Lincoln Cathedral, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England

The Grotesque and Serpent-tailed Beast Capital at Lincoln Cathedral

2154

Transitional Romanesque to Early English Gothic Period (c. 1192–1210)

A structural stone capital or ornamental corbel from Lincoln Cathedral’s great rebuilding campaign after the 1185 earthquake, featuring a grinning wide-eared beast twisted into an impossible bodily contortion with its scaly serpentine tail coiling back around its own flank. Unlike the symmetrical confrontations of French Romanesque, this figure has turned against its own anatomical logic — the grotesque here is not a formula but a specific bodily impossibility.