This dissertation finds a classical source for some of the qualities of Mannerist
painting usually considered wholly anti-classical. The ancient source is not the monumental sculpture which informed so many of the works of the Renaissance, but rather the ancient Roman wall paintings in Neros Domus Aurea. Discovered during the Renaissance, these frescoes made a marked impression on wall decoration allantica, but their influence can also be traced in less obviously derivative works. The painting style, known by around 1500 as the grotesque, altered the aesthetic of sixteenth-century art, initiating a taste for the strange and decorative that is manifest in many works of cinquecento Mannerists.
