The Grotesque in Church Art

The Grotesque in Church Art is a book by T. Tindall Wildridge. The preface says the designs the book treats have vast fields outside the English church works to which it has been thought good to limit it. The preface also speaks of the derivation, of a larger number than is generally supposed, of church designs from heathen prototypes by the hands of apprenticed masons. The text says we may usefully inquire as to the causes of those remarkable characteristics of Gothic art which have caused the word Grotesque to fittingly describe so much of its detail.

The text says the joke has a different meaning for every age, and that the capacity for simultaneously recognizing likeness and contrast between things the most incongruous is a quality of slow growth among nations. The text describes a lady with gnarled features, on the left, bearing a swathed infant that is headless. The index has entries for Fafnir the Dragon, Fairies and Fauns, among others.