Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hevelius [Johannes Havelke] Biography

Hevelius [Johannes Havelke] (Danzig, 1611- id. , 1687) German astronomer.He drew up a first lunar map, published under the name Selenography (1647), in which he assigned names to the various features of the lunar surface and called the dark areas the sea.He determined the period of rotation of the Sun, observed its spots and discovered the faculae.In 1657 he began a catalog in which he determined the positions of 1,500 stars and that he could not finish because of a fire that destroyed his observatory (1679).

Gilbert Bécaud Biography

Gilbert Bécaud (François Silly, called Gilbert Bécaud, Toulon, 1927) French singer and composer.He was a pianist for E.Piaf and, from 1963, created a new type of melodic song.He has also composed a cantata, an opera and music for the cinema.

Isidore Philipp Biography

Isidore Philipp (Budapest, 1863-Paris, 1958) French pianist and composer of Hungarian origin.Installed in France from a young age, in 1890 he founded, with Berthelier and Loeb, a chamber music association.He was a remarkable pianist and an esteemed teacher.He lived in the US since 1941.He wrote educational works for his instrument.

José Agustín Pérez del Pulgar Biography

José Agustín Pérez del Pulgar (Madrid, 1875-1939) Physicist and Spanish Jesuit.He was professor of physics in 1897 at the Chamartín de la Rosa school in Madrid, where he founded a meteorological observatory whose bulletin he directed between 1900 and 1904.He obtained a degree in physics in 1905 and moved to Belgium, Holland and Germany, where he carried out various theology courses. José Agustín Pérez del Pulgar A student of the eminent mathematicians David Hilbert and Felix Klein at the universities of Liège and Göttingen, his interest in mathematics led him to study geometry projective, particularly in aspects related to electrostatic theory, as reflected in works such as The theory of potential and the curvature of space (1907) or Stokes's theorem and the fundamental laws of electromagnetism (1913). He was the founder of the Catholic Institute of Arts and Industries of Madrid and of the School of mechanical-electric assemblers.In an article, published in 1915, entit...

Francisco Sá Carneiro Biography

Francisco Sá Carneiro (Francisco Lumbrales Sá Carneiro; Oporto, 1934-Lisbon, 1980) Portuguese politician and lawyer.Throughout his career, his membership in the National Salvation Board stands out in 1974, being a minister without portfolio in the Palma Carlos cabinet.Once the so-called Carnation Revolution ended, as secretary of the Popular Democratic Party, he got a seat that he renewed in 1976.From then on he was placed in the ranks of the Portuguese Social Democratic Party, a formation with which he triumphed in the December elections.1979, becoming Prime Minister in 1980. Sá Carneiro studied law at the University of Lisbon, joining the ranks of the Catholic Action Youth movement.It was not until 1969 that he began his career as a politician, practicing as a lawyer, meanwhile, in Porto.In the year indicated, elections were called for Marcelo Caetano, after Oliveira Salazar retired.Carneiro was unable to be elected, but Caetano counted on him, among others, to join the National...

Isaac Jesus Barrera Quiroz Biography

Isaac Jesús Barrera Quiroz (Otavalo, 1884-Quito, 1970) Ecuadorian writer.He stood out for the publication of different biographies focused on characters from the colonial era such as the Ecuadorian writer, politician and diplomat Vicente Rocafuerte (1783-1847) and the liberator Simón Bolívar (1783-1830).He also stood out for his studies in the history of literature: Studies of Castilian Literature and History of Ecuadorian Literature .He directed the Ecuadorian Academy of History and was a corresponding member of the Academy of Language.

Carolingian dynasty Biography

Carolingian Dynasty Family reigning between the middle of the 8th century and the beginning of the 10th century in practically all of Western Europe (except for the Iberian Peninsula, southern Italy and the British Isles).It gets its name from the two most prominent figures of the dynasty, Carlos Martel and Charlemagne.It was originally a Germanic noble family settled in Austrasia, in the area between the Meuse and the Rhine rivers; a first attempt to seize the Throne from the Merovingians in the mid-seventh century ended in failure, without the reprisals affecting the family patrimony.From now on, the family preferred to grow up under the Merovingian monarchy, whose decomposition left effective power in the hands of the mayordomos of the palaces of the different territories. Pepin II of Herstal (679-714) , steward of Austrasia, managed to seize the rule of the Frankish kingdom by defeating the steward of Neustria and Burgundy.His bastard son Carlos Martel (714-41) re-establis...

Josep de Togores Biography

Josep de Togores (Josep de Togores i Llach; Cerdanyola, 1893-Barcelona, ​​1970) Spanish painter.After a first realistic stage, with a predominance of the nude, he drifted towards a style with a religious theme.He also worked on mural painting and book illustration. Born into a wealthy family and with intellectual and artistic concerns, he soon revealed a great sensitivity for drawing.At thirteen years of age, he became deaf due to meningitis.In those years he was a drawing student of Joan Llaverias, who advised the father to let his son's artistic potential develop to the maximum.In 1906, father and son traveled to Paris and then to Belgium in the hope of curing the boy's deafness. A year later, stimulated by the impression made on him by the Monet painting he saw at the International Exhibition in Barcelona, ​​Josep de Togores began to paint his first oil paintings.After a period of apprenticeship with Félix Mestres in Barcelona, ​​he painted some worthy paintings, the ...

Heinrich maier Biography

Heinrich Maier (Heidenheim, 1867-Berlin, 1933) German philosopher.He produced a "critical realism", along the lines of H.Driesch.He is the author, among other works, of Aristotle's syllogistics (1896-1900) and of The philosophy of reality (1926-1935).