Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting

by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Thomas Kaufmann

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.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

In surreal portraits of noted Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, other inanimate objects compose the features of the subjects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giusepp...

Reviews

[Merahnaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Akhirnya bisa membaca Arcimboldo adalah kemewahan tersendiri.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Brilliant Visit with Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527 1593) is an artist not known for masterpiece of the past, yet there are probably very few people who have not encountered his art, so popular has been his imagery through the ages. This current book, complete with copious color plates of excellent reproduction of his art, is well written by art historian Thomas daCosta Kaufmann, probably the preeminent authority on this fascinating artist. In many ways Kaufmann makes this art book read like a novel, filled with facts but also peppered with humor about the artist and about the paintings he created. But he also never loses sight of the fact that Arcimboldo was a brilliant still life artist and has significant importance in the history of western art. The lush pages flow with visual imagery, beautiful prose, poetry and a hefty sampling of philosophy about he period in time when Arcimboldo created his 'visual jokes'.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo began his career in Lombardy painting in the style of Leonardo (like most other painters of his day). But he moved on in the art world (and the political world of painting portraits) to develop his own style. He created many portraits out of combinations of fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, birds, eggs, paper, kitchen items - anything that caught the painter's eye and imagination. The results are very amusing yet very representational 'portraits' that for all the world look like people. There are ample reproductions to learn the symbols of many of the components of these portraits, but in addition to the genius of the painter to create such imaginative caricatures is the sheer magical ability of Arcimboldo to paint still life better than most painters before or since.

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has provided us with a literate and an entertaining look at an artist who has always been a sideline curiosity. Read his book and realize what a genius was Giuseppe Arcimboldo!

Grady Harp