Works by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo built heads out of fruit, flowers, fish, books and tree roots, overlapping the objects to form the parts of a face, so that from a distance each looks like an ordinary portrait.

The son of a Milanese artist, he began beside his father on cathedral stained glass and frescoes. From 1562 he painted portraits for three Habsburg emperors in Vienna and Prague, Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II, and designed costumes and decorations for their court. Maximilian II, His Wife and Three Children, a court portrait given to him, lines the family up stiffly, a small dog at the feet of the child in red.

His Seasons and Elements, repeated with small changes, are heads in profile paired to face each other, Summer toward Fire, Winter toward Water. In Summer of 1563 a peach makes the cheek and a cucumber the nose, and letters of his name and the year are woven into the straw coat. Fire answers with burning sticks for hair and, at the chest, a cannon, a gun and the Golden Fleece chain. A poem by J. Fonteo reads both cycles as praise of the emperor.

Back in Milan from 1587, he painted Rudolf II as Vertumnus: the emperor with a pear for a nose, cherries for lips and a chestnut husk for a chin. The Librarian, known today from several copies, is stacked from books, with an open volume for hair and a beard of animal tails, a library's dusters. It has been read as a jab at the rich who bought books to own rather than to read. A few drawings below include a self-portrait.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Palace of Versailles, Kunsthistorisches Museum, National Gallery Prague, Skokloster Castle.