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From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Giuseppe Arcimboldo (also spelled Arcimboldi; 1527 - July 11 1593) was a 16th century Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books -- that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject.
Biography
In 1562 he became the court portraitist to Maximilian II at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague, both of whom seem to have much liked Arcimboldo's extraordinary portraits.
He was also the court decorator, costume designer, and general art expert. His style of early pre-surrealist portraiture was much copied by his contemporaries, making it difficult at times to differentiate his work from that of imitators. Ironically, given the fame of the imaginary portraits, Arcimboldo's conventional work has been all but forgotten.
He died in Milan.
Many of his works were stolen from Rudolf II's collections by the Sweden Raids on Prague in 1648 during the Thirty Years' War by orders of Christina of Sweden.
His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris, as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and at the Candie Museum, Guernsey, also contain pieces of his work.
The Arcimboldo Legacy
The bizarre works of Arcimboldo, especially his multiple images, were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí. The “The Arcimboldo Effect” curated by Pontus Hultén in 1987 included numerous trompe-l'oeil paintings. Arcimboldo's influence can also be seen in the work of Shigeo Fukuda, István Orosz, Octavio Ocampo, and Sandro del Prete, as well as the films of Jan Švankmajer. His painting, Water, was used as the cover of the album Masque by the progressive rock band Kansas.
