Maria Fabricius Hansen, Grotesques: Sixteenth-Century Frescoes in Rome, Florence, and Northern Italy, Yale University Press, 2025

Maria Fabricius Hansen is Professor of Art History at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her primary field of research is Italian art and architecture from Late Antiquity to around 1600.

Today, “grotesque” is typically associated with the bizarre or the monstrous. When the term emerged in Italy around 1500, however, it referred specifically to ornamental wall painting distinguished by inventive, whimsical, and fantastical motifs. This genre rapidly became a favored decorative mode in elite palatial interiors.

Grotesques offers an art-historical introduction and a site-based guide to sixteenth-century ornamental fresco painting. Presenting examples from Rome, Florence, and numerous locations across northern Italy, the book reframes the visual culture of a period poised between an antique-medieval worldview and the early modern.

Themes of diversity and hybridity, explorations of the composite and the complex,resonate strongly with contemporary culture. Yet few periods rival the artistic and material ingenuity of the sixteenth century, when grotesque strange, imaginative figural inventions permeated visual and architectural practice. The book traces these forms as they appeared in situ, painted directly onto the walls and ceilings of prominent Renaissance palaces and villas.

Written for readers drawn to visual invention, the book addresses students and specialists in early modern art and cultural history, as well as general readers with an interest in the field. While it can be read at home, its organization around specific sites makes it equally suited as a guide for travel in Rome, Florence, and northern Italy, where many of these extraordinary fresco cycles remain in their original settings.