maybe stretching the definition of grotto a little but
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For those that like such things, the physical version of Deidia is now $10, same as the electronic.
Whoa what is that last screenshot from
damn it, i tried to get alt text working but it only shows up before the image loads.
it’s one of the outpost areas from Guild Wars (Gadd’s Encampment). the camera is hacked and massively zoomed out for that shot, but you can see the player character on the bridge if you look closely
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Susan Sontag wrote an essay about grottoes which is included in her book of essays Where the Stress Falls. I thought I’d share it here cause it’s pretty good and pretty short.
A Place For Fantasy, 1983
A Place for Fantasy
GARDEN HISTORY IS an enthralling branch of art history, opening onto the history of outdoor spectacles (the masque, fireworks, pageants) of architecture, or urban planning—and of literary history as well. Once mainly a European subject (its scholars were French, English, German), it now flourishes in this country, too. One center of activity is the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C., which possesses superb materials on garden history.
The principal tradition of Western Garden art is inclusive rather than exclusionary, putting human-made constructions—of marble, brick, tufa, stucco, wood—among the trees and plants. And of the many constructions that recur in gardens (statuary, fountains, follies, bridges), none is more fascinating or complex in its history and associations than the grotto. It is a space that is, literally, profound. The human-made recess or subterranean space that is called a grotto is, usually, a space already tamed. Other, less reassuring names for the same kind of space are “cave,” “underground vault,” “crypt”. The grotto in the garden is the domesticated version of a space that is often scary, even repulsive, and yet exercises on some people, of whom I am one, a very strong attraction. I have always been fascinated by grottoes and have gone out of my way to look at them and at constructions that echo them. This curiousity is perhaps no more than dread mastered—but then the grotto seems no more, or less, than a playfulness with morbid feelings.
For grottoes to enter the garden, a place conceived as a haven and a site of recreation, their original functions had to be secularized and miniaturized. Grottoes, mostly real grottoes, were first of all sacred places. The sibyl’s or oracle’s lair, the hermit’s retreat, the sect’s sanctuary, the resting place of the bones of holy men and revered ancestors—we are never far, in our imaginations, from being reminded of the cell and the grave. And grottoes that were artificial had, to begin with, severely practical purposes: like the marvelous vaults the Romans built as part of hydraulic projects. Artificial caves first appear as an element in the garden program in the late Roman Republic. From the latter part of the first century B.C., artificial grottoes, and rooms fitted out to resemble grottoes, became common features of the gardens of the villas of Roman patricians. These caverns, ornamented spaces that alluded gracefully to the old sacred spaces and their mysteries, were partly practical constructions for pleasures and entertainments conducted outdoors—for example, as the backdrop of satyr plays and for banquets. Perhaps the most famous and grandiose, though hardly typical, of those villas whose ruins survive from the ancient world was Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli near Rome, which had a number of grottoes.
Christianity gave the grotto new associations and succeeded in monopolizing grotto imagery for more than a thousand years. Supposedly natural but in fact thoroughly stylized grottos figure in paintings of the Christian narratives—the cave of the Nativity, the sepulchre of the Entombment—and in the lives of Saint like Jerome and Anthony, who are often depicted as praying or being assailed at the mouth of their hermit’s grotto. The revival of the garden grotto—that is, the reconnection of the grotto with the garden—had to wait for the Renaissance, when the grotto could be divested of its principally Christian associations and infused with new, eclectic symbolism(Neo-Platonist, humanist). Although the gardens and grottoes of the classical villas had long since been leveled, descriptions of them—for example, by Ovin and Livy—had been preserved, and were admired. The elaboration of the garden grotto, a principal feature of the new heights attained by the garden in the Renaissance, produced such triumphs as the Grotta Grande in the Medici’s Boboli Gardens in Florence and the many grottoes and hydraulic marvels of Pratolino, so admired by Montaigne and other foreign visitors. The use of the grottoes of ancient villas as banquet sites protected from the sun was replaced in the Renaissance by their employment as backdrops for theatrical spectacles.
The distinctive, complex idea of the garden as a work of art, which has been most prevalent in Western culture—the garden as an “ideal” landscape, including an anthology of architectural elements, and featuring waterworks of various spectacular contrivance—is defined in the Renaissance. Though only one element of the garden program, which in the West has mostly been heterogeneous, the grotto has a privileged place: it is an intensification in miniature, of the whole garden-world. It is also the garden’s inversion. The essence of the garden is that it is outdoors, open, light, spacious, natural, while the grotto is the quintessence of what is indoors, hidden, dim, artificial, decorated. The grotto is characteristically a space that is adorned—with frescoes, painted stuccos, mosaics, or (the association with water remaining paramount) shells.
In the garden history that starts in the Renaissance, the grotto reflected all the turns of taste, all the ideas of the theatre. The grotto as artificial ruin. The grotto as a place for foolery and escapades. (A modern, degraded form of this survives in the fairground’s papier-mâché Tunnel of Love.) The grotto as showcase. The grotto is, as it were, the innately decadent element of the garden ensemble, the one that is most impure, and most ambiguous. It is a space that is complex and accumulative, dimly lit, thickly ornamented. (An appeal to fantasy, and a likely site for the elaboration of bad taste.) At first it was thought to be the most intensively “rustic” space—the imitation of a cave, as in some Roman villas. Eventually it became an elaborately theatrical, encrusted space. The roof and walls of the famous grotto build by Alexander Pope at Twickenham in the 1720s and 1730s were studded with shards of mirror interspersed with shells. (The grotto as camera obscura, in Pope’s phrase.) In the eighteenth century, many grottoes were built by shell collectors principally as a setting to display their treasures. One of the last private grottoes, the Venus Grotto built by Ludwig II of Bavaria at Linderhof in 1876-1877, was itself a theatrical space, the setting of several scenes from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Le Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, in a small village in central France, could be regarded as the great garden grotto of the beginning of this century—and perhaps the last of the breed. The crypt-like ground level of this astonishing building has the characteristic encrustedness of the grotto interior, the didacticism, and the reach for the sublime. Its builder’s aim is nothing less than to miniaturize, and thereby to possess, the sublime. There are inscriptions, labels, declarations, adages incised throughout on the walls—the whole structure being designed, with something like genius, by the inspired autodidactic village postman who built it single-handedly between 1879 and 1912, as an anthology of world spiritual wisdom. However different in materials and sensibility, Ferdinand Cherval’s grotto-labyrinth belongs to the same family as the grotto of Pope.
Grottoes are places of fantasy, but the greatest grotto buildings are, and always have been, functional: from the cryptoportici of the Roman villas (underground passageways one could take from one building to another to avoid the heat of the day), or that stupendous achievement of Roman engineering, the emissarium of Lake Albano (the subject of one of Piranesi’s most haunting books of engravings), to such modern fantasy lands as the limestone caves, over six hundred feet long, that house the operations of the Brunson Instrument Company in Kansas City, Missouri: or the miles of underground shopping streets in Osaka; or the vast caverns dug in the mountains behind the National Museum in Taipei that store the innumerable art treasures that Chiang Kai-shek made off with when he fled from China to Taiwan in 1949; or the Louvre métro station in Paris, several stations of the Stockholm subway system, and, above all, the justly celebrated Moscow subway, especially the Mayakovsky and Dynamo stations. Modern technology has made it possible to build below ground on a scale never before feasible: the great subterranean installations are bound to multiply. Grottoes of art, grottoes of industry, grottoes of shopkeeping, grottoes of war—all these are functional and yet seem the epitome of the poetry of space. In grottoes the functional and the fantastic are anything but incompatible. Perhaps that is why the museum for his art collection that Philip Johnson put underground next to his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, seems like the famous house’s twin—a house with glass walls demands one that is sunk beneath the ground—but it is not convincing as an example of the grotto in the garden: it is too purely functional, stripped down.
Many tourist-worn sites can supply the grotto experience. The Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, the Postojna Caves in Slovenia (near Ljubljana), the Grotte D’Arcy near Vézelay, south of Paris, the Grotte di Nettuno near Alghero on the western coast of Sardinia—such natural caves admired by grotto-buffs like myself serve as well the function of artificial grottoes. For there is no natural cave open to tourists that (if only because of the requirements of safety) has not been turned into into a stage set, or museum, with guides pointing out zoomorphic forms and organ pipes in stalagmites and stalactites with their flashlights to the visitors lined up on the stairs and walkways. (In Postojna, one traverses part of the caves by a miniature railroad.) The cemetery is a garden with—generally inaccessible—grottoes. But some cemeteries, particularly in Latin countries, have mausoleums and aboveground crypts with grilles instead of doors, into which one can peer. Visits to the Etruscan tombs excavated at Cerveteri, near Rome—such as the Tomba Bella, with its relief-encrusted walls—resemble visits to grottoes, as do visits to the catacombs of Palermo and of Guanajuato, whose walls are decorated with upright mummies of artful piles of bones instead of shells.
The garden grotto is not extinct, but it is not to be found in gardens anymore. And it is above ground more than below. While the dominant architectural tradition for half a century was the machine phase of the Bauhaus style, much of the building that contradicted, dissented from, or simply ignored the hyperrational Bauhaus aesthetic precisely tended to have a “grotto” look: the curving line, the encrusted wall surface, the underground mood, in buildings as different as Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Milà and Parque Güell (indeed most of Gaudí’s work), Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (with its Nibelungen and Goethe grottoes), Frederick Kiesler’s “Endless louse” (he designed a “Grotto for Meditation”), the Rudolf Steiner Goetheanum in Switzerland, and Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. One of the more flamboyant recent versions is the design developed by John Portman for the Hyatt Hotels. In the first of the hotels, in Atlanta, one goes through an oddly small, unprepossessing entrance to receive the full shock of unexpected height in an enclosed space. The Portman atrium—overdecorated, cluttered, and centered on water, usually a waterfall—is a deliberately coarse transposition of some garden-grotto motifs.
Grottoes affirm the element of fantasy of frivolity, excess in architecture and feeling. Garden grottoes may be, in the sense projected in garden history writing, obsolete. But one can predict an interminable future for this kind of space, for it is a permanent part of our imagination.
A grotto is both a hiding place and a kind of ruin; it is on the border between the scary and the safe, the sublime and the decrepit. It is also a permanent part of our reality. And added to the archaic fears and apprehensions embodied in the grotto is a specific modern scariness. In the 1950s there was considerable pressure on all American house owners to build grottoes in their gardens. They were called bomb shelters.
[1983] Susan Sontag
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Oh, also, a grotto I saw in real life in Munich the other day. The pics aren’t great cause my phone sucks and they were taken hastily.
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this game is 100% places i would hang out but i think i would hang out here the most
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Still thinking about the Magdalenenklause in Schloß Nymphenburg: outside
a ruined Italian chapel
Inside
half austere hermitage
half maniacal sea cave grotto
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damn that’s a charming screenshot, maybe i should play the snes version sometime
what is that?
(people in g.o. threads please tell us what games you’re showing us, not all of us are cool and smart)
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just a buncha games about shooting aliens and maybe jumping sometimes
Tallon Overworld (Metroid Prime)
Haven Forest (Jak II)
Xen (Black Mesa)
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Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Chapter 5 “Shells”, Part XI
There are minds for which certain images retain absolute priority. Bernard Pakissy’s was one of these and, for him, shell images were of enduring interest. If one had to designate Palissy by the dominating element of his material imagination, he would fall quite naturally into an “earthly” group. But since the material imagination is a matter of nuances, Palissy’s imagination would have to be specified as that of an earthly being in quest of a hard earth that must be further hardened by fire, but which also has the possibility of attaining natural hardness through the action of a solidifying, self-containing salt. Shells manifest this same possibility and, in this respect, the limp, sticky, “slimy” creatures that inhabit them play a role in their hard consistency. Indeed, the principle of solidification is so powerful, the conquest is carried so far, that the shell achieves its enamel-like beauty as though it had been helped by fire. Beauty of substance is added to beauty of geometrical form. For a potter or an enamelist, a shell must indeed be a subject for infinite meditation. But there are many animals beneath the enameled glaze of this gifted potter’s plates that have made the hardest possible shells of their skins. If we relive Bernard Pallisy’s passion, in the cosmic drama of different sorts of matter, or in the struggle between clay and fire, we can understand why the humblest snail that secreted its own shell should have provided him with food for infinite dreaming.
Among all these daydreams, I shall note here only those that furnish the most curious images of the house. The following, entitled: “About a fortress city” (De la ville de fortresse), is included in Palissy’s Recepte veritable. In summarizing it I shall try to retain the amplitude of the original.
Faced with “the horrible dangers of war,” Bernard Palissy contemplated a design for a “fortress city” He has lost all hope of finding an existing plan “in the cities built today”. Vitruvius himself could be of no help in the century of the cannon. So he journeyed through “forests, mountains and valleys to see if he could find some industrious houses.” After inquiring everywhere, Palissy began to muse about “a young slug that was building its house and fortress with its own saliva.” Indeed, he passed several months dreaming of such a construction from within, and most of his leisure time was spent walking beside the sea, where he saw “such a variety of houses and fortresses which certain little fishes had made from their own liquor and saliva that, from now on, I began to think that there was something that might be applied to my own project.” “The battles and acts of brigandry” that take place in the sea being on a larger scales than those that take place on land, God “had conferred upon each one the diligence and skill needed to build a house that had been surveyed and constructed by means of such geometry and architecture, that Solomon in all his wisdom could never have made anything like it.”
With regard to spiralled shells, he wrote that this shape was not at all “for mere beauty, there’s much more to it than that. You must understand that there are several fish with such sharply pointed beaks that they would devour most of the above-mentioned fish if the latter’s abodes were in a straight line: but when they are attacked by their enemies on the threshold, just as they are about to withdraw inside, they twist and turn in a spiral line and, in this way, the foe can do them no harm.”
Meanwhile, someone brought Palissy two large shells from Guinea: “A murex and a whelk.” The murex being the weaker must be better defended, according to Palissy’s philosophy. As a matter of fact, the shell having “a number of rather large points around the edges, I decided that these horns had been put there for that purpose, which was for defense of the fortress.”
It has seemed necessary to give all these preliminary details, because they show that Palissy was looking for natural inspiration. He sought nothing better for constructing his fortress city than to “take the fortress of the above mentioned murex as an example.” With this idea in mind, he started work on his plan. In the very center of the fortress city, there was to be an open square on which the governor’s house would be located. Starting from this square, a single street would run four times around the square; first, in two circuits that espoused the shape of the square; then, in two octagon-shaped circuits. All doors onto the inside of the fortress, so that the backs of the houses would constitute one continuous wall. The last of the house-walls was to back up against the city wall which, thus, would form a gigantic snail.
Bernard Palissy enlarged at length on the advantages of this natural fortress. Even if part of it fell to the enemy there would always remain a possibility of retreat. In fact, it was this spiral movement of retreat that determined the general line of the image. Nor would enemy cannon be able to follow the retreat and “rake” the streets of the coiled city. Enemy artillerymen would be as disappointed as the “pointed-beaked” marauders had been when they tried to attack a coiled shell.
In this summary, which may seem too long to the reader, it has nevertheless been impossible to enter into the detail of mixed images and proof. A psychologist who followed Palissy’s text line by line would find images used as proof, images that are witnesses of a reasoning imagination. This simple account is psychologically complex. But for us, in this century, the “reasoning” of such images is no longer convincing. We no longer have to believe in natural fortresses. And when military men build “hedgehog” defenses, they know that they are not in the domain of the image, but that of simple metaphor. It would be a great mistake, however, if we were to confuse the genres and take Palissy’s snail-fortress for a simple metaphor. This is an image that has inhabited a great mind.
As for myself, in a leisurely book of this kind, in which I enjoy all the images, I was obliged to linger over this monstrous snail.
And in order to show that, through the simple play of the imagination, any image may be increased in size, I should like to quote the following poem, in which a snail assumes the dimensions of a village:
It’s a giant snail
Descending the mountain
With at its side
The brook’s white foam
Very old, only one horn left
Which is its short, square belfry.
And the poet adds:
The manor is its shell…
But there are other passages in Bernard Palissy’s works which accentuate this predestined image that we are obliged to recognize in his shell-house experience. As it happens, this potential constructor of a shell-fortress was also an architect and landscape gardener, and to complement his plans for gardens, he added plans for what he called “chambers”. These “chambers” were places of retreat that were as rough and rocky on the outside as an oyster shell: “The exterior of the aforementioned chamber,” wrote Palissy, “will be of masonry made with large uncut stones, in order that the outside should seem to have been man-built.” Inside, on the contrary, he would like it to be as highly polished as the inside of a shell: “When the masonry is finished, I want to cover it with several layers of enameling, from the top of the vaulted ceiling down to the floor. This done, I should like to build a big fire in it… until the aforesaid enameling has melted and coated the aforesaid masonry…” In this way, the “inside of the chamber would seem to be made of one piece… and would be so highly polished that the lizards and earth-worms that come in there would see themselves as in a mirror.”
This indoor fire lighted for the purpose of enameling bricks is a far from the “blaze” we light in our time to “dry the plaster”. Here, perhaps, Palissy recaptured visions of his potter’s kiln, in which the fire left brick tears on the walls. In any case, an extraordinary image demands extraordinary means. Here a man wants to live in a shell. He wants the walls that protect him to be as smoothly polished and as firm as if his sensitive flesh had to come in direct contact with them. The shell confers a daydream of purely physical intimacy. Bernard Palissy’s daydream expresses the function of inhabiting in terms of touch.
Because dominant images tend to combine, his fourth chamber is a synthesis of house, shell and cave: “The inside masonry will be so skillfully executed,”he wrote (loc. cit., p. 82), “that it will appear to be simply a rock that has been hollowed out in order to cut stone from the interior; and the aforesaid chamber will be twisted and humped with several skewed humps and concavities having neither appearance nor form of either the chiseler’s art or of work done by human hands; and the ceiling vaults will be so tortuous that they will look as though they are about to fall, for the reason that there will be several pendant humps.” Needless to say, the inside of this spiraled house will also be covered with enamel. It will be a cave in the form of a coiled shell. Thus, by means of a great sum of human labour, this cunning architect succeeded in making a natural dwelling of it. To accentuate the natural character of the chamber he had it covered with earth, “so that, having planted several trees in the aforesaid earth, it would not seem to have been built.” In other words, the real home of this man of the earth was subterranean. He wanted to live in the heart of a rock, or, shall we say, in the shell of a rock. The pendant humps fill this dwelling with a nightmare dread of being crushed, while the spiral that penetrates deep into the rock gives an impression of anguished depth. But a being who desires to live underground is able to dominate commonplace fears. In his daydreams, Bernhard Palissy was a hero of subterranean life. In his imagination he derived pleasure - so he said - from the fear manifested by a dog barking at the entrance of a cave; and the same thing was true of the hesitation, on the part of a visitor, to enter further into the tortuous labyrinth. Here the shell-cave is also a “fortress city” for a man alone, a man who loves complete solitude, and who knows how to defend and protect himself with simple images. There’s no need of a gate, no need of an iron-trimmed door; people are afraid to come in.
In any case, an important phenomenological investigation remains to be made on the subject of dark entrance halls.
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The latest large Minecraft update actually added grassy grottos in the form of a “lush cave” biome. It has mossy stuff, vines, rare bushes, enormous bouncy leaves, the works. They can get much larger than this one too
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