Giuseppe Arcimboldo Biography

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

(Milan, 1527-id., 1593) Italian painter.He was the first designer of cardboard for tapestries and stained glass window for the Cathedral of Milan.He lived in Prague, and in Vienna he worked for the Habsburg court.Arcimboldo was the creator of a type of portrait in which the face was made up of groups of animals, flowers, fruits and all kinds of objects.In them there is a mixture of satire and allegory, as in La Primavera and El verano .His works were seen in his time as an example of curious painting but lacking in artistic value.In recent times, the Surrealists placed great value on the visual interplay of their compositions and the grotesque nature of their allegories.

He began his career at the age of 22, as a designer of the stained glass windows of the Milanese cathedral, together with his father, Biaggio, who would be his first teacher.He combined his work with the study of Leonardo da Vinci's engravings, especially those with a caricatural vein, whose imprint would become evident in his later production.In 1562 he moved to Prague, where he was successively in the service of the emperors Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rodolfo II, becoming one of the favorite painters of the court, where he made various sets for the imperial theater.On the death of Rodolfo II he returned to Milan, where he died on July 11, 1593.

Vertumno (1590), by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

From the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo the various allegorical paintings stand out in which, from vegetables, fruits, flowers, animals or various objects, he forms human figures or figurations of the seasons of the year, such as the Spring (1563, Louvre Museum, Paris) or the Portrait with vegetables (Pinacoteca de Cremona).Gifted with a singular imagination to create the most unlikely and original visual effects, Arcimboldo enjoyed deserved fame in his time from those grotesque portraits (particularly those in the series The Four Seasons ) in which the physiology of the face was made up of the most disparate elements.It is a capricious, illusionistic and meticulous art, representative of the mannerist taste for artificial metaphor, unusual curiosity and paradox.

The study and assessment of Arcimboldo's work were not rigorously addressed until the beginning of the 20th century, as a reflection of the interest turned towards her by surrealism.The surrealists appreciated a fascinating mixture of satire and allegory in these works, and they attached great value to the visual game that their compositions propose; in them they saw in anticipation of their visual games and incorporated their techniques into their own vocabulary, imitating them profusely.His influence reached painters of the stature of Salvador Dalí, as evidenced by the Paranoid Face made by the Spanish artist in 1935.