The Cook, a reversible portrait by Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, circa 1570.
Arcimboldo made a whole series of such paintings.
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A Familiar Face
The Waiter, by Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, circa 1574.
Is it a still life or a portrait?
Still Life
You Are What You Eat
Invertible Head as Basket of Fruit, c. 1590, by the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
He also personified the elements and the seasons.
Essential Characters
Three years after personifying the four seasons, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) did the same for the four elements.
“There is no unemployed force in Nature,” wrote Emerson. “All decomposition is recomposition.”
You Are What You Eat
This 1590 painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo is both a still life and a portrait — when it’s inverted, the bowl of vegetables becomes the greengrocer who sold it.
A Risky Compliment
In Vertumnus, Giuseppe Arcimboldo portrayed his patron Rudolf II as the Roman god of growth and change. Fortunately, Rudolf appreciated the metaphor and awarded Arcimboldo one of his highest orders.
See also Renaissance Surrealism and The Librarian.
“The Librarian”
Giuseppe Arcimboldo‘s caricature of Rudolf II’s historiographer and librarian, Wolfgang Lazio (1514-1565) — a collector of coins and a lover of books.
Renaissance Surrealism
There’s no mistaking a portrait by Giuseppe Arcimboldo — the Milanese painter represented his subjects as masses of flowers, vegetables, fruits, and fish. These personifications of the four seasons were composed between 1563 and 1573.
