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Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, also spelled Arcimboldi (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe artʃimˈbɔldo]; 5 April 1527 – 11 July 1593), was an Italian Mannerist painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.
These works form a category distinct 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. He specialized in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms.[full citation needed]
The still life portraits were clearly partly intended as curiosities to amuse the court, but critics have speculated as to how seriously they engaged with Renaissance Neo-Platonism or other intellectual currents of the day.
Giuseppe's father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist of 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. Augustus, Elector of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his The Four Seasons which incorporates his own monarchic symbols.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
At a distance, his portraits look like normal human portraits. However, individual objects in each portrait actually overlap together to make various human anatomical shapes. They were carefully constructed by his imagination. The assembled objects in each portrait were not random: each was related by characterization. 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. The animal tails, which became the beard of the portrait, were used as dusters. By using everyday objects, the portraits were decoration and still-life paintings at the same time. His works showed not only nature and human beings, but also how closely they were related.
After a 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.[citation needed] In fact, Arcimboldo criticized rich people's misbehavior and showed others what happened at that time through his art. In The Librarian, although the painting might have appeared ridiculous, it also contained a criticism of wealthy people who collected books only to own them, rather than to read them.
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Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, also spelled Arcimboldi (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe artʃimˈbɔldo]; 5 April 1527 – 11 July 1593), was an Italian Mannerist painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.
These works form a category distinct 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. He specialized in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms.[full citation needed]
The still life portraits were clearly partly intended as curiosities to amuse the court, but critics have speculated as to how seriously they engaged with Renaissance Neo-Platonism or other intellectual currents of the day.
Giuseppe's father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist of 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. Augustus, Elector of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his The Four Seasons which incorporates his own monarchic symbols.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
At a distance, his portraits look like normal human portraits. However, individual objects in each portrait actually overlap together to make various human anatomical shapes. They were carefully constructed by his imagination. The assembled objects in each portrait were not random: each was related by characterization. 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. The animal tails, which became the beard of the portrait, were used as dusters. By using everyday objects, the portraits were decoration and still-life paintings at the same time. His works showed not only nature and human beings, but also how closely they were related.
After a 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.[citation needed] In fact, Arcimboldo criticized rich people's misbehavior and showed others what happened at that time through his art. In The Librarian, although the painting might have appeared ridiculous, it also contained a criticism of wealthy people who collected books only to own them, rather than to read them.