Christoph Jamnitzer opens his book of ornament designs, Neuw Grotteßken Buch (1610), with a flourish — the images the reader is about to see, he insinuates in his dedicatory address, are products of ingenuity and daring on the level of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the Americas. To make this comparison, Jamnitzer asserts that his labors of producing printed ornament designs are parallel to the endeavor of cosmography. Jamnitzer’s claim is bombastic but also literal; in her thorough analysis of the book, Madeleine Viljoen notes that Jamnitzer puns on period-specific alternative meanings of cosmos (the universe/ornament) and graphos (mapper/printmaker or draughtsman) to reveal that designers of ornament prints and seafaring explorers are the maker-discoverers of new worlds and possess special insight into our own.

What novelties does the reader encounter, then, in Jamnitzer’s book? A menagerie of hybrid creatures; frolicking nude cherubs; architecture with soft, living components; flowers so rare, they do not exist. Jamnitzer’s compositions are squarely in the tradition of grotesquerie — a mode of depiction dating back to European antiquity in which motifs and figures are combined and recombined in creative hybrids and fanciful arrangements. Such “grotesques” have a tendency to provoke simultaneous, contradictory reactions in spectators: delighted surprise shadowed by revulsion; attraction perversely heightened by disgust. Grotesques were prime examples of defamiliarization avant la lettre.

In true grotesque form, many of Jamnitzer’s creatures are composed of seemingly incongruous elements whose juxtapositions relate one disquietingly droll surprise after another. In one etching, bellows comprise the body of a flightless bird. Some of its tail “feathers” are in fact signified by the bellows’ corresponding ash broom. Blind, as it has no head, only a crest composed of expressed puffs of air, the bird appears to hurry forward on chicken-like legs. But the bird’s urgent velocity is a misdirect, for its whole body is perched on a creeping turtle, and moving in slow motion.

For all the freewheeling caprice of these visual confections, Jamnitzer’s realm is no Eden. Knowledge prevails here, and it is not always appealing. Effects of the abject are threaded throughout the book: scatalogical enemas and shit, rags, postmortem bodily emissions. In more than one scene, creatures are pierced or squeezed to death, their moments of expiration frozen as spectacles of grim fascination as liquids and breath leave their bodies. One fantastical ornamental creature is about to have one of its heads eaten by another in an act of self-cannibalism. And several of the flowers in a seemingly orderly display appear to have faces while simultaneously resembling vulvas.

Perhaps the zaniest turn of all is how cleverly the world of the Neuw Grotteßken Buch points back to our own. Jamnitzer’s world is not timeless but rather tethered to modernity. Firearms, eyeglasses, and even human figures in seventeenth-century dress have their place here. Viljoen demonstrates that many of Jamnitzer’s blooms relate to botanical illustrations from early modern European travelogues of the Americas, one motif that connects his grotesques to the global exploration mentioned in his dedication. Our world too is filled with both humor and terror; our bodies produce both ingenious artisanal objects and poop. The Neuw Grotteßken Buch’s surprises and disturbances reflect the dialectic of ingenuity and irrationality of our own cosmos. They reveal the madness behind our methods of taxonomizing, mapping, and ordering.

The book itself comprises three sections, each with its own title page followed by four pages of text including the dedication, a poem, and a five-year imperial privilege. The latter three elements — dedication, poem, and privilege — are repeated identically, in full, behind the unique title pages. In other words, the book seems to start thrice, though the grotesque compositions in each section do not repeat. This odd arrangement may be the final, overarching reversion to the “real” world. Our creative labors unfold not in a continuous, steady flow of effort, but rather start and start again—each time from a different perspective, in a different mood.