When 16th century Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted his first “fruit face,” imagine the reception he must have garnered.[1] His work has to be some of the strangest in the history of art. But it seems, there is an art behind his madness.
In 1562 at the age of 36, Arcimboldo received an invitation to accept a post as Court Portraitist at Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II’s imperial court in Vienna. Suddenly the budding artist was thrust into a rich renaissance-style intellectual and artistic atmosphere, which boasted interchange between botanists, astronomers, physicians, and alchemists. These would influence his art, and soon he would begin churning out vegetable and fruit likenesses of local celebrities and benefactors.
At first, these may seem to us cartoonish and strange. And inde…