GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO:
MAESTRO OF NATURE AND FANTASY
Summer (detail of vegetables)
Giuseppe Arcimboldo 1563
Nicknamed “il Meraviglioso” (“the Marvelous”), the famed Italian mannerist artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1597), was the darling of the courts of three Holy Roman Emperors. He produced dozens of magnificent and elegant portraits of the nobles and their retinue, as well as a series of remarkably illusionistic portraits of profile heads incorporating flora and fauna.
The series of Four Seasons that the brilliant Arcimboldo crafted for the Habsburg aristocrat and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II are only extant in the paintings of Summer and Winter, that today hang at the wondrous Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, and that of Spring, which is in Madrid at the beautiful Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes.
Maximilian asked Arcimboldo to make copies of these, to give to his Royal relatives and friends. A complete set of all four of Arcimboldo’s copies of the Seasons are at the Louvre.
A wonderful monograph on Arcimboldo and his time was produced by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 2010, as part of their blockbuster show: “Arcimboldo: Nature and Fantasy.”The PDF link for this monograph is below.
Here is part of the introduction:
“Soon forgotten after his death, Arcimboldo was rediscovered in the 1930s when the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred H. Barr, included the artist’s paintings in the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.
“Ever since, Arcimboldo has been considered a source of inspiration for the surrealists and their successors.
“Art historians have also seen him as a typical representative of mannerism, a term used to describe an artistic style fashionable at European courts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Mannerist painters rejected the rational, harmonious approach of much Renaissance art in favor of ambiguity, virtuosity, and elegance. Along with their patrons, they prized artifice, cleverness, obscure symbolism, and intellec- tual puzzles — all qualities found in Arcimboldo’s paintings. Arcimboldo’s composite heads were already celebrated as “scherzi” (jokes) by his contemporaries, but they also reflect the serious scientific study of nature that was characteristic of the sixteenth century.”
NGA DC monograph PDF https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/exhibitions/pdfs/arcimboldo_brochure.pdf
A splendid example of the meticulous and realistic rendering of plants is this detail from the portrait of Summer by Arcimboldo which is held by the Kunsthistorisches.
High-resolution, zoomable link from the Kunst:
https://www.khm.at/en/objectdb/detail/71/?offset=3&lv=list
Summer
Giuseppe Arcimboldo
1563 (oil on panel)
67 cm × 50.8 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum
