Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres.Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating tensions - monstrosities even - that manifest themselves in a variety of ways. In some cases, dichotomies (between order and chaos, artificiality and nature, rational logic and imaginative creativity, etc.) may emerge. Elsewhere, a sense of agitation undermines structures of statuesque control or erupts into wild, unruly displays of constant genesis.The monstrosity of ornament is brought into play through strategies of hybridity and metamorphosis, or by the handling of scale, proportion, and space in ambiguous and discomforting ways that break with the laws of physical reality. An interest in strange exaggeration and curious artifice allows for such colossal ornamental attitude to thrive within early modern art.

Chris Askholt Hammeken has a PhD in Art History from Aarhus University.[Maria Fabricius Hansen](https://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/staff/?pure=en/persons/163300) is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Copenhagen.

INTRODUCTION Chris Askholt Hammeken and Maria Fabricius Hansen: IntroductionGROTESQUESChapter 1Maria Fabricius Hansen: Ambiguous Delights: Ornamental Grotesques and Female Monstrosity in Sixteenth-Century ItalyChapter 2Luke Morgan: Dissonant Symphonies: The Villa d'Este in Tivoli and the GrotesqueSACRED SPACE AND NARRATIVEChapter 3Tianna Helena Uchacz: Outside-In: The Intrusion of Ornament into Sacred NarrativeChapter 4Barnaby Nygren: 'That savage should mate with tame': Hybridity, Indeterminacy, and the Grotesque in the Murals of San Miguel Arcángel (Ixmiquilpan, Mexico)Chapter 5Maria-Anna Aristova: Decoration in the Desert: Unsettling the Order of Architecture in the Certosa di San MartinoAGENCY AND ORNAMENT ENLIVENEDChapter 6Lisa Andersen: Masquing/(Un)Masking: Animation and the Restless Ornament of FontainebleauChapter 7Chris Askholt Hammeken: Sea-Change: The Whale in the Florentine LoggiaChapter 8Frances Connelly: Ornament and Agency: Vico's Poetic MonstersA HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVEChapter 9Jacob Wamberg: Trafficking the Body: Prolegomena to a Posthumanist Theory of Ornament and Monstrosity