The wildly encrusted sweetmeat dish seen in the display case brought to the polite dinner table a subterranean aesthetic that had long been reserved for secret caves and intimate bowers. Beginning in the Renaissance, grottoes functioned like fully naturalistic cabinets of curiosities. These outdoor rooms and the furniture within them were ornamented with stones, shells, and leaves as an imaginative re-creation of the abodes of mythological gods and goddesses. Grottoes were the sites of wild costume parties and illicit sexual encounters that offered polite society a fantastical escape from the rational world.


This drawer, called The Grotto of Tethys
made by Mary Dickey, 2008.
Lent by the artist.
Images taken from Versailles & Marly
(untitled volume), Paris,1672–c.1689
(after drawings by J. and P. Le Pautre, 1672/3); Raphael Sadeler, Allegory of Water
Paris, late sixteenth century;
Biblioteque nationale, cabinet des Etampes;
Attributed to Bernard Palissy,
Rocher with the Provinces of France
in the Guise of Muses, 1573
(from Jean Dorat, Magnifi centia Spectaculi
a regina matre in hortis suburbanis
editi Descriptio, Paris, 1573);
Wood engraving, New York
The New York Public Library,
(Astor, Lenox, and Tilder Foundation);
Gli artifi tiosi et curiosi moti spiritali di
Herrone, tradotti da M. Gio Battista Aleotti Ferrara, 1589.