Mystery still shrouds the reason why Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–93) was summoned to work in Vienna by the Emperor Emperor Ferdinand I in 1562. The son of an obscure Milanese artist active in the Cathedral, Arcimboldo may have been noticed by Hapsburg agents, roaming through Europe as talent scouts, for his skill in drawing animals and designing ephemeral festive decorations. The latter were perfectly married to the needs of a court that delighted in celebrations, while the study of nature was well matched to the Northern European taste for the Wunderkammer, a mysterious, private space for the display of curiosities, rare and strange objects, small-format artworks, precious stones, exotic discoveries and the most varied and bizarre expressions of the mineral, animal and vegetable worlds.

In the cultured, liberal atmosphere that surrounded the next emperor, Maximilian II, who acceded to the throne in 1564, Arcimboldo found a receptive outlet for his multifaceted, imaginative genius, borrowing from both the Northern figurative tradition (one thinks of the monstrous creations of Hieronymus Bosch) and the exploration of grotesque facial expressions that had been developed in his native Milan by Leonardo da Vinci.

Mannerism based its aesthetic principles on ideas, but Arcimboldo combined this intellectual approach with the faithful observation of natural phenomena. It was an alchemy of opposites, and had he lived later Arcimboldo would no doubt have been the inventor of still life as an independent genre, creating his own basket of fruit decades before Caravaggio’s “Cestina” (1594–98)—that is, if he hadn’t decided to upend the basket and transform it into a grotesque head in which apples simulate puffy cheeks, grapes replace sideburns and a pear becomes a bulbous nose.

In 1563 Arcimboldo composed his first series of “Seasons”: composite heads with allegorical subtexts, followed in 1566 by a series of “Elements” (only “Water” and “Fire” have remained in Vienna; “Earth” and “Air” are in two private collections. These are figures in profile with facial features represented by fruit, flowers, logs, animals and objects, each alluding to the subject in question, combined and arranged so as to create an ensemble at once logical and harmonious on the one hand and disquieting and grotesque on the other. “Elements,” presented to Maximilian II on New Year’s Day 1569, was a brilliant success. The allegorical meaning of the paintings, for which the humanist Giovanni Battista Fonteo composed verses, which were published in a separate booklet, underlined the analogy between the solidity and endurance of imperial power and the cycles of nature, creating a correspondence between seasons and dynasties, nature and history.

A fashion was born, and Vienna became the center of this new kind of painting, an art that was both a cultivated game and pleasing propaganda, presented in such a way that it could be comprehended immediately. Maximilian even commissioned a second set of “Seasons” in 1573 (now in the Louvre) as a gift for Elector Augustus of Saxony, in order to reconcile the Catholic Hapsburgs and a Lutheran ruler. In 16th-century Europe such an artistic gesture could add great weight to a strategic political alliance.