8/18/2019 Grotto - Wikipedia

Grotto
A grotto (Italian grotta and French grotte) is a natural or artificial cav e used by humans in both modern times and antiquity , and historically or prehistorically . Naturally occurring
grottoes are often small cav es near water that are usually flooded or liable to flood at high tide. Sometimes, artificial grottoes are used as garden features. The Grotta Azzurra at Capri and
the grotto at the v illa of Tiberius in the Bay of Naples are examples of popular natural seashore grottoes.

Whether in tidal water or high up in hills, grottoes are generally made up of limestone geology , where the acidity of standing water has dissolv ed the carbonates in the rock matrix as it
passes through what were originally small fissures. See karst topography , cav ern.

Contents
Etymology
Antiquity
A Marian grotto in Bischofferode, Germany
Garden grotto history and design
Religious grottoes
Gallery
See also
Notes
Further reading

Etymology
The word grotto comes from Italian grotta, Vulgar Latin grupta, and Latin crypta ("a cry pt"). [1 ] It is also related by a historical accident to the word grotesque. In the late 15th century , Romans accidentally unearthed Nero's Domus Aurea on
the Palatine Hill, a series of rooms, decorated with designs of garlands, slender architectural framework, foliage, and animals. The rooms had sunk underground ov er time. The Romans who discov ered this historical monument found it v ery
strange, partly because it was uncov ered from an "underworld" source. This led the Romans of that era to giv e it the name grottesca, from which came the French grotesque.

Antiquity
Grottoes were v ery popular in Greek and Roman culture. Spring-fed grottoes were a feature of Apollo's oracles at Delphi, Corinth, and Clarus. [2 ] The Hellenistic city of Rhodes was designed with rock-cut
artificial grottoes incorporated into the city , made to look natural. [3 ] At the great Roman sanctuary of Praeneste south of Rome, the oldest portion of the primitiv e sanctuary was situated on the second lowest
terrace, in a grotto in the natural rock where a spring dev eloped into a well. According to tradition, Praeneste's sacred spring had a nativ e ny mph, who was honored in a grotto-like watery ny mphaeum. [4 ]

Tiberius, the Roman emperor, filled his grotto with sculptures to create a sense of my thology , perhaps channeling Poly phemus' cav e in the Odyssey. The numinous quality of the grotto is still more ancient: in a
grotto near Knossos in Crete, Eileithy ia was v enerated, ev en before Minoan palace-building. Ev en farther back in time, the immanence of the div ine in a grotto is seen in the sacred cav es of Lascaux.

Garden grotto history and design

The popularity of artificial grottoes introduced the Mannerist sty le to Italian and French gardens of the mid-16th century . Two famous grottoes in the Boboli Gardens of Palazzo Pitti were begun by Vasari and
completed by Ammanati and Buontalenti between 1583 and 1593. One of these grottoes originally housed the Prisoners of Michelangelo. Before the Boboli grotto, a garden was laid out by Niccolò Tribolo at the
Medici Villa Castello, near Florence. At Pratolino, in spite of the dry ness of the site, there was a Grotto of Cupid (surv iv ing), with water tricks for the unsuspecting v isitor. [5 ] The Fonte di Fata Morgana ("Fata
Morgana's Spring") at Grassina, not far from Florence, is a small garden building, built in 157 3–4 as a garden feature in the extensiv e grounds of the Villa "Riposo" (rest) of Bernardo Vecchietti. It is decorated
with sculptures in the Giambolognan manner.
Two vaulted grottoes called
The outsides of garden grottoes are often designed to look like an enormous rock, a rustic porch or a rocky ov erhang. Inside, they are decorated as a temple or with fountains, stalactites and imitation gems and Taq-e Bostan, located in
shells (sometimes made in ceramic); herms and mermaids, my thological subjects suited to the space; and naiads, or riv er gods whose urns spilled water into pools. Damp grottoes were cool places to retreat Iran, Sassanian era
from the Italian sun, but they also became fashionable in the cool drizzle of the Île-de-France. In Kuskov o in the Sheremetev estate there is a Summer Grotto, built in 17 7 5.

Grottoes could also serv e as baths; an example of this is at the Palazzo del Te, in the 'Casino della Grotta', where a small suite of intimate rooms is laid out around a grotto and loggetta (cov ered
balcony ). Courtiers once bathed in the small cascade that splashed ov er the pebbles and shells encrusted in the floor and walls.

Grottoes hav e also serv ed as chapels, or at Villa Farnese at Caprarola, a little theater designed in the grotto manner. They were often combined with cascading fountains in Renaissance gardens.

The grotto designed by Bernard Palissy for Catherine de' Medici's château in Paris, the Tuileries, was renowned. There are also grottoes in the gardens designed by André Le Nôtre for Versailles. In
England, an early garden grotto was built at Wilton House in the 1630s, probably by Isaac de Caus.

Grottoes were suitable for less formal gardens too. Pope's Grotto, created by Alexander Pope, is almost all that surv iv es of one of the v ery first landscape gardens in England, at Twickenham. [6 ] Pope
was inspired after seeing grottoes in Italy during a v isit there. Efforts are under way to restore his grotto. [7 ] There are grottoes in the landscape gardens of Painshill Park, [8 ] Stowe, Clandon Park and Grotto entrance, Villa Torrigiani
Stourhead. [9 ] Scott's Grotto is a series of interconnected chambers, extending 67 ft (20 metres) into the chalk hillside on the outskirts of Ware, Hertfordshire. Built during the late 18th century , the
chambers and tunnels are lined with shells, flints and pieces of coloured glass. [1 0 ] The Romantic generation of tourists might not actually v isit Fingal's Cav e, on the remote isle of Staffa in the Scottish
Hebrides, but they hav e often heard of it, perhaps through Felix Mendelssohn's "Hebrides Ov erture", better known as "Fingal's Cav e", which was inspired by his v isit. In the 19th century , when miniature
Matterhorns and rock-gardens became fashionable, a grotto was often found, such as at Ascott House. In Bav aria, Ludwig's Linderhof contains an abstraction of the grotto under Venusberg, which figured in
Wagner's Tannhäuser.

Although grottoes hav e largely fallen from fashion since the British Picturesque mov ement, architects and artists occasionally try to redefine the grotto in contemporary design works. Such examples include
Aranda/Lasch's Grotto Concept, (2005), Callum Moreton's Grotto pav ilion (2010), ARM's post-modern Storey Hall (1995), and Frederick Kiesler's Grotto of Meditation for New Harmony (1964). [1 1 ]

Religious grottoes
Today , artificial grottoes are purchased and built for ornamental and dev otional purposes. They are often used as shrines in which to place statues of saints, particularly the Virgin Mary , in outdoor gardens.

Many Roman Catholics v isit a grotto where Bernadette Soubirous claimed she saw apparitions of Our Lady of Lourdes. Numerous garden shrines are modelled after these apparitions. They can commonly be
found display ed in gardens and churches, among other places (see Lourdes grotto). Sculpture in a grotto setting,
Villa Torrigiani, Lucca

Gallery

Marian grotto with a lily pond in San

Grotto in an iceberg with Grotto of the Buttes- Grotto pavilion in Anapat Grotto, Lastiver, Shell Grotto, Wales
Thome Basilica, Chennai
the Terra Nova ship in Chaumont in Paris. Kuskovo, Moscow Armenia
the background (1911) (1775).
during the 'British
Antarctic Expedition' by
Herbert G. Ponting

See also
Modern Marian grotto at a church in
Architecture of cathedrals and great churches
Jakarta, Indonesia
Blue Grotto, former underground wine storage vaults in the anchorages under the Brooklyn Bridge, on the Manhattan side
Caves of Hercules
Grotto-heavens, Chinese religious usage associated with Daoist religion
Shell grotto
Tunnels in popular culture

Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grotto 1/2
8/18/2019
1. OED, s.v. "grotto".
2. G. W. Elderkin, "The Natural and the Artificial Grotto", Hesperia 10.2 (April –
June 1941), pp. 125–137, gives numerous well-known ancient Greek examples,
natural and architectural, with some details of their sites.
3. E. E. Rice, "Grottoes on the Acropolis of Hellenistic Rhodes", The Annual of
the British School at Athens 90 (1995), pp. 383–404.
4. A.R.A. van Aken, "Some Aspects of Nymphaea in Pompeii, Herculaneum and
Ostia" Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, 4.3/4 (1951), pp. 272–284
Grotto - Wikipedia
6. Frederick Bracher, "Pope's Grotto: The Maze of Fancy Pope's Grotto: The Maze
of Fancy", The Huntington Library Quarterly 12.2 (February 1949), pp. 141–162;
Anthony Beckles Willson, "Alexander Pope's Grotto in Twickenham", Garden
History 26.1 (Summer, 1998), pp. 31–59.
7. [1] (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/museums/11866157/Inside-Alexander-P
opes-hidden-grotto.html) Lambert, Victoria. “Inside Alexander Pope's hidden
grotto”. The Telegraph. September 15, 2015.
8. Alison Hodges, "Painshill, Cobham, Surrey: The Grotto", Garden History 3.2
9. James Turner, "The Structure of Henry Hoare's Stourhead", The Art Bulletin
61.1 (March 1979), pp. 68–77; Malcolm Kelsall, "The Iconography of
Stourhead", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46(1983), pp. 133–
143; Kenneth Woodbridge, "Henry Hoare's Paradise," The Art Bulletin 47.1
(March 1965), pp. 83–116.
10. "Archived copy" (https://web.archive.org/web/20050513215354/http://scotts-grot
to.org/CMS/index.php). Archived from the original (http://scotts-grotto.org/CMS/i
ndex.php) on 2005-05-13. Retrieved 2005-10-18.

5. Webster Smith, "Pratolino", The Journal of the Society of Architectural (Spring 1975), pp. 23–28. 11. Alderslade, Jessica (2014). "An Introduction to the Grotto and Its Place within
Historians 20.4 (December 1961), pp. 155–168. Contemporary Design". Reinterpreting the Grotto in Contemporary Design.
Australia,.

Further reading
Jackson, Hazelle (2001). Shell Houses and Grottoes. England: Shire Books). Traces the development of the grotto in Italy during the Renaissance and its popularity in the UK from the eighteenth century to the present. Includes gazetteer of UK grottoes.
Jones, B. (1953). Follies and Grottoes. London.
Miller, Naomi (1982). Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto. New York: Braziller. Traces the development of the grotto from Antiquity to modern times.

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