Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Lore & Background

Giuseppe's father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist of Milan, Italy. Like his father, Giuseppe began his career as a designer for stained glass 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, Austria and later to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also court decorator and costume designer. Augustus, Elector 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. At a distance, his portraits look like normal human portraits, but individual objects overlap to make various human anatomical shapes. The assembled objects were not random: each was related by characterization. In The Librarian, Arcimboldo used objects that signified book culture, 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. Some scholars argued that the portrait ridiculed their scholarship, suggesting that wealthy people collected books only to own them, rather than to read them. Art critics debate whether his paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind. A majority of scholars hold that, given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci), Arcimboldo catered to the taste of his times. He died in Milan, Italy where he had retired after leaving the Prague service. During this last phase he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II, 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.

Reader's Guide

Giuseppe Arcimboldo is significant as a 16th-century Mannerist painter whose composite portraits—made entirely of fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, books, and other objects—remain a source of fascination. His works show not only nature and human beings, but also how closely they were related. After his death and that of his patron Rudolf II, his heritage was quickly forgotten, and many works were lost. Only in 1885 did art critic K. Kasati publish a monograph focusing on Arcimboldo's role as a portraitist. With the advent of surrealism, theorists paid attention to his formal work, and in the first half of the 20th century many articles were devoted to his heritage. Gustav René Hocke drew parallels between Arcimboldo, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst's works. The exhibition 'The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the face from the 16th to the 20th Century' at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1987) included numerous 'double meaning' paintings. His influence can be seen in the work of Salvador Dalí, Shigeo Fukuda, István Orosz, Octavio Ocampo, Vik Muniz, Sandro del Prete, and the films of Jan Švankmajer. Arcimboldo's works are also used by some psychologists and neuroscientists to determine the presence of lesions in the hemispheres of the brain that recognize global and local images. His paintings are held in museums including Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, the Louvre, the Uffizi Gallery, and others. In total about 20 of his pictures remain, though many more have been lost according to mentions of his contemporaries and documents of the era.

Did You Know?

• Arcimboldo started his career as a designer for stained glass and frescoes at local cathedrals when he was 21 years old.
• He was court portraitist to three Holy Roman Emperors: Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolf II.
• 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.
• Only about 20 of his pictures remain, though many more have been lost according to mentions of his contemporaries and documents of the era.
• In 1976, Spanish sculptor Miguel Berrocal created a bronze sculpture titled Opus 144 ARCIMBOLDO BIG as a homage to Arcimboldo.