The creative originality and wit of the Milanese artist earned him a particularly close relationship with the Emperor Rudolf II, who succeeded his father Maximilian II in 1576 and took Arcimboldo with him when he moved the court to Prague in 1583. Among the artist’s prerogatives was the freedom to enter and leave the sovereign’s rooms without being announced, as if he were a member of the imperial family.

Rudolf commissioned a celebratory portrait in which he appears as Vertumnus, the ancient Roman god of prosperity. The deification of an emperor is a highly effective mode of propaganda, but his mutation into a flourishing bunch of vegetables also reflects the success enjoyed by the 16th-century publication of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the great first-century A.D. poetic narrative of the pagan myths about transformation (gods into human, humans into animals, plants or even stars). In this instance, unlike the portrait of the jurist, the effect is one of magnificence and splendor, and the sovereign’s mask serves to construct an image of glory—imperial power is even identified with the cosmic regeneration of nature. Yet it is still a mask, since psychological reality is presented through a filter, by way of metaphor.

Although Arcimboldo’s paintings were multiplied in engravings, his art almost fell in oblivion after his death, and his vegetable portraits were remembered only as a compositional joke. But it is hardly accidental that his personality and poetic message were rediscovered by the art and philosophy of the century of Freud and Einstein. Arcimboldo became a subject for Roland Barthes, who compared his manner of painting with specific modes of literary rhetoric and considered his art as a transmutation “of play into grand rhetoric, of rhetoric into magic, of magic into wisdom.” But even before that, Picasso’s Cubist “Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler” (1910) drew conscious inspiration from Arcimboldo’s “Portrait of a Librarian,” of which the Spanish artist owned a reproduction.

The German Dadaists saw the decomposition of the face from a negative and profoundly uneasy point of view, with sources in the massacres of the Great War and the consequent social crisis. George Grosz’s collage “Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor” (1919) is perhaps the most disturbing manifesto of this genre. By piecing together the portrait from renderings of mechanical objects such a screw, a bolt, and a knife, the artist shows the sitter as a defaced victim of his inventions.

A different twist was expressed 15 years later in the celebrated “Le Viol” (“The Rape”) (1934) by Magritte, in which a woman’s face is constructed from her sexual attributes, and immediately thereafter, in Salvador Dalí’s “Face of Mae West” (1935), in which physiognomy is transformed into a room furnished like a stage set.

As for Arcimboldo, three and a half centuries later, his faces are not only mirrors of the soul, but witty presentations of social conditions, professions, functions—and of the vanity of it all.

 

Roberta Bartoli is the author of numerous books and exhibition catalogues on Italian Renaissance painting.