In Giuseppe Arcimboldo's most famous paintings, grapes, fish,
and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a
man's chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as
a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together on canvas and
panel to assemble the strange heads and faces that constitute one
of Renaissance art's most striking oeuvres. The first major study
in a generation of the artist behind these remarkable paintings,
"Arcimboldo" tells the singular story of their creation.
Drawing on his thirty-five-year engagement with the artist,
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann begins with an overview of Arcimboldo's
life and work, exploring the artist's early years in
sixteenth-century Lombardy, his grounding in Leonardesque
traditions, and his tenure as a Habsburg court portraitist in
Vienna and Prague. "Arcimboldo" then trains its focus on the
celebrated composite heads, approaching them as visual jokes with
serious underpinnings--images that poetically display pictorial wit
while conveying an allegorical message. In addition to probing the
humanistic, literary, and philosophical dimensions of these pieces,
Kaufmann explains that they embody their creator's continuous
engagement with nature painting and natural history. He reveals, in
fact, that Arcimboldo painted many more nature studies than
scholars have realized--a finding that significantly deepens
current interpretations of the composite heads.
Demonstrating the previously overlooked importance of these
works to natural history and still-life painting, "Arcimboldo"
finally restores the artist's fantastic visual jokes to their
rightful place in the history of both science and art.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!