Wizard of Transmutation
February 2008
Mystery still shrouds the reason why Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–93) was summoned to work in Vienna by the Emperor Emperor Ferdinand I in 1562. The son of an obscure Milanese artist active in the Cathedral, Arcimboldo may have been noticed by Hapsburg agents, roaming through Europe as talent scouts, for his skill in drawing animals and designing ephemeral festive decorations. The latter were perfectly married to the needs of a court that delighted in celebrations, while the study of nature was well matched to the Northern European taste for the Wunderkammer, a mysterious, private space for the display of curiosities, rare and strange objects, small-format artworks, precious stones, exotic discoveries and the most varied and bizarre expressions of the mineral, animal and vegetable worlds.In the cultured, liberal atmosphere that surrounded the next emperor, Maximilian II, who acceded to the throne in 1564, Arcimboldo found a receptive outlet for his multifaceted, imaginative genius, borrowing from both the Northern figurative tradition (one thinks of the monstrous creations of Hieronymus Bosch) and the exploration of grotesque facial expressions that had been developed in his native Milan by Leonardo da Vinci.
Mannerism based its aesthetic principles on ideas, but Arcimboldo combined this intellectual approach with the faithful observation of natural phenomena. It was an alchemy of opposites, and had he lived later Arcimboldo would no doubt have been the inventor of still life as an independent genre, creating his own basket of fruit decades before Caravaggio’s “Cestina” (1594–98)—that is, if he hadn’t decided to upend the basket and transform it into a grotesque head in which apples simulate puffy cheeks, grapes replace sideburns and a pear becomes a bulbous nose.
In 1563 Arcimboldo composed his first series of “Seasons”: composite heads with allegorical subtexts, followed in 1566 by a series of “Elements” (only “Water” and “Fire” have remained in Vienna; “Earth” and “Air” are in two private collections. These are figures in profile with facial features represented by fruit, flowers, logs, animals and objects, each alluding to the subject in question, combined and arranged so as to create an ensemble at once logical and harmonious on the one hand and disquieting and grotesque on the other. “Elements,” presented to Maximilian II on New Year’s Day 1569, was a brilliant success. The allegorical meaning of the paintings, for which the humanist Giovanni Battista Fonteo composed verses, which were published in a separate booklet, underlined the analogy between the solidity and endurance of imperial power and the cycles of nature, creating a correspondence between seasons and dynasties, nature and history.
A fashion was born, and Vienna became the center of this new kind of painting, an art that was both a cultivated game and pleasing propaganda, presented in such a way that it could be comprehended immediately. Maximilian even commissioned a second set of “Seasons” in 1573 (now in the Louvre) as a gift for Elector Augustus of Saxony, in order to reconcile the Catholic Hapsburgs and a Lutheran ruler. In 16th-century Europe such an artistic gesture could add great weight to a strategic political alliance.
Arcimboldo was a wizard, a creator of fantastic transmutations. He thoroughly inspected the vegetable and animal worlds and then rearranged them, according to unpredictable hierarchies and montages, into human faces—and his composing game could expand or contract, as in the magnificent, recently rediscovered “The Four Seasons in One Head.” The striking image of “Fire” (1566), is in reality an apologia for the Emperor’s military triumphs, alluding to the war against the Turks begun that year; but it is above all an anti-pacifist and almost disturbingly modern manifesto. Hair is painted as burning firebrands, a wrinkled brow as a fuse, but then cannons and gun barrels are interspersed with arrogant, immodestly placed Hapsburg emblems such as the collar of the Golden Fleece and the steel for striking fire, culminating with the double-headed eagle of the imperial house.
Arcimboldo’s success at court also derived from his invention of coded portraits, and these became irreverent, humorous calling cards. Here we may mention the bust-length portrayal of Wolfgang Lazius, Maximilian II’s court librarian (c. 1562). Books and nothing but books: one with pages wide open to indicate a shock of hair, one for his nose, another two with red bindings for his lips, a large volume for his shoulder and upper arm, and another for his forearm, with fingers created out of bookmarks. Precision lenses for examining texts stand in for eyes, and the flowing beard is made of martens’ tails, used for dusting off the emperor’s precious books.
In the portrait of the court jurist Johann Ulrich Zasius (1566), the sneering expression is achieved through an assemblage of plucked poultry, while the hale and hearty features of the rubicund “Cook” (c. 1570) are composed of piglets, roasted to perfection and set under a pewter soup bowl hat, worn at a rakish angle and with a lemon slice for a brooch and a serving platter for a collar.
The same kind of jocular painting, with the image only becoming clear when turned upside down, is also found in the “Vegetable Gardener” (c. 1590), whose ample pot stuffed with onions, turnips and other vegetables is magically transformed into cheeks, eyes, nose and beard. For Arcimboldo, mankind is to be celebrated as an integral part of nature. But at the same time, human faces become a representation of vanitas (the vanity of all things) since objects of nature will inevitably decompose; and it is this intellectual contradiction that provides the key to interpreting the Mannerist poetics of Arcimboldo.
The creative originality and wit of the Milanese artist earned him a particularly close relationship with the Emperor Rudolf II, who succeeded his father Maximilian II in 1576 and took Arcimboldo with him when he moved the court to Prague in 1583. Among the artist’s prerogatives was the freedom to enter and leave the sovereign’s rooms without being announced, as if he were a member of the imperial family.
Rudolf commissioned a celebratory portrait in which he appears as Vertumnus, the ancient Roman god of prosperity. The deification of an emperor is a highly effective mode of propaganda, but his mutation into a flourishing bunch of vegetables also reflects the success enjoyed by the 16th-century publication of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the great first-century A.D. poetic narrative of the pagan myths about transformation (gods into human, humans into animals, plants or even stars). In this instance, unlike the portrait of the jurist, the effect is one of magnificence and splendor, and the sovereign’s mask serves to construct an image of glory—imperial power is even identified with the cosmic regeneration of nature. Yet it is still a mask, since psychological reality is presented through a filter, by way of metaphor.
Although Arcimboldo’s paintings were multiplied in engravings, his art almost fell in oblivion after his death, and his vegetable portraits were remembered only as a compositional joke. But it is hardly accidental that his personality and poetic message were rediscovered by the art and philosophy of the century of Freud and Einstein. Arcimboldo became a subject for Roland Barthes, who compared his manner of painting with specific modes of literary rhetoric and considered his art as a transmutation “of play into grand rhetoric, of rhetoric into magic, of magic into wisdom.” But even before that, Picasso’s Cubist “Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler” (1910) drew conscious inspiration from Arcimboldo’s “Portrait of a Librarian,” of which the Spanish artist owned a reproduction.
The German Dadaists saw the decomposition of the face from a negative and profoundly uneasy point of view, with sources in the massacres of the Great War and the consequent social crisis. George Grosz’s collage “Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor” (1919) is perhaps the most disturbing manifesto of this genre. By piecing together the portrait from renderings of mechanical objects such a screw, a bolt, and a knife, the artist shows the sitter as a defaced victim of his inventions.
A different twist was expressed 15 years later in the celebrated “Le Viol” (“The Rape”) (1934) by Magritte, in which a woman’s face is constructed from her sexual attributes, and immediately thereafter, in Salvador Dalí’s “Face of Mae West” (1935), in which physiognomy is transformed into a room furnished like a stage set.
As for Arcimboldo, three and a half centuries later, his faces are not only mirrors of the soul, but witty presentations of social conditions, professions, functions—and of the vanity of it all.
Roberta Bartoli is the author of numerous books and exhibition catalogues on Italian Renaissance painting.