gargoyles and grotesques were a hallmark of the Gothic period of architecture, which grew popular in Western Europe from the 12th to the late 15th centuries, and which was carried over well into the 20th century during the age of Gothic Revival marked by fascination with the Middle Ages. You will find gargoyles and grotesques in countries such as France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom.
In this post we will look at the history of gargoyles and grotesques during the Gothic period to give us insight about these fascinating architectural figures perching from buildings all over Western Europe.
The chief references for this article are Alex Woodcock’s Gargoyles and Grotesques, published by Shire Publications in 2011, and “Gravely Gorgeous“, published online by the Cornell University Library. We recommend that you check out these sources to learn more. Other references will be linked throughout the piece.
Origins
Even those who have not been to the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral know its famous defining feature: the gargoyles perched on its exterior, like beastly sentinels surveying the city of Paris. Strictly speaking though, these simultaneously horrifying and fascinating sculptures need to serve one purpose before they can be called a “gargoyle”–they need to be able to divert the flow of rainwater away from buildings.
In essence, true gargoyles are decorative waterspouts which can be seen on the facades of cathedrals, universities, and town halls built in the Middle Ages, placed there to spout rainwater away from the building’s exterior and thereby limiting water damage to the masonry. Many of them suffer water damage themselves as centuries of rain course through them, and simply fall to the ground.
Similar-looking sculptures that do not convey water and serve other ornamental and practical functions are called “grotesques”.
One can guess the function of a gargoyle from its name. The word derives from the French word gargouille, or throat. “Gargoyle” and the verb “to gargle” have the same root.
Sculptures are called “grotesque” as a reference to their style. Italians during the 15th century took interest in their country’s Roman origins and began excavating ancient buildings. The uncovered chambers were called grotte (“cave”) because of their cave-like dimensions, and were found to be decorated with murals depicting fantastic flora and creatures with combined human and animal characteristics. The Italians called them grottesca (“cave painting”) and the term was adapted as a name for this art style. By 1561 it had mutated into the English noun “grotesque”, and in modern times the word is used to describe anything bizarre or strange.
Indeed, the use of hybrid human-animal imagery was not invented during the Gothic period, but dates back to the Romans. Roman interiors, based on archaeological findings, were lavishly decorated. The fantastic imagery on the walls of Nero’s extravagant Domus Aurea or Golden House (built between the Great Roman Fire of 64 and Nero’s death in 68) is an example of the “grotesque” style.
The ancient Egyptians and Greeks also used decorative stone waterspouts, and the use of roofline imagery is already evident in the classical style of architecture (Woodcock, 2011, p. 8).
The classical style was adapted for religious structures in Romanesque architecture (ca 1050 to 1200), when the first gargoyles were designed, with waterspouts added to small corbels. Corbels are decorative architectural structures that projected from a wall and supported weight.
In Gothic architecture, the grotesques and gargoyles were “freed from the constraints of a supportive function” (p. 9) and became larger and more elaborately carved.
During the Renaissance, the term “Gothic” was coined as a slur, synonymous to “barbaric”, referring to the architecture of the Middle Ages reminiscent of the Goths’ destructive influence on the classical civilisation of Rome.
The famous gargoyles that can be seen now on Notre-Dame did not resemble the gargoyles of the Middle Ages. The cathedral was constructed back in the 13th century and the medieval gargoyles began to disintegrate along with the crumbling cathedral. Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, lead architect of the French national preservation initiative, the Commission des monuments historiques, began an elaborate restoration in 1843 that produced the gargoyles we see now.
He called them “chimera”, which in Greek mythology referred to a creature with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a dragon’s tail, a specific combination that Viollet-le-Duc’s chimeras did not follow, as they were a combination of other animals.
Viollet-le-Duc was influenced by Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), and the esteemed architect’s gargoyles later became the archetypal gargoyles, even though, as stressed by the Cornell University Library, “they are neither Gothic nor gargoyles, but products of the nineteenth-century imagination.”