Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Paintings
Rudolf II of Habsburg as Vertumnus
Water
The Librarian
Spring
Flora
Winter
Summer
Summer
Spring
Fire
Summer, allegory
Four Seasons in One Head
Bust of a Daughter of Ferdinand I
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The Librarian
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe artʃimˈbɔldo]; also spelled Arcimboldi) (1526 or 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. His father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist of Milan. Like his father, Giuseppe Arcimboldo started his career as a designer for stained glass and frescoes at local cathedrals when he was 21 years old. He also married later on.
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. 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 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.[2] In the portrait now represented by several copies called 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 everyday objects, the portraits were decoration and still-life paintings at the same time.[3] His works showed not only nature and human beings, but also how closely they were related.[4]
After a 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 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 books in order to own them, instead of to read them.[3]
Art critics debate whether his paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind.[5] 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, where he had 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 in 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 16th-century Mannerist. A transitional period from 1520 to 1590, Mannerism adopted some artistic elements from the High Renaissance and influenced other elements in the Baroque period. A Mannerist tended to show close relationships between human and nature.[6] Arcimboldo also tried to show his appreciation of nature through his portraits. In The Spring, the human portrait was composed of only various spring flowers and plants. From the hat to the neck, every part of the portrait, even the lips and nose, was composed of flowers, while the body was composed of plants. On the other hand, in The Winter, the human was composed mostly of roots of trees. Some leaves from evergreen trees and the branches of other trees became hair, while a straw mat became the costume of the human portrait.
Legacy
In 1976, the Spanish sculptor Miguel Berrocal created the original bronze sculpture interlocking in 20 elements titled Opus 144 ARCIMBOLDO BIG as a direct homage to the Italian painter. This first work was followed by the limited-edition sculpture in 1000 copies titled Opus 167 OMAGGIO AD ARCIMBOLDO (HOMAGE TO ARCIMBOLDO) of 1976-79 consisting of 30 interlocking elements.
The bizarre works of Arcimboldo, especially his multiple images and visual puns, were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí. The exhibition entitled “The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the face from the 16th to the 20th Century” at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1987) includes 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.[7]
His painting Water was used as the cover of the album Masque by the progressive rock band Kansas, and was also shown on the cover of the 1977 Paladin edition of Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness.[8]
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.[9]
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.
Arcimboldo's influence can also be seen in the work of Vik Muniz.
Arcimboldo's works are used by psychologists and neuroscientists to determine the presence of lesions in the hemispheres of the brain that recognize global and local images and objects.
References
"Giuseppe Arcimboldo Biography". Giuseppe-arcimboldo.org. Retrieved 2012-07-16.
Maiorino, Giancarlo. The Portrait of Eccentricity: Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Print.
Elhard, K. C. "Reopening the Book on Arcimboldo’s Librarian." Libraries & Culture 40.2 Spring 2005. 115-127. Project MUSE.
ROSENBERG, KAREN (September 23, 2010). "Several Obsessions, United on the Canvas". NY Times. Retrieved 30 December 2012.
Melikian, Souren (October 5, 2007). "Giuseppe Arcimboldo's hallucinations: Fantasy or insanity?". NY Times. Retrieved 30 December 2012.
"The Mannerist Style and the Lamentation:". Artsconnected.org. 2009-03-10. Retrieved 2012-07-16.
[Literature:The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the face from the 16th to the 20th Century. Abbeville Press, New York, 1st Edition (September 1987). ISBN 0896597695. ISBN 978-0896597693.]
See the 1977 Paladin edition of The Myth of Mental Illness
Bolaño, Roberto. "2666". Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, pps. 729, 784.
Further reading
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (University of Chicago Press; 2010) 313 pages
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