We’re probably all familiar with  funny faces like these  although I suspect that most of us don’t know much more about them or the artist, except perhaps that his name was Arcimboldo.

The obvious question is why  a serious court artist for three emperors  should turn his hand from conventional portraits to ones  made up entirely of objects such as flowers, fruit and vegetables. It seems such a bizarre thing to do yet,  so what on earth was going through his mind when he painted such pictures, and what was going through the mind of the people who were looking at them?

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was born into an important family in Milan in 1527. His great uncle was the archbishop and his father was an artist at the court.  He first comes to public notice when, aged just 22,   he designed  stained glass for the cathedral there, some which can still be seen. Later in addition to the paintings I’m going to explore in this post, he designed frescoes for the cathedral at Monza; and a tapestry for Como Cathedral.

A couple of years later, in  1551 Ferdinand Duke of Bohemia, visited Milan, and commissioned him to paint some heraldic devices. In itself, nothing of great importance, except that Ferdinand was very shortly afterwards to succeed, his brother, Charles V,  and become Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of the Hapsburg Empire which stretched across half of Europe.  The two men obviously got on and eventually in 1562 Arcimboldo was persuaded to leave Milan and head to the Imperial Court in Vienna to work for Ferdinand.  Apart from painting “official” portraits such as those below,  he was the organizer of  court festivities, and in charge of making acquisitions for the emperor’s famous kunstkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities which included art, antiques, curios, and oddities of nature of all kinds. This also gave him access to the large imperial art collection which  included the work of many German and Dutch painters which were very different in style to those he would’ve seen in Italy and which included a number with what might be called a “grotesque” streak to them.

His patron died  in 1564 but his son, the new Emperor Maximilian II,  kept Arcimboldo on as a court painter. His court  was full of artists and scientists, and he established a garden full of rare plants and a menagerie which included elephants and tigers.  It was for Maximilian that he painted the first of his famous Four Seasons series which  marked a turning point in his career.

The four paintings were presented to the emperor on New Year’s Day 1569, and were completely different to anything he had done before. In part it is because  they harked back to the  rather severe profiles  of Roman emperors on coins, a style which had gone out of fashion, in favour of 3/4 or full face portraits.

 

The idea of portraying the seasons as human beings went back to Roman times, so there was nothing strange there but of course what was strange is that  rather than showing the subject in a realistic way,  Arcimboldo produced the first of what known as  “composite heads”,  hybrid masterpieces of  deception and illusion.  At first sight and from a distance, they  look like standard portraits but on closer inspection they are far from it. Instead the portrait is made up of a collection of  everyday things which combine and overlap to make up the image.

It’s difficult to classify such a confusing mix and even his contemporaires couldn’t define it adequately referring to the paintings  as  ‘jokes’, ‘caprices’ and ‘grotesques’. These days  modern critics often use the term “Mannerist”, which is equally difficult to define,  allying the paintings with similar over the top styles in architecture, literature and music.  The Tate sums Mannerism  up as “a sixteenth century style of art and design characterised by artificiality, elegance and sensuous distortion of the human figure.”

 

 

That might explain why three years later Arcimboldo presented another series of four paintings in similarly odd style, called The Four Elements.  Following the same principle they are composite images representing Earth, Water, Fire and Air  assembled from plants, animals and objects related to the respective subject, but without depicting even the smallest fraction of a real human face.

On the back of the Painting of Spring is an inscription which translates to “Spring is accompanied by Air, a head of birds”. This strongly implies that  each season was deliberately planned to be paired with the appropriate element: Spring with Air, Summer  with Fire, Autumn with Earth and Winter with Water.

The two series of paintings were  accompanied by a long poem  by Giovanni Battista Fonteo, who was a close collaborator with Arcimboldo helping  him with the organisation of  events and festivals.   It helped explain their symbolism giving an insight into  the serious side of Arcimboldo’s work  and shows they are much more than just ingenious visual jokes.  Of course they were intended to amuse but  behind  the amusement are all sorts of references to the imperial dynasty and the power of the Hapsburg empire.

In particular Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, of Princeton University,  author of Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting has researched “the imperial panegyric writing” of Fonteo and its links to the complex political iconography of the two sets of paintings. Kaufmann says they symbolise “the majesty of the ruler, the copiousness of creation and the power of the ruling family over everything.” As an Emperor in charge of human affairs, Maximilian could also be said to run the wider world, including the seasons. The harmonious combinations of fruit and vegetables in each picture could be said to reflect the harmony that existed under his benevolent  rule.  It’s worth noticing too that each figure  also wears something that can be seen as a crown or triumphal wreath.   Maximilian went along with all this and in 1571 played Winter  in a  festival orchestrated by Arcimboldo, while members of his court dressed up as the other elements and seasons.

If that all sounds a bit contrived of course it is but it’s typical of the later Renaissance for intellectuals to contrive puzzles and look for  links and correspondence between ideas and objects from all branches of knowledge. What Arcimboldo managed to do was to condense several of these associations into a single coherent whole so that not only did they amuse but they also appealed to the intellect.

For more on this a good starting poiint is Kaufamnn’s article “Arcimboldo’s Imperial Allegories” in   Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte,  available for free via JSTOR

The Four Seasons proved very popular. The emperor ordered another copy of the paintings for himself, and also ordered others as diplomatic gifts.   Arcimboldo was commissioned  to produce a set  for the Elector of Saxony in 1573 and then another set for Philip II of Spain in 1582.  Further copies are known to have been produced by Arcimboldo or his studio and the Saxony set was copied locally at least twice.  There were plenty of later versions too, probably produced for the open market where these amusing but intellectually interesting pictures proved popular.  In all at least 30 paintings survive and can be traced through museum and auction house records, although provenance is not always clear.  None are identical but the differences are usually not that significant although  it’s fun to try and spot what they are.

 

In fact it’s a good thing there were so many copies because only Summer and Winter [now in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum,] have survived from the original set, while only Spring survives from the Spanish set [in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid].  However, the  set  sent to Dresden for the Elector of  Saxony had more luck.  In the 19thc Arcimboldo  was largely forgotten  and the paintings were sold  but by chance were rediscovered much later by a dealer and rescued from a building that was about to be demolished.  He sold them to the Louvre in 1964 where they can be seen today.

So let’s take a look at the Four Seasons.  I’ve seen several accounts of each picture, and some of the copies,  none of which entirely tally either with each other or with what I think I can see myself  so don’t take my word for anything – study the pictures yourself!

 

 

The majority opinion is that Spring is a portrait of a young woman, although Real Academia de Bellas Artes which holds the painting said it is “un joven y sonriente caballero”: which translates as “a smiling young gentleman.”  The face is composed almost entirely of small pale pink and white flowers such as dianthus with  roses for the chin and to accentuate the colour of the cheeks. Rose buds make up the lips and nose while the hair is a magnificent bouquet which includes a newly-introduced yellow tulip, a martagon lily, roses, pinks, marigolds and pansies. An aquilegia forms an ear-ring while  a wide  lace ruff of small white flowers including daisies.  The alaborate court dress is a thicket  of green leafy vegetation, including cabbage and dandelion leaves on the  sleeves, and with jewels made of berries.  The official description says that the prominent iris is the pommel of a sword, but it could equally be a corsage, as the other female figures in the series have similar flowery ornaments.

Summer is a female figure and unlike spring is made up of fruit and vegetables rather than flowers. Each piece is realistically painted and somehow assemble to make a realistic face too. It sounds bizarre to say her teeth are an open pea pod and her nose is a cucumber but it’s true!  With cherries for lips, a pear for a chin and a peach for her cheek the portrait also contains garlic, maize and an aubergine amongst many other things.  Her hair is an array of fruit including, what looks like a small watermelon  and sprays of olive, with a dashing touch like a feather added by a few stalks of oats. She wears a spikey ruff over a gown of woven wheat  and its there that Arcimboldo has signed his name and dated the painting, and the whole ensemble is finished with an artichoke corsage.

In a noticeable shift from the earlier two portraits, “Autumn” is depicted as a middle-aged man with much rougher features, although the variety of produce used is as wide as before. The tone is more muted and cooler suggesting perhaps the imminent arrival of winter. His face is made of apples and pears, with a chestnut and its case for his mouth, and a pomegranate for his chin.  An overripe cereal head forms a beard. However the facial expression is sadder and less smiley – more autumnal in fact – than the two earlier pictures. Rather than depicting a whole, ripe fig as the earring Arcimboldo instead shows an overripe one that  had burst with its seeds about to drop.  Bunches of grapes and vine leaves form his hair which is topped by a domed pumpkin hat. Autumn’s clothing   is presented as  a partially broken barrel, with wooden slats tied round with willow, and a medlar button-hole.  

The final painting Winter is not composed of produce or vegetation. Instead it is  depicted as a withered old man  made from a single gnarled tree trunk, with knobbly bark representing the wrinkles of his skin and broken branches making his nose and ear.  His  eye is simply a dark cleft in the wood while his thin straggly beard  is composed of mossy  roots while his  mouth is formed of two bracket fungi. A touch of green from ivy leaves ornaments his hair which is otherwise just  a tangle of naked branches. The only other colour is offered by the orange and lemon hanging over his chest to provide a small, cheery note to an otherwise dreary portrait.  His cape is a woven mat draped around his shoulders and typical of the matting used by gardeners to protect crops over winter.  Its thought that the cape was based on one that the emperor actually owned, and in the original set its has an M and a crown for Maximilian woven into the design, but in the Dresden set these were replaced by  the crossed swords of Meissen, the coat of arms of Saxony.

After Maximilian died in 1576, the new Emperor, his son Rudolph II continued to employ Arcimboldo although the court moved from Vienna to Prague. Rudolph was an unusual ruler. He was fascinated by art and science and employed alchemists, mathematicians, astrologers, astronomers and all sorts of scholars so that  the Prague court became the intellectual and cultural centre of Europe. This must have suited Arcimboldo but he decided he wanted to return to Milan to see out his old age in his home city. So in 1587 Rudolph reluctantly allowed Arcimboldo to leave Prague for Italy although he was to continue working for the emperor long-distance until his death   in 1593.

Amongst the works he sent Rudolph during these last years were one representing all four seasons in a single picture as well as the famous portrait of the emperor  as Vertumnus, the God of gardens and vegetation.

 

Once again it could seem to be  just a bit of a joke but once again it conceals a lot of intellectual virtuosity. It is  meant as another imperial allegory, corresponding with  the Four Seasons, with the variety of fruit and flowers  from all seasons signifying that a golden era has returned under Rudolph’s rule.

For more on the links between Rudolph and Vertumnus there is an article by Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann, in “Arcimboldo and Propertius. A Classical Source for Rudolf II as Vertumnus” in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 1985 which is available for free via JSTOR

There’s a lot more to say about Arcimboldo and his work – including his upside down pictures which take the “composite heads” idea one stage further – and how his ideas were reinvented by  the  surrealists and Dadaists in the early 20th but also still inspire artists today  but I’ve run out of time and wordspace so  I’ll leave all  that for another day. Meanwhile just enjoy trying to identify the flowers, fruit and veg in the pictures above.