Domus Aurea or Golden House was the name of Emperor Nero’s enormous palatial villa built in the center of Rome sometime after the great fire of 64 AD. The structure and grounds were so vast that Tacitus remarked that the whole of Rome had been reduced to one house. Shortly after Nero’s death, this opulent and despised construction was buried in dit and rubble. The structure lay undisturbed for fifteen hundred years when excavatins revealed the unusual and perfectly preserved frecoes that decorated the palace walls and ceilings. These bizarre ornamental drawings featured elaborate fantasies with symmetrical anatomical impossibilities, small beasts, human heads, and delicate, indeterminate vegetables merged into one unified decorative motif. Renaissance artists including Filippino Lippi, Pinturicchio, Perugino, Signorelli, and most importantly the Chief Architect and Prefect of Antiquities at the Vatican, Raphael studied and copied these drawings. It was Raphael that used the motif in his decorations of the Vatican Loggia. The style came to be called “grotesche” (referring to underground caves) a word that was later to evolve into the term “grotesque”.
As the evolution of the practice and meaning of the grotesque has moved through the centuries it has let a profound mark on Western thought and art practice. Today, the “grotesque” can e seen covering the buildings, cathedrals and palaces of all of Europe even stretching as far as St. Basils in Moscow. Present day understanding of the word grotesque has evolved into a very broad and complex subject. Geoffrey Harpham in “On the Grotesque” says “the Grotesque is the central moment of a process on the path to emergent comprehension. The purgatorial stage of understanding during which the object appears as a jumble of distortion of other forms”. He quotes Theophile Gautier who believes “Le grotesque a toujours existe dans l’art et dans la nature.” Thomas Mann in Meditations of a Nonpolitical Man remarks that the grotesque is “properly something more than the truth, something real in the extreme, not something arbitrary, false, absurd, and contrary to reality.” For me, the grotesque is a special, highly ordered state that is capable of merging aspects of both the conscious and the unconscious mind.
“Domus Aurea” for vibraphone and piano is inspired by a mediation on the larger meaning of the word “grotesque” as well as by the design process found in the original Domus Aurea. Like Harpham, I agree with Nabokov in “Speak, Memory” where he says, “I was always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the exigencies of fantastic content, causing form to bulge and burst like a sponge-bag containing a small furious devil.” Domus Aurea was written for Daniel Ciampolini of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.
