Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo – Court painter to the Habsburg Emperor in Vienna and Prague

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was born in Milan in around 1526. Very little is known about his early years; even his date of birth is no more than a guess based on a written testimony that he died at the age of 66. It is supported by a self-portrait handed down by the artist and dated 1587, which also bears the age 61. All we know about his family is that it produced clerics and jurists and even an artist in Giuseppe's father Biagio Arcimboldo. It was probably his father who taught Giuseppe Arcimboldo the foundations of painting, as they both worked together on the decoration of Milan Cathedral in 1549. As northern Italy belonged at that time to the Habsburg Empire, the journey from Milan to Vienna was short, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo arrived at the imperial court in 1562, where Ferdinand I called on his services as a portraitist. Arcimboldo followed the emperor to Prague, and also served his successors Maximilian II and Rudolf II there.

Faces from flower, leaves, nodules and roots

Giuseppe Arcimboldo created his most famous works as a court painter, including the impressive Four Seasons cycle of paintings, which he produced in several series in the 1560s and 1570s. The original paintings were created for Archduke Maximilian and at the same time represent the first composite heads in the artist's oeuvre. Today, Giuseppe Arcimboldo is famous precisely for this idiosyncrasy: his portrait heads are often made up of organic as well as inorganic things, which only become expressive faces through their artistic conception and the viewer's imagination. In the case of Seasons, the artist arranged plants and plant parts so skilfully that flowers, branches, leaves and moss form into facial features and seem to look at each other. At the same time, however, the individual components were executed perfectly realistically and with great mastery, achieving their unreal ambiguity exclusively through the interplay of their creator's suggestive composition. According to surviving text sources, the Italian's bizarre allegories had a very profane reason: they were intended to serve the praise of his imperial patrons. In this respect, at least, Giuseppe Arcimboldo's art conformed to the usual conventions.

With bizarre ideas to become an early pioneer of Surrealism

Giuseppe Arcimboldo also worked as an architect, stage designer and engineer, demonstrating his great inventiveness time and again. Giuseppe Arcimboldo's imaginative work served as inspiration for the surrealists of the 20th century; Salvador Dalí, for example, created his Face of Mae WestWhich Can Be Used as an Apartment in 1935 in imitation of the Italian Mannerist's composite heads. In 1587, Arcimboldo left the imperial court in Prague a celebrated and highly honoured artist to spend his retirement in Italy.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo died in his hometown of Milan on 11 July 1593.