Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Hope argues that since Lomazzo mentions Arcimboldo's Elements in his Trattato of 1584 but fails to note the existence of his Seasons, he only had knowledge of the former series, the Elements, before Arcimboldo left italy."--Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (2009) by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann "... the paradox of the Silenus and the notion of serio-ludere to which it is related provided a classical pedigree for paradoxes when they became an ... This is indicated by the inclusion of the barbaro-Pico exchange in a compendium of specifically Socratic serious jokes compiled by ... After discussing how Socrates and other ancient figures were Sileni, Erasmus took the metaphor in a christian direction by ..."--Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (2009) by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann "idem iocoso nomine Gryllym deridiculi habitus pinxit, unde id genus pictura grylli vocantur." (cited in Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting; English: "he painted a figure in a ridiculous costume, known jocosely as the Gryllus; and hence it is that pictures of this class are generally known as "Grylli."--Pliny the Elder
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Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (2009) is a book by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann.
Blurb:
In Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man’s chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together on canvas and panel to assemble the strange heads and faces that constitute one of Renaissance art’s most striking oeuvres. The first major study in a generation of the artist behind these remarkable paintings, Arcimboldo tells the singular story of their creation. Drawing on his thirty-five-year engagement with the artist, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann begins with an overview of Arcimboldo’s life and work, exploring the artist’s early years in sixteenth-century Lombardy, his grounding in Leonardesque traditions, and his tenure as a Habsburg court portraitist in Vienna and Prague. Arcimboldo then trains its focus on the celebrated composite heads, approaching them as visual jokes with serious underpinnings—images that poetically display pictorial wit while conveying an allegorical message. In addition to probing the humanistic, literary, and philosophical dimensions of these pieces, Kaufmann explains that they embody their creator’s continuous engagement with nature painting and natural history. He reveals, in fact, that Arcimboldo painted many more nature studies than scholars have realized—a finding that significantly deepens current interpretations of the composite heads. Demonstrating the previously overlooked importance of these works to natural history and still-life painting, Arcimboldo finally restores the artist’s fantastic visual jokes to their rightful place in the history of both science and art.
