Giuseppe Arcimboldo (* around 1526 in Milan; † July 11, 1593 ibid.) was an Italian painter of the late Renaissance, especially Mannerism. His panel paintings are famous, in which he depicted flowers, fruits or vegetables, but also inorganic objects such as books, and composed surprising portraits or still lifes from them.
In addition to his work as a painter, Arcimboldo designed festive decorations and was also active at the Prague court as an engineer, a costume designer and a musician. Only a part of his works has been preserved. More rarely used forms of his family name are Archimboldi and Arcimbaldo.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Life
Almost nothing is known of Arcimboldo's early years. The earlier assumption that he was born in 1527 resulted from the entry in Milanese death registers, which recorded that he died at the age of 66. Based on a long-unknown self-portrait that includes the year 1587 and the age 61, 1526 is now considered the most likely birth year.
His family had produced high clergymen and jurists, but also artists such as his father Biagio. The earliest mention of him dates from 1549, when he was working with his father on the decoration of Milan Cathedral. From the files of the Milan Cathedral we know that this work continued until 1559.
The city of Milan, like all of northern Italy, had been under Habsburg rule since 1525. In 1562 Arcimboldo came to Vienna as a talented painter of conventional portraits and copyist at the court of Emperor Ferdinand I.
He remained there as a so-called "house painter". He remained there as a so-called "Hauskonterfetter" even under the successors of Ferdinand I: Maximilian II and Rudolf II.
Ferdinand I's son, Emperor Maximilian II appointed him court painter in 1564. Soon after, he created the first series of paintings of the "Four Seasons" and the "Four Elements" in the manner that became typical for him. They were presented to the emperor on New Year's Day 1569.
In 1570 Arcimboldo was sent to Prague to create a grand pageant with mythological themes for Maximilian. His ingenuity as a painter, as well as in arranging processions, coronation ceremonies, ostentatious weddings, and the like, was widely admired.
As painter, stage designer, architect, engineer and organizer in one person, he staged glittering, costly festivities and courtly masquerades that were designed to highlight the emperor's power, increase his fame and distract the people from their everyday misery, at least for a short time. From 1575 he was court painter to Emperor Rudolf II, Maximilian's son and successor.
Rudolf II was a politically rather insignificant emperor, but a very good friend of the arts and science and kept a colorful court of artists, astronomers, astrologers and alchemists. Arcimboldo had similar tasks to perform for him as he had previously done for Maximilian.
In addition, he invented hydraulic machines, occupied himself with a museum project, and pursued his project of translating music into color values. He was convinced that painting and music obeyed the same laws, and therefore tried to develop a scientific theory according to which there was a fixed relationship between harmonic proportions of tones and semitones on the one hand and color nuances on the other.
It was not until 1587 that Rudolf II allowed him to return to his native Milan, and so Arcimboldo left the court in Prague. Rudolf II had previously confirmed his hereditary nobility and honored it with a coat of arms, and in 1592 he was awarded the non-hereditary title of Court Palatine.
The asteroid (6556) Arcimboldo was named after him.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo's The work
Arcimboldo owes his posthumous fame to his "teste composte" (Italian: composite heads), as his contemporary Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, the art theorist of Mannerism, called them: amazing portraits made of flowers, fruits, animals, but also inorganic objects, which he arranged so artfully that, with the help of the viewer's imagination, they come together to form the appearance of a human head.
Contemporaries often attested great similarity to the persons depicted in these associative pictures. With this concept, Arcimboldo proves to be a striking representative of Mannerism, a style of the late Renaissance. Renaissance artists had achieved a high degree of perfection and harmony in their recreation of nature.
Mannerism provided a counter design or a then modern extension of the possibilities. Now individual artists such as Arcimboldo based their works on subjective ideas or fantastic ideas that went decidedly beyond the classical-harmonic representation. The allegorical or enigmatic (enigmatic, puzzled) image became an essential stylistic element of Mannerism.
Arcimboldo created numerous images of this type, including a portrait of Emperor Maximilian II, in which his head is depicted as a composition of fish and seafood. Also known are his inverted paintings, which initially show still lifes of vegetables or flowers; when turned upside down, they change to portraits.
Picture example The Spring. This is a painting from the Four Seasons series, a theme Arcimboldo took up repeatedly. The face of the person depicted is formed from rosebuds and individual, unidentifiable blossoms.
The ear is formed from the blossom of a peony, a columbine forms the earring, while lilies of the valley represent the teeth. A variety of flowers form the hair, to which a Madonna lily is pinned as an ornament. The robe is composed of green foliage; recognizable are the leaves of cabbage, dandelion and wild strawberries. The collar consists of white flowers, including daisies.
Image example Vertumnus. For Arcimboldo's multi-layered art, not always transparent at first glance, his painting Vertumnus of 1591 is a concise example. We first see an accumulation of precisely and delicately painted flowers as well as field and garden fruits from all seasons.
These combine to form a portrait with the facial features of Rudolf II. Furthermore, the emperor appears with a wreathed forehead as Vertumnus, the Etruscan-Roman god of change or transformation - allegorically indicated by the changes of vegetation in the course of a year.
On a fourth level, the successful combination of very different parts can be understood as a symbol (actually: ideal) for the harmonious diversity of the imperial empire.
Example image The water. Represented by a breast image formed from sea animals.
Example image The Fire. Represented by a breast image formed from burning wood, candles, lamp, steel and flints, and firearms.
This and similar pictorial inventions by Arcimboldo gave inspiration to the Surrealists of the 20th century, which can be found in various works, for example in Salvador Dalí's Face of Mae West as Apartment (gouache, Chicago) and Spain (oil, Rotterdam).
Giuseppe Arcimboldo Selection of works
- The Vegetable Gardener or a Joke with Vegetables (reverse painting), Museo ala Ponzone Cremona
- King Herod, portrait from children's corpses, Venice
- Rudolph II as Vertumnus, portrait made of vegetables, fruits, flowers; Skokloster Castle
- Four Seasons, series from 1563, 1572, 1573
- Four Elements, 1566
- The Librarian, portrait from books
- The lawyer, 1566
Archduchess Portraits
As court painter in Vienna, Arcimboldo may have been the painter of the Archduchess Portraits, four female portraits of female members of the Habsburg imperial family.