Whimsical Portrait by Arcimboldo
Today artratcafe CAFÉ begins a new series – Playing With Your Food. This series will feature historical and contemporary artists who use food in their art – both real and illusionary.
Self Portrait by Arcimboldo
This week the featured artist is the Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527 – 1593). Arcimboldo was an Italian painter famous for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of fruits, vegetables, flowers and fish. His conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of organic objects, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today.
In 1573 Arcimboldo created a series of heads based on the four seasons. All are oil on canvas and can be seen in The Louvre, Paris, France.
Spring
Arcimboldo was perhaps the first artist to use food to create an image, though his work was in paint, not made of actual food. From a distance, his portraits look like normal human portraits. However, individual objects in each portrait were actually overlapped together to make various anatomical shapes of a human. They were carefully constructed by his imagination.
Art critics debate whether Arcimboldo’s paintings were simply whimsical or the product of a deranged mind. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre, Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times.
Summer
Autumn
Winter
Vertumnus
Vertumnus – 1591 (oil on wood. exhibited at Skoklosters Slott. Balsta, Sweden) was particularly appreciated by everyone, especially by the Emperor Rudolph 11. It is a head-and-shoulder portrait of the Emperor, showing him in the form of Vertumnus, the ancient Roman god of vegetation and transformation.
The job of a renaissance court portraitist was to produce likenesses of his sovereigns to display at the palace and give to foreign dignitaries or prospective brides. It went without saying the portraits should be flattering. Yet Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted his royal patron, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, as a heap of fruits and vegetables. With pea pod eyelids and a gourd for a forehead, he looks less like a king than a crudité platter.
The Admiral
Lucky for Arcimboldo, Rudolf had a sense of humor. And he had probably grown accustomed to the artist’s visual wit. Arcimboldo served the Hapsburg family for more than 25 years, creating oddball “composite heads” made of sea creatures, flowers, dinner roasts and other materials.
Arcimboldo’s work had a surreal quality long before the advent of the Surrealist Art movement, and his ‘food portraits’ no doubt inspired many of the other artists who will be featured in this series.
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Credits and Thanks due to: Wikipedia / Google Images / http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture http://webecoist.momtastic.com/
Brilliant paintings! Thank you, John. Here are the real ones, created far more recently, at http://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/soundeagle-in-edible-art-glorious-food-and-festive-season/. Please feast your eyes and enjoy!
Happy new year to you and your family!
As mentioned, I shall feature you in my blog very soon . . . .
Thanks for your comment SoundEagle – I have checked out your collection and enjoyed…
Thanks for this post John….I was trying to remember Giuseppe Arcimboldo name recently but could not. Look forward to the other food artists.
You are welcome Robert – I see Arcimboldo as the joker of the Italian Renaissance – food for thought…
Beautiful and…yes, clever! Something that makes me smile, enjoy and admire at the same time. Looking forward the posts to come!
To bring a smile to your lips is Arcimboldo’s and my reward…
You both did succeed…
Wonderful…
Hi John, this makes me smile too, it is amazing, the things you can do with meals!
It would hang nicely in a restaurant!
You might think so Ina – do they enhance your appetite? Maybe not – see comment from Philippa at seascapesaus. These images might make the customers nervous! Glad it made you smile…
I wonder what they were smokin’ back then.
Whatever it was we can be sure it was organic…
What makes them even more interesting is the time they were painted!!!!
That’s for sure – we think of Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael but not of paintings like Arcimboldo’s. But remember that Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450 – 1516) was painting equally surreal subject matter at a similar time (see his Garden of Earthly Delights if you don’t know it)…
True, I know…
I would have guessed 20th Century art
Timeless in a way…
These are fascinating, John. While your page was loading an image came to mind, but it was my own composite I think! Strange how these images of food don’t make me hungry…. A strange disconnection between subject matter and the building blocks. Thanks for putting these out!
I never thought about the gastronomical neutrality of these works – good observation. I guess it would be connected to the human taboo of cannibalism…
That’s clever, yes! Also this is all healthy food. Would it be possible to do a contemporary one with hamburgers, heavy pickle, heavy mayo?
I’m sure such a request will be fulfilled in some form during this series…
Brilliant paintings.
And so much fun to explore…
Wow Inlove this!!! And find myself oddly hungry
Interesting Gary – if these paintings actually made you hungry you might be in a minority – see other comments on this subject. Thanks for commenting.
This is going to be a great series!
Have your bib and tucker ready Helen…