Tasso on the Aesthetics of Horror

 From Creation of the World, Day 5: 1222-35

As a painter, who portrays the pallor

and bleakness of a dead body, adorning

a bloodless face with the hues of death,

also adds there horrid beasts and frightening

monsters, and verisimilar ones at that:

though, as true-to-life, he may frighten you,

the mere illusion of those painted features

and his craftsmanship can delight you;

so, by means of these colors and lights

of poetical style, together with these

shadows of poetry, I create dreadful

shapes, and I thus try my best to please

the most sublime minds, and from deep horror

draw such delight that satisfies the more wise.

A footnote engages these ideas:

Among the “manifestos” we have already come across, this one is the most radically Tassean. Cf. Gerusalemme Liberata 1, stanza 3, but capsizing it: there, beautiful descriptions aimed at attracting readers and making them “drink” (that’s the verb Tasso uses) the more serious contents; here, a frightening surface calls the readers to a paradoxical discovery of Light and Beauty at a deeper level—in poetry as well as in life. Melville assumes a like posture in Moby-Dick, ch, 1: “Not  ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.”