GARGOYLES IN AMERICA

By MICHAEL QUINN

A DOCTOR IN MARYLAND HAS ONE CLIMBING his chimney. Another lurks in the baggage area at the new Denver airport. A fearsome specimen keeps watch over the swimming pool of Court TV's Arthur Miller. A grotesque gaggle stars on its own Disney animated TV series. They're gargoyles--and for reasons no one can quite fathom they've become the hottest commodity to emerge from the Middle Ages since Gregorian chant. Though their scary Gothic ancestors patrolled the cathedrals of Europe, serving double duty as protectors from evil and divertors of rainwater, today's gargoyles are more likely to turn up as tchotchkes--pencil holders, bookends, and the like. They've also gone edible, in the form of Franco-American canned pasta (with and without meatballs).

America's leading gargoylophile, Michael Stopka of Chicago's Design Toscano, is a beneficiary and an instigator of the trend. In five years his business--"historical reproductions for home and garden"--has grown from a $6,000 stake to $6 million in sales, thanks largely to gargoyle paperweights, gargoyle table bases-even the occasional gargoyle lamp finial. Stopka links the knobby monsters' popularity to the current vogue of cherubim as a design motif, though he makes an interesting distinction: while gargoyle fanciers are largely male, angelic perfection tends to draw women. Men, apparently, feel more at home with the grotesque.