Volume 34, Number 14 · September 24, 1987
Sight Gags
By Charles Hope
The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century
An exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice (February–May, 1987)
The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century
by Pontus Hulten et al.
Abbeville Press, 402 pp., $75.00
The reputation of the Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo is based entirely on a dozen or so bizarre pictures showing portrait-like heads made up of animals, plants, or inanimate objects. The most famous are the four Elements and the four Seasons. Fire, for example, is a combination of burning coals, guns, fuses, and the like; Air is formed of a multitude of different birds, Water of fishes, and Earth of quadrupeds. The Seasons, by contrast, show flowers, vegetables, and trees. A portrait of a librarian is composed of books; another, of a well-known jurist ravaged by syphilis, has a body made from legal documents and a head formed of plucked fowls and a fish. The Cook and The Vegetable Gardener are based on a slightly different conceit. When displayed one way up these images look like human heads; but when reversed they show respectively a platter of roasted meats and a bowl of vegetables.
Review, 3995 words
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