Etymon #32
Nero's buried clowns
The word entered English in the 1520s, borrowed through Italian from Latin. Its earliest English use described a style of ornamental decoration, strange twisted figures on ancient Roman walls. The word shares its origin with ANTIQUE. In the sixteenth century they were the same word.
The Italian source word meant old or ancient. It arrived in English through Renaissance artists exploring the underground chambers of ancient Rome. In the 1480s the Baths of Titus, part of Nero's buried Domus Aurea, were rediscovered. Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, and Pinturicchio were lowered into the chambers on ropes to study the figures painted on the walls. The ancient style they discovered there was called antico. The word came into English still marked by what had been found on those walls.
For nearly two centuries after its arrival in English in the 1520s, the word shared the same meaning as ANTIQUE. Both described the same thing, ancient, belonging to former times. By the end of the seventeenth century the two words had different meanings. ANTIQUE kept the original sense. The other word described the figures discovered on the walls of the Baths of Titus in the 1480s.
Two English words share this word's roots. GROTESQUE came from the same Italian Renaissance moment, named after the grotte, the underground chambers where those strange figures were found. ANCIENT came from a deeper connection, the same Proto-Indo-European root meaning front or before. One word from the same walls. One word from the same ancient ancestor.
In Shakespeare's Hamlet, first printed in 1603, Hamlet tells Horatio he will perform a grotesque and deliberately unnatural version of himself, and chose this word to describe the act. The twisted figures found on the walls of those Roman chambers had become a way of describing human behaviour. By the 1570s the word had settled into its modern sense, naming the foolish or outrageous behaviour we still recognise today.
Six letters.
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