Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), was an Italian Renaissance painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.

These works form a distinct category from his other productions. He was a conventional court painter of portraits for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague, also producing religious subjects and, among other things, a series of coloured drawings of exotic animals in the imperial menagerie. However, he specialised in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms.

Giuseppe's father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist from Milan, Italy. Like his father, Giuseppe Arcimboldo started his career as a designer for stained glass and frescoes at local cathedrals when he was 21 years old.

In 1562, he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, Austria and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. 

Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, plants, fruits, sea creatures and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today.

In the portrait now represented by several copies called 'The Librarian', Arcimboldo used objects that signified the book culture at that time, such as the curtain that created individual study rooms in a library and the animal tails, which are the beard in the portrait, which were used as dusters. His works showed not only nature and human beings, but also how closely they were related.

After the portrait was released to the public, some scholars, who had a close relationship with the book culture at that time, argued that the portrait ridiculed their scholarship. In fact, Arcimboldo was pointing out that wealthy people who collected books did so to own them, rather than to read them.

Arcimboldo died in 1593 in Milan, Italy where he had retired after leaving the Prague service.