Quote by Anonymous
““While he was working in Rome, archaeologists were excavating the Domus Aurea, Nero’s golden house, near the Colosseum. In order to study firsthand the vividly colored decorations painted on its walls, Raphael had himself lowered into the cave, or grotta. The designs that he reproduced in his works came to be known in Italian as grottesca; their ornate, stylized forms gave rise to the English “grotesque.””