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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.

Art, European --- Art, Renaissance --- Art --- Decoration and ornament --- Monsters in art --- grotesques --- ornaments [object genre] --- monsters [legendary beings] --- anno 1500-1799 --- Europe --- Art, Renaissance. --- Art, Occidental --- Art, Visual --- Art, Western (Western countries) --- Arts, Fine --- Arts, Visual --- Fine arts --- Iconography --- Occidental art --- Visual arts --- Western art (Western countries) --- Arts --- Aesthetics --- Renaissance art --- Art, Decorative --- Decorative art --- Decorative design --- Design, Decorative --- Nature in ornament --- Ornament --- Painting, Decorative --- Decorative arts --- Arts and crafts movement --- Art, Modern --- European art --- Nouveaux réalistes (Group of artists) --- Zaj (Group of artists) --- Early modern and Renaissance art, artificiality, playfulness, ambiguity, anxiety, ornament. --- Art européen --- Art de la Renaissance --- Art, Primitive --- Decoration and ornament, Primitive --- Art, European - 16th century --- Art - Europe - 16th century --- Decoration and ornament - Europe - 16th century --- Monsters in art - 16th century