In Giuseppe Arcimboldorsquo;s most famous paintings; grapes; fish; and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a manrsquo;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 artrsquo;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 Arcimboldorsquo;s life and work; exploring the artistrsquo;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 underpinningsmdash;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 creatorrsquo;s continuous engagement with nature painting and natural history. He reveals; in fact; that Arcimboldo painted many more nature studies than scholars have realizedmdash;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 artistrsquo;s fantastic visual jokes to their rightful place in the history of both science and art.
1998-04-09 1998-04-09File Name: B0089NVXTW
Review
