Every era has artists ahead of their time, but few examples are as notable as that of the Italian Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), an avant-garde artist of the 16th century, a precursor of surrealism at the court of the kings of Hungary and Bohemia, the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. Surely Arcimboldo, son of a modest artisan, would like another, less pompous title for himself.
The painter of crudités. That is what some of his portraits seem like, such as that of Emperor Rudolf II, his lord and protector at the court of Prague, whom he represented as an accumulation of fruits and vegetables, with eyelids in the shape of a pea pod and a pumpkin on his forehead. . It is one of the famous composite heads of him. Very famous now, of course, because his works fell into oblivion for centuries.
Arcimboldo, who began helping his father paint the stained glass windows of the Milan Cathedral and ended up with sui generis portraits of nobles and emperors, knew success in life. But he seemed condemned to a footnote in the encyclopedia of art until the surrealists of the 20th century claimed his figure and considered him one of their own. Dalí and Picasso were two of his most devoted admirers. How not to be?
He was a wizard of painting, capable of drawing still lifes of fruits that, when inverted, became a portrait. Or roasts that transform into a man's face if they are turned over. Semiotician Roland Barthes, author of the pamphlet Arcimboldo (Casimiro), describes him as a master of metaphors and assures that what he “paints are not so much things, but the description that an inventor of wonderful stories would make of them.
Wonderful stories like Hansel and Gretel, by the Brothers Grimm, in which the witch's house is made of gingerbread, cakes and sweets. Arcimboldo's faces are also edible. Some of his characters have a mushroom for lips, a zucchini for a nose, a lemon for a pendant, cherries for eyes, garlic for ears, and a pear-shaped chin. The tail of a fish can be the beard...
And many more foods. Apples, grapes and chestnuts underwent a metamorphosis thanks to this alchemist of painting, capable of giving the carcass of a chicken the features of a face. He didn't paint like that because he didn't know how to do it any other way. There is also a realistic Dalí (Girl at the Window) and Picasso (Science and Charity). The painting Maximilian II, his wife and his three children, which he painted in 1563, meets the strictest canons.
But in the same way that there are birds that cannot live in cages, Arcimboldo's overflowing imagination could not be constrained. He, too, was not satisfied with painting alone. He designed headdresses and costumes (a sketch of one of his dragon costumes is preserved in the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence), as well as hors d'oeuvres (the dramatic ones, of course, not the gastronomic ones) and other entertainments for the nobility.
He benefited from some very special patrons. Rudolf II was not irritated by his portrait of fruits and vegetables, which would have led the artist to the scaffold at the court of a satrap. The Habsburgs, his patrons, “had cabinets of art and curiosities,” Barthes recalls. Something like the beings in the movie Freaks, in the original: effigies of dwarfs, giants, hairy men and women...
In this context, the painter's transmutations were celebrated and applauded. Rudolf II himself organized costume balls in which he tried to adopt the appearance of the portrait, in a twist that must have satisfied the painter: his paintings did not imitate reality, but reality ended up imitating his paintings. . Is there any greater praise? Maybe yes. “How modern!” Exclaim visitors to his collection at the Louvre.
They say that art serves to give us answers to questions that we don't even know how to ask. That happens with Arcimboldo and his hypnotic paintings. The first impression is one of strangeness, of surprise at his compositions with sea creatures, crustaceans, flowers and food. Whoever has had the joy of contemplating Winter's work will have the feeling of being in front of the most true (and desolate) representation of this season.
The painter respects the codes and conventions of portraiture. And even his profile poses (those strict canons we talked about before), but to completely invert their meaning. The viewer first sees fruits or animals piled up, but ends up deciphering the hidden code and capturing another message. That's the true face of winter: dry branches and trunks with bumps that look like veins.
If Antonio Vivaldi is the composer of The Four Seasons, Giuseppe Arcimboldo is its painter. Flowers for the face of spring. Corn cobs and peaches for summer. Seasonal products for fall, such as grapes, pears, figs and pumpkins. And the desolation of nature for winter, in a portrait that could be that of Mr. Scrooge, the protagonist of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
“With a 6 and a 4, I paint the face of your portrait,” we said as children in school. For a quarter of a century, Arcimboldo served the Habsburgs, a family eager for imaginative works that not only did not renounce their allegories, but encouraged and collected them as they collected exotic animals in their Prague gardens. The painter did not use six or four, but he did use all kinds of foods. And branches, coral fragments, deer antlers…
He turned a tray into a helmet. A slice of lemon in a rosette. A turnip in a nose. But without humorous intention. Perhaps his most disturbing work is Herod. The character's empty gaze is surprising, actually the absence of an eye, as in Winter. The sensation of raw meat forces us to get closer. And then we see them: the face is made with children. He was a genius, an avant-garde of the 16th century.
