Everything about Giuseppe Arcimboldo totally explained
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 recognisable likeness of the
portrait subject.
Biography
Arcimboldo was
born in
Milan in
1527, the
son of Biagio, a
painter who did
work for the office of the Fabbrica in the
Duomo.Arcimboldo was commissioned to do
stained glass window designs beginning in
1549, including the
Stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria vitrage at the Duomo. In
1556 he worked with
Giuseppe Meda on frescoes for the
Cathedral of Monza. In
1558, he drew the
cartoon for a large
tapestry of the
Dormition of the
Virgin Mary, which still hangs in the Como
Cathedral today.
In
1562 he became court portraitist to
Maximilian II at the
Habsburg court in
Vienna, and later, to 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,
fruit and
tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today.
Art critics are now debating whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged
mind.
Arcimboldo died in
Milan.
When the
Swedish army invaded
Prague in
1648, during the
Thirty Years' War, many of
Arcimboldo's paintings were stolen 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, and the Candie Museum in
Guernsey also own
paintings by
Archimboldo.
The bizarre works of
Arcimboldo, especially his multiple
images, were rediscovered in the early
20th century by
Surrealist artists like
Salvador Dalí. The “The
Arcimboldo Effect” exhibition 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.
Further Information
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