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| Vertumnus, a portrait of today. Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor painted as Vertumnus, Roman God of the seasons, c. 1590-1. Skokloster Castle, Sweden. |
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 – 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.
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 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.
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| This paper version of an "Archimboldo" is an entertaining art project for students in first, second, or third grade. Bring in fresh fruits and veggies for students look at while they draw with bright, bold oil pastels. Then have them cut these out to assemble with glue onto dark construction papers. |
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.
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