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Man of Letters (self-portrait), Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1587

Man of Letters (self-portrait), Giuseppe Arcimboldo, c. 1587

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, like Hieronymus Bosch, was several centuries ahead of his time. He was born into a distinguished Milanese family of archbishops, jurists and artists in 1527, a time when the Italian Renaissance was in full flower. Little is known of his early life, but his connections with local nobility helped him to secure work designing frescoes and windows for Milan’s famous Duomo.

Early Influences

While serving his apprenticeship in Italy, Arcimboldo was exposed to a number of then-fashionable optical illusions and allegorical artworks, one of which was a majolica bowl containing a startling composite self-portrait by Francesco Urbini. Urbini’s piece includes a garland with the words “Ogni uomo me guarda comme fosse una testa di cazzi” (“Every man looks at me as if I were a head of dicks”), and — true to these words — the portrait is a composite of fifty penises, including an “ear-dick” featuring a Prince Albert piercing.

In the Service of Emperors

In 1562 Arcimboldo crossed the Alps to Vienna in order to accept the role of court portraitist and festival organiser for Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I (r. 1558-1564), who died almost immediately after his arrival. Fortunately, emperor Maximilian II (r. 1564-1576) and his young son, Rudolf II (r. 1576-1612), decided to honor Arcimboldo’s contract.

Rudolph became quite enamoured of Arcimboldo, who crafted grand costume pageants in his honor, such as a spectacle in which the six-year-old Rudolph played the part of a knighted dwarf in full plate armor while adults dressed as giants and monsters.

Arcimboldo was given wide latitude in his position as court portraitist. He painted some conventional likenesses during his career, but his enduring fame is based on a series of allegorical portraits composed of carefully chosen objects, particularly his Four Elements and Four Seasons, which were formally presented to Emperor Maximilian II on New Year’s Day, 1569.

When Maximilan’s court relocated to Prague in 1570, they sent Arcimboldo ahead to organize an elaborate inaugural pageant to coincide with Maximilian’s arrival. Six years later, Rudolph ascended the Habsburg throne.

A Bohemian Parnassus

Rudolf II was described by his contemporaries as “the greatest art patron in the world,” and Prague became, under Rudolf’s guidance, one of the leading centers for the arts and sciences on the European continent. The Rudolfine taste for outstanding decoration and fantastic imagery were legendary, and his ambition and insight as a patron and collector changed the way art would be viewed by future generations. He brought into his service some of the most important European artists, architects, scientists¹, philosophers and humanists, turning Prague into what has been referred to as “a Parnassus of the arts.”

Rudolfine Prague was a scene of communication, collaboration and commentary between artists, scholars and scientists. This interdisciplinary cross-pollination had a strong influence on Arcimboldo’s painting, helping him to combine classical allusion and allegory with contemporary painting techniques. In addition to painting, he devised hydraulic machines, created a new method of musical notation using colors² and designed a series of wunderkammers, which efforts collectively earned him the sobriquet “Leonardo of Habsbourg.”

In 1587, Arcimboldo left the court in Prague to return to his family home in Milan with a purse of 1,500 guldens for his service to the Habsburg court. It was there that he produced his most famous work, Vertumnus, a portrait of Rudolf II reimagined as the Roman god of metamorphoses in nature and life, with Rudolf’s face composed of fruit and flowers, symbolising the perfect balance between nature and harmony that his reign represented.

Vertumnus reached Rudolph during the winter of 1591. On May Day, 1592, Rudolf II granted his childhood friend the title of Count Palatine, which guaranteed that he and his heirs would enjoy continued income and status for generations. Arcimboldo died shortly thereafter on July 11th, 1593, at his home in Milan.

Rudolf II died in Prague on January 22nd, 1612. Emperor Matthias did not continue Rudolf’s policy of patronage. Rudolfine Prague died with Rudolf, the court’s entourage scattered to other continental European cultural centers, particularly Florence, Madrid, Paris and Vienna.

In 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the Swedish Army sacked Prague. After the Imperial collections and picture gallery were pillaged, Arcimboldo’s paintings were taken to Sweden, where many of them, including Il Cuoco, Il Giurista, Il Bibliotecario and Vertumnus itself, remain³. The rest of Arcimboldo’s surviving work is distributed throughout Europe, some in museums, some in private collections⁴.

After Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo’s influence on his contemporaries was surprisingly minimal. Several anonymous artists produced paintings highly derivative of his style in the decades following his death, but none of them made any effort to move forward his ideas and themes, with the exception of a quartet of seasonal portraits painted in the 17th Century by Flemish landscape pioneer Joos de Momper and a few satirical composite portraits used in political posters and cartoons.

The late-18th Century movement from Realism to Impressionism borrowed little from Arcimboldo’s work, creating large-scale forms out of non-representational building blocks to mimic perception rather than layering symbolism upon symbolism.

It wasn’t until the 20th Century that Arcimboldo was rediscovered by the Modernists and Surrealists. We see echoes of Arcimboldo in the work of Pablo Picasso, George Grosz, Rene Magritte and, especially, Salvador Dalí⁵.

The 2007 release of Jape’s video for their song Floating has now — over 400 years after his death — brought Arcimboldo’s work into the 21st century. And, of course, it’s on YouTube.

This article was inspired by the beautiful — and now much mourned — Giornale Nuovo, to which it is still dedicated.