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

Enrico Caruso Biography

Enrico Caruso (Naples, 1873-id., 1921) Italian tenor considered the best of his time and one of the greatest in history.Enrico Caruso made his debut in his hometown in 1894, although it was in Milan that he achieved his first great success in 1898 with the interpretation of the opera Fedora , by Umberto Giordano. Enrico Caruso His tours took him around the world, with performances in Saint Petersburg, Rome, Lisbon and Monte Carlo, where he excelled in his magnificent interpretation of La bohème by Giacomo Puccini, accompanied by Australian soprano Nellie Melba.With his fame firmly established, he made his debut in 1902 at London's Covent Garden with Rigoletto by Verdi, an opera that he also performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1903, with extraordinary success.The beauty and strength of her voice won over the Metropolitan audience. His cheerful and outgoing character, his dramatic talent on stage and an almost perfect tenor voice, with a superb powe...

Francisco Asenjo Barbieri Biography

Francisco Asenjo Barbieri (Madrid, 1823-1894) Spanish composer and musicologist.The significance of Francisco Asenjo Barbieri in Spanish music is threefold: he was an excellent composer, a capable conductor, who is responsible for the introduction in Spain of many symphonic works from the European continent, and a tireless musicologist, responsible for the recovery and edition of the ancient heritage of his homeland. Francisco Asenjo Barbieri Drawn to opera since his earliest childhood (when he attended the Italian opera performances that were offered at the Teatro de la Cruz, in the that his grandfather worked), Barbieri studied clarinet, singing and composition at the Madrid Conservatory, where he had Ramón Carnicer as his teacher.At the end of his studies he carried out various tasks, from copyist to choirmaster, while trying to publicize his first compositions, including the Italian opera Il buontempone (1847). The difficulties to release it made him focus his interest o...

Josep Tarradellas Biography

Josep Tarradellas (Josep Tarradellas i Joan; Cervelló, Barcelona, 1899-Barcelona, 1988) Catalan nationalist politician.His Catalanist and leftist convictions led him to participate in the republican opposition against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), as a member of various groups that, in 1931, were integrated into the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya coalition. Josep Tarradellas Tarradellas was elected secretary general of that group, which was to dominate Catalan political life during the Second Republic (1931-1936).He was a member of the Spanish Parliament and, after the approval of the first Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia (1932), also a member of the Catalan Parliament, Minister of the Interior and Health and a close collaborator of the first president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Francesc Macià.

Ismael Serrano Biography

Ismael Serrano (Madrid, 1974) Spanish singer-songwriter.Endowed with a deep and personal voice, his career began to emerge with the boom of new singer-songwriters of the 1990s and he soon became one of the most openly committed voices of his generation. Ismael Serrano Born in the popular Vallecas neighborhood, the young Ismael grew up among the records of his father, the journalist and writer Rodolfo Serrano, and his older brother.His father even taught him the first chords on a guitar.He began to study music theory and piano and, shortly after, he dared to compose his first songs. In 1992 he began his Physics career at the Complutense University of Madrid and towards the year 1994 he entered the circuit of bars and cafes in Madrid, to play and sing in the emblematic places of the capital that They welcomed musical styles related to his: La Taberna Encantada, Libertad 8 or Galileo Galilei.Following the line of interpreters such as Silvio Rodríguez, Luis Eduardo Aute, Joan Ma...

John osborne Biography

John Osborne (London, 1929-Shropshire, UK, 1994) British playwright.The first book of his autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1989), describes his childhood in the suburbs, his brief experience as a journalist and his years as a provincial actor, during which he began to write his first plays, the first being staged in 1950. He made his name with Looking back with anger (1956), which was followed by Epitaph for George Dillon (1957), written in collaboration with Anthony Creighton. The Host (1957) starred Laurence Olivier in the role of Archie Rice, a withered survivor of the great Music Hall era. Looking back with anger was the founder of a new theatrical trend that critics called the school of angry young men ( angry young man ) for the vitality, satire and realism of his proposal, which expressed a reaction against the old values and the social order established in the postwar period.Osborne was precisely one of the most important and well-known playwrights o...

Jorge L. Tamayo Biography

Jorge L.Tamayo (Oaxaca, 1912-Playa Vicente, Veracruz, 1978) Mexican engineer and geographer.He was a professor of economic geography, a technical consultant on transportation for the UN attached to ECLAC, and president of the Mexican Society of Natural History (1974-1978).His works include The use of water and soil in Mexico (1958), Atlas of the water of the Mexican Republic (1976) and The fundamental problem of the Mexican agriculture (1964), for which he won the national economics prize in 1962 and 1964.Despite not being one of his fields of study, Jorge L.Tamayo also carried out an enormous task as a historian by collecting more than nine thousand writings and documents related to the Mexican president Benito Juárez, a task in which he invested ten years and whose results would be published in fifteen volumes.

Duke of Rivas Biography

Duque de Rivas (Ángel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas; Córdoba, 1791-Madrid, 1865) Spanish poet and playwright whose work is considered emblematic of Hispanic romanticism.With liberal ideas, he fought against the French in the war of independence and later against the absolutism of Fernando VII, for which he had to go into exile in Malta.These experiences inspired some of his poems, such as With eleven mortal wounds, in the manner of ancient pastoral romances.Under the influence of his friend Manuel José Quintana and of the then dominant aesthetics, his first verses (collected in Poesías , 1813) and plays, such as Ataúlfo (1814) and Lanuza (1822), were framed within the neoclassical order.However, during his Maltese exile he met the work of William Shakespeare, Walter Scott and Lord Byron and joined the romantic trend with the poems The Exile and The Outlaw's Dream (1824), and The Malta Lighthouse (1828). Ángel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas He lived in France from 1830 ...

Ferdinand lassalle Biography

Ferdinand Lassalle (Breslau, present-day Poland, 1825-Geneva, Switzerland, 1864) German politician and thinker.Born into a family of Jewish merchants, he studied in Breslau and Berlin.After a brief stay in Paris, which allowed him to learn about the French socialist movement, in 1845 he joined the League of the Just.During his participation in the German revolution of 1848, for which he was imprisoned, he befriended Karl Marx. Ferdinand Lassalle That same year, he became one of the Maximum exponents of German socialism, he founded the General Association of German Workers, the first socialist movement of any significance in the country.He enjoyed high regard among the workers, but his ideology, although influenced by Marx, developed positions opposed to Marxism on revolutionary strategy and did not make great theoretical contributions to socialist thought. Lassalle, who did not understand the principles of historical materialism, defended German unification and Otto von Bismar...

Edward Kennedy Biography

Edward Kennedy (Edward Moore Kennedy, also known as Ted Kennedy; Boston, 1932-Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, 2009) American politician member of the Kennedy clan, one of the most influential families in the history of the Democratic Party.Brother of Robert Francis Kennedy and President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, he began his political career as a Democratic senator from Massachusetts in 1964, a position to which he would be reelected in 1970, 1982, 1992 and 1996. Edward Kennedy From 1969 to 1971 he was deputy leader of the Senate Democratic majority.His presidential aspirations were frustrated when he was convicted of reckless manslaughter in a 1969 car accident.While he was driving while intoxicated, his vehicle fell into a lake and his companion, Mary Jo Kopechne, was killed.Despite this, he would later present his candidacy for the nomination for the presidential elections of 1980 and 1988, but was defeated. Edward Kennedy had married in 1958 with Virginia Joan Bennet, with who...

Francisco Morales Bermúdez Biography

Francisco Morales Bermúdez (Lima, 1921) Peruvian military and politician and military, president of the republic between 1975 and 1980.He studied with the Jesuits at the La Inmaculada school and later at the Escuela Military of Chorrillos, from which he graduated in 1943 with the rank of second lieutenant in engineering, also awarded the Sword of honor for his excellence in studies.It was also the first of his promotion in the engineering student officer courses and in those that qualified the degrees of lieutenant and captain, respectively, in the engineering weapon. Francisco Morales Bermúdez Later he graduated as an officer of the General Staff at the Higher School of War of Peru, where he obtained the Badge of honor, again for being the first in the ratings.During 1957 and 1958 he studied at the Higher School of War of the Argentine Army.Back in Peru, he was a professor at the Chorrillos Military School, at the Engineering Application School and at the Superior War School.La...

History Today Online

Search This Blog