Gargoyle
Introduction
A gargoyle (from French gargouille > gargouiller 'to produce a noise similar to that of a liquid in a tube', Latin gurgulio and Greek γαργαρίζω 'to gargle') is the protruding part of a pipe that serves to evacuate rainwater from roofs.
By expelling water in fine jets through their mouths, the gargoyles prevented the water from contacting the stone walls and causing them to deteriorate.
In the architecture of the Middle Ages, especially in Gothic art, they are widely used in churches and cathedrals and are usually adorned with intentionally grotesque figures that represent men, animals, monsters or demons "Demon (mythology)"). Probably, they had the symbolic function of protecting the temple and frightening sinners. This was maintained, although with less development, in Spanish Renaissance architecture and even in some Baroque churches.
The word gargoyle is used on many occasions to refer to all types of creatures that decorate the walls of buildings and that, by representing the same type of figures as gargoyles, are included within the same name. These representations that adorn buildings are not gargoyles for drainage, but decorative images, sometimes called chimeras "Chimera (architecture)"), such as, for example, those of Viollet-le-Duc from Notre Dame in Paris.[1].
History
Gargoyles were introduced into Christian architecture for the first time in Gothic-style cathedrals, but they were already used in Islamic and Buddhist architecture before. Additionally, antecedents of the use of animal heads as water channels can be found in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Pompeii. In 1220 they appear in the cathedral of Laon and from 1240, in Paris. Its period of greatest splendor covers the century and the first half of the century. From the Renaissance onwards, little by little they began to become simple pipes made of stone or metal, without iconographic representation, although some in the shape of a Chimera "Chimera (mythology)") are also found. In the 19th century, neo-Gothic architecture recovered the use of gargoyles.[2].