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

Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
English | (May 1, 2010) | ISBN: 0226426866 | 336 pages | PDF | 9 MB

In Giuseppe ArcimboldoΓÇÖs most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a manΓÇÖs 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 artΓÇÖs 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 ArcimboldoΓÇÖs life and work, exploring the artistΓÇÖs 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 underpinningsΓÇöimages 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 creatorΓÇÖs continuous engagement with nature painting and natural history. He reveals, in fact, that Arcimboldo painted many more nature studies than scholars have realizedΓÇöa finding that significantly deepens current interpretations of the composite heads.