These have always fascinated me but I thought they were the same. It turns out they aren't. Even more what we tend to think of as gargoyles - well, what I think of as gargoyles, bizarre creatures that lurk on the roofs of medieval buildings - turned out to be grotesques or chimeras. This is because gargoyles are actually disguised water spouts.
So these - at Quito Cathedral in Ecuador - are gargoyles.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 France
This is also a gargoyle - photo taken by Jon Sullivan at the Natural History Museum, London, England and released into the public domain.
But this little creature from Winchester Cathedral is not.
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Author: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Nor, I suspect, is Le Stryge at Notre Dame de Paris
(photographed with Henri Le Secq by Charles Nègre in 1853).
They are both grotesques because they don't incorporate a spout to take water away from the building and are purely decorative. Grotesques can be humorous, have human faces or form or can be fantastical creatures like griffins or mixtures of animals in which case they are chimeras.
So I learned something new today. Always a good thing.
