Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Self-portrait, now in National Gallery Prague
Born	5 April 1526 Milan, Duchy of Milan, Holy Roman Empire
Died	11 July 1593(1593-07-11) (aged 67) Milan, Duchy of Milan, Habsburg Spain
Known for	Painting
Notable work	The Librarian, 1566 Vertumnus, 1590–1591 Flora, c. 1591

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, also spelled Arcimboldi (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe artʃimˈbɔldo];^[1] 5 April 1527 – 11 July 1593), was an Italian Renaissance painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.^[2]

These works form a distinct category from his other productions. He was a conventional court painter of portraits for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague; also producing religious subjects and, among other things, a series of coloured drawings of exotic animals in the imperial menagerie. He specialized in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms.^[3]

The still life portraits were clearly partly intended as curiosities to amuse the court, but critics have speculated as to how seriously they engaged with Renaissance Neo-Platonism or other intellectual currents of the day.