Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Self-portrait, now in National Gallery in Prague
Born	1527 Milan
Died	(1593-07-11)July 11, 1593 (age 66) Milan
Nationality	Italian
Known for	Painting
Notable work	The Librarian, 1566 Vertumnus, 1590-1591 Flora, ca. 1591

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (also spelled Arcimboldi) (1527 – July 11, 1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books – that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject.

Biography

Vertumnus, a portrait of today. Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor painted as Vertumnus, Roman God of the seasons, c. 1590-1. Skokloster Castle, Sweden.

His father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist. Like his father, Giuseppe Arcimboldo started his career as a designer for stained glasses and frescoes at local cathedrals when he was 21 years old.

In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "The Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols.

Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, plants, fruits, sea creatures and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today.

At a distance, his portraits looked like normal human portraits. However, individual objects in each portrait were actually overlapped together to make various anatomical shapes of a human. They were carefully constructed by his imagination. Besides, when he assembled objects in one portrait, he never used random objects. Each object was related by characterization. In The Librarian, Arcimboldo used objects that signified the book culture at that time, such as the curtain that created individual study rooms in a library. The animal tails, which became the beard of the portrait, were used as dusters. By using the everyday objects, the portraits were decoration and still life paintings at the same time. His works showed not only nature and human beings, but also how close they were related.

After the portrait was released to the public, some scholars, who had a close relationship with the book culture at that time, argued that the portrait ridiculed their scholarship. In fact, Arcimboldo criticized the phenomenon of the rich people’s misbehavior and showed others what happened at that time through his art. In The Librarian, although the painting looked ridiculous, it criticized some wealthy people who collected the books in order to satisfy their ownership, instead of to read the books.

Art critics debate whether his paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times.

Arcimboldo died in Milan, to which he retired after leaving the Prague service. It was during this last phase of his career that he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II (see above), as well as his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career.

When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years' War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from Rudolf II's collection.

His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris, as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, the Candie Museum in Guernsey and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid also own paintings by Arcimboldo.

Mannerism

Arcimboldo is known as a mannerist in the 16th century. The Mannerism was a transitional period from 1520 to 1590, which adopted some artistic elements from the High Renaissance and influenced the other elements in the Baroque period . The Mannerist tended to show close relationship between human and nature. Arcimboldo also tried to show his appreciation of nature through his portraits. In The Spring, the human portrait was composed only of various spring flowers and plants. From the hat to the neck, every part of the portrait, even lips and nose, was composed of the flowers while the body was composed of the plants. On the other hand, in The Winter, the human was composed mostly by the roots of the trees. Some leaves from evergreen trees and the branches of other trees became hairs while a straw mat became the costume of the human portrait.

Legacy

The bizarre works of Arcimboldo, especially his multiple images, were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí. The exhibition entitled “The Arcimboldo Effect” at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1987) included numerous 'double meaning' paintings. Arcimboldo's influence can also be seen in the work of Shigeo Fukuda, István Orosz, Octavio Ocampo, and Sandro del Prete, as well as the films of Jan Švankmajer.

His painting, Water, was used as the cover of the album Masque by the progressive rock band Kansas.

A detail from Flora was used on the cover of the 2009 album Bonfires on the Heath by The Clientele.

The 'soup genie' character Boldo in the 2008 animated film The Tale of Despereaux, is composed of vegetables.

Arcimboldo's surrealist imagination is visible also in fiction. The first and last sections of 2666, Roberto Bolaño's last novel, concern a fictional German writer named Archimboldi, who takes his pseudonym from Arcimboldo.

The 1994 short story The Coming of Vertumnus by Ian Watson counterpoints the innate surrealism of the eponymous work against a drug-induced altered mental state.

Gallery

• 
  The Jurist, 1566, Nationalmuseum, Sweden
• 
  The Librarian, 1566, oil on canvas, Skokloster Castle, Sweden
• 
  Winter, 1573, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris
• 
  Spring, 1573, oil on canvas, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid
• 
  Summer, 1573, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris
• 
  Autumn, 1573, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris
• 
  An earlier version of Summer, 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Austria.
• 
  The Fire, Oil on Wood, 1566, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Austria

See also

• Hidden faces

Further reading

• Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (University of Chicago Press; 2010) 313 pages

External links

• Giuseppe-Arcimboldo.org 32 works by Giuseppe Arcimboldo
• Giuseppe Arcimboldo at Olga's Gallery
• Arcimboldo at TVM
• Arcimboldo in the "A World History of Art"
• Web Gallery of Art
• Arcimboldo at MuseumSyndicate
• Arcimboldo at Panopticon Virtual Art Gallery
• Skokloster Castle, Sweden
• Arcimboldo, from Milan's cathedral to european courts
• Arcimboldo's Feast for the Eyes Smithsonian Magazine