Gargoyle collecting isn’t among the most popular of hobbies, so I may be on the road to becoming a trendsetter. I purchased these two little grotesques at the New York Renaissance Faire this past weekend. I’ve named them Toulouse and Berlioz in honor of one of my favorite Disney movies, The Aristocats. According to the salesperson, Toulouse is a grotesque baby goat and Berlioz a baby lion. I tried to find some real medieval goat and lion grotesques for comparison, but all I came up with was carvings of lions eating goats. Let’s hope these two get along better than their historic predecessors.
I bought my grotesques from a cool little shop called Sales From the Crypt, which also sells many other medieval and medieval-inspired works. My friends and I were particularly taken with the reproduction Lewis chessmen, and I’m considering a set of carved faces based on Oxford University gargoyles for my next acquisition.
If you could have your own gargoyle or grotesque, what would it look like?
A Scholarly Skater 
so cute they are!
Gargoyles have been flapping around the inside of my skull for a few years now, and we have a few gargoyles and grotesques around our house, including a large reproduction of “Le Stryge,” the baleful fellow tacked onto Notre-Dame de Paris in the 19th century—but recently we were graced with a rather special breed of grotesque.
Bats enjoy our attic, and in June one of their number apparently came flapping out, found a reason to cling to the brick wall next to our bedroom window, and…well, its spirit flapped off to the Great Mosquito Breeding Puddle in the Sky, but its body stayed put, a macabre testament to the tenacity of rigor mortis. I joked that we’d been graced by a rare architectural ornament: a truly organic gargoyle.
Wow! That’s awesome and creepy at the same time. Thanks for sharing. 🙂
Playing chess with replica Lewis Chessmen would be awesome!