Giuseppe Arcimboldo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Giuseppe Arcimboldo | |
 Self-portrait |
|
| Birth name | Giuseppe Arcimboldo |
| Born | 1527 Milan |
| Died | July 11, 1593 Milan |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Field | Painting |
| Famous works | The Librarian, 1566 Vertumnus, 1590-1591 |
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 recognizable likeness of the portrait subject.
[edit] Biography
In 1562 he became the court portraitist to Maximilian II at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to his son Rudolf II, both of whom seem to have much liked Arcimboldo's extraordinary portraits.
He was also the court decorator, costume designer, and general art expert. His style of early pre-surrealist portraiture was much copied by his contemporaries, making it difficult at times to differentiate his work from that of imitators. Ironically, given the fame of the imaginary portraits, Arcimboldo's conventional work has been all but forgotten.
He died in Milan.
His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Amras 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, and at the Candie Museum, Guernsey, also contain pieces of his work.
 Winter, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien |
 Spring, 1563, oil on wood, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid |
 Summer, 1573, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris |
 Autumn, 1573, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris |
[edit] The Arcimboldo Legacy
The bizarre works of Arcimboldo especially his multiple images were rediscovered by Surrealist artists in the first part of 20th century. The paranoiac-critical method of Salvador Dalí was influenced by the Mannerist painter and in many Surrealist Dictionaries Arcimboldo is identified as a Surrealist painter before Surrealism existed. In the “The Arcimboldo Effect” exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1987) a lot of double meaning paintings were exhibited, all of them connected to the secret technique of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. There are also contemporary works influenced by the revival of interest in Arcimboldo, including paintings by Shigeo Fukuda, István Orosz, Octavio Ocampo and Sandro del Prete, and some of the films of Jan Svankmajer.
