It is a style of decoration overloaded with images with natural forms, with curved figures representing plants and animals, often combined, creating fantastic beings or taking the mythological as a reference. Although it exists since ancient times, it is known as 'grotesque' since the fifteenth century when some grottoes with these drawings on their walls were discovered in Rome. In reality these grottoes were corridors of the buried Domus Aurea, the palace built by Emperor Nero, which was an emblem of the corruption of his government and his successors filled with rubble to build on the ground, which paradoxically protected and preserved it for centuries. In English 'grotesque' and 'grotesque' have distinct meanings, although both come from the Italian grottesco, for grotta ("grotto, cave").
