monsters are now painted in frescoes rather than reliable images of definite things. In his treatise De Architectura (25 BC), Vitruvius had this to say about the “depraved taste” of the artists of his time: Already back in the day of the “original” grotesques, these designs had not failed to raise criticism. If our reaction, watching the details of these images, is wondering why the wealthiest families of the 16 th century would have chosen to adorn their corridors and rooms in this manner, we are not alone. “Mascherone” at Palazzo Vecchio (Florence) Their subjects are mischievous, humorous, and fantastic: women transforming into columns, half-human and half-animal creatures, harpies, climbing plants sustaining impossible weights, and, most importantly, wide-mouthed masks ( mascheroni).

Re-baptized as grottesche, these decorative patterns became a real fashion. The ruins, nicknamed “caves” ( grotte in Italian), were decorated with frescos representing bizarre motifs inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The origin of the word “grotesque” derives from the discovery, in the 16 th century, of the ruins of the Domus Aurea, Emperor Nero’s unfinished and extravagant residence. Unlike Renaissance art, which we generally think of as being devoted to the Beautiful and to balanced yet naturalistic proportions, grotesque artworks shift the focus to the misshapen, the disproportionate, the fantastic and the delirious. This contrast between the classical beauty of Venus and the mischievous ugliness of the creatures epitomizes the relationship between balanced form (valued by the great artists of the Renaissance) and the Grotesque, an artistic phenomenon which spread widely in the 16 th century, especially in European garden architecture. The English word dome, “a vault, having a circular plan and usually in the shape of a portion of a sphere,” ultimately derives from Latin domus (Deī) “house (of God),” which becomes Italian duomo and German Dom, both meaning “cathedral.Artemisia Gentileschi, Susannah and the Elders (1622)

In the United States, in the first half of the 19th century, domestic developed the specific meaning “homemade cotton cloth.” Its plural domestics now means “household items made of cloth, such as sheets, towels, and tablecloths.” Domus comes from the Proto-Indo-European root dem-, dom- (with variants) used to form a verb “to chop (wood), build' as well as the noun 'a house.” Dom- is also the source of Greek dómos “house,” Sanskrit dáma- “house, building,” Slavic dom “house, home.” The variant dem- forms Greek démein “to build” the suffixed root demro- becomes timra- in Germanic, whose derivative noun timram “building material, wood,” becomes timber in English. When the adjective domestic first appeared in English in the early 16th century, it meant “housed.” The sense “relating to one’s own country” dates to 1545, and Shakespeare was presumably the first to use domestic in the sense “relating to one’s home or family affairs.” The noun domestic “something made in the home” dates from the first half of the 17th century. The English word domestic ultimately comes from Latin domesticus, formed from the noun domus “house, home, family, household (with dependents), school (of philosophy).” The adjectival suffix -esticus is a combination of two suffixes: -estis (the adjective domestis does not exist in Latin) and -ticus (borrowed from rusticus “pertaining to a farm or farming, rural, provincial”).

Domus medici meaning