ABSTRACT
In light of the history of art, this chapter shows that the grotesque 'thrives in an atmosphere of disorder and is inhibited in any period characterized by a pronounced sense of dignity, an emphasis on the harmony and order of life, an affinity for the typical and normal, and a prosaically realistic approach to the arts'. The grotesque blossoms in the aesthetic climates in which transgressing classical rationalism and order is greatly praised. The grotesque, as a product of aegri somnia, runs off the rails of reason, penetrates the orderly empirical world, and unveils the penetralia of being in which objects are not perfectly defined and designated but melt into and permeate one another, or contraries exist side by side without cancelling each other out. The grotesque, then, makes itself a kind of 'Dionysiac art', wherein, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, all the excess of pleasure and suffering and knowledge in nature reveals itself at one and the same time.
