Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo’s predominantly brown picture is an ingenious metaphor

concerning the earth and its wealth of mammals, reflecting a system of organizing and classifying the world that has ancient roots.  Arcimboldo renders a very detailed human head without incorporating a single element of the human anatomy, creating a witty composite portrait through inter-woven animal forms. In the 16th century Arcimboldo’s composite portraits were recognized as very sophisticated games but they are also much more than that, they are allegorical investigations into some of the world’s fundamental organizing principle.

Arcimboldo was court artist for the Hapsburgs, who established a dynamic milieu  cross-fertilized by artists, scientists, mathematicians, and other intellectuals. The Hapsburgs founded botanical gardens, zoological parks  and museums of extraordinary man-made and natural objects and so the composite portraits are the product of this rich environment.

In other experiments the artist sought to articulate correspondences between colour and musical notation, using tonal scale as analogies for universal harmony. The proportions were said to relate to this harmonic principles developed by the 6th Century Greek mathematician Pythagoras.

 Arcimboldo’s paintings and colour-music experiments are part of the mindset that seeks equivalences to formulate a theory of being in which everything was linked  and correspondences exist to be classified and mined for insight. The visual jokes in his Earth-hued representations of Earth’s abundance are more than optical tricks based on  physical observations. They are metaphysical investigations.

CHROMAPHILIA the story of color in art by Stella Paul p. 19

Giuseppe Arcimboldo works