Download Italian Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Pictures at Michael Brooke, 1998)/ Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1527-1598. Illuminations.
Retrieved 12/16/03 from
http://www.illumin.co.uk/svank/biog/arcim/arcidx.html
Italian Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Mannerism, the artistic style which gained popularity in the period following the High
Renaissance,
takes as its ideals the work of Raphael and Michelangelo BuonarrotIt is
considered to be a period of
technical accomplishment but of formulaic, theatrical and overly stylized
work.
One of the most bizarre and distinctive painters in the whole of art history, Giuseppe
Arcimboldo (1527-1593)
owes his reputation to the series of composite portraits of heads made up of a variety of
objects, both natural and
man-made. Most of these paintings were created at the court of Rudolf II, who hired
Arcimboldo as his court
painter, placing him at the centre of Rudolf's eccentric menagerie of artists, scientists and
charlatans. Arcimboldo, with his anthropomorphic, cumulative methods, is one of the
obsessions for which I am unable to find a satisfactory interpretation.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527 into a highly distinguished family,
which boasted archbishops
(including his grandfather), jurists and artists (including his father Biagio). Little is
known about his early life, but
his connections with Milanese nobility undoubtedly helped him secure work designing
frescoes and windows for
the cathedral. In 1562 he travelled across the Alps to Vienna to become the portraitist and
copyist to the Hapsburg
court, at the invitation of Emperor Maximilian II (his talent having been noted by
Maximilian's father Ferdinand I,
who employed him as a painter of conventional portraits). Under Maximilian's patronage
he produced his first
series of the Seasons and the Elements, which were formally presented to the Emperor on
New Year's Day, 1569.
In 1570 Arcimboldo was sent to Prague, to design an elaborate pageant for Maximilian
that blended classical and
Czech mythology, and he was to perform similar duties for Maximilian's son Rudolf II,
when he ascended the
Hapsburg throne in 1575. Arcimboldo designed the festivities for Rudolf's coronation and
other state events,
while spending his spare time devising hydraulic machines and new forms of musical
notation using colours.
In 1591 he produced his masterpiece, Vertumnus, an allegorical portrait of his master
Rudolf II as the Roman god of metamorphoses in nature and life, with Rudolf's face
made up of fruit and flowers, symbolising the perfect balance between nature and
harmony that his reign allegedly represented. Arcimboldo died in 1593.
Surrealism http://www.encarta.msn.com
Surrealism grew out of the Dada movement and flourished in Europe between
World War I and World War II. Surrealism employed many of the techniques of
Dada but emphasized the positive rather than the negative. Surrealism tried to
meld the conscious and the unconscious, the world of dreams and fantasy along
with reality so that the line between these ideas was completely blurred. Many
artists of this time felt the unconscious was where the true center of art lay, and
that artists could tap into this genius by bending and softening the lines between
what one's eyes see and the dreamworld. Much of Surrealistic art portrays
alternate realities; some created by accident, some using the unconventional
realities of blind feeling and impulse. Some of the art of this time is quite cruel and
violent as well as very beautiful. The artists, like the Dada artists before them,
wanted to shock their viewers with the unexpected and make people think in new
ways. He wanted to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.
S. Lee Hager (n.d.). Surrealism, Alchemy, and the Northern Renaissance. Retreived
12/1/6/03 from http://alandpeters.tripod.com/alchemyrenaissance.html
The processes of alchemy were based on Aristotle's theory of transmutation, which
proposed that all matter consisted of four basic elements:
earth, air, fire, and water, and that these elements were all mutable or interchangeable.9
While these theories seem preposterous now, it must be
remembered that during this period empirical evidence validated the theory: water turned
into ice and steam, acorns became oak trees and
caterpillars became butterflies. A strong belief in transubstantiation on a spiritual level
wherein the wine and bread becomes Christ's actual
blood and body, no doubt also strengthened belief in these theories.10 From this point of
view, it would not be a tremendous leap to believe
that base metals could be transformed into gold or that an elixir of life could be distilled
from plants. Alchemical symbols in Northern
Renaissance art must be read within the context of alchemy as an accepted science that
encompassed the medicinal, spiritual, and chemical, as
well as the mystical.
A brief description of some of the processes involved in alchemy will aid in the discovery
of alchemical symbols in art. The first step in the
alchemical process was called "conjunction," and concerns the uniting of opposites such
as the four alchemical qualities of hot and cold, wet
and dry. The second step was called either "coagulation" or "child's play" and concerned
a balancing of the four alchemical elements, earth, air,
fire, and water. Coagulation led to the third process, "putrefaction" that was said to
separate the elements that had previously been joined. The
last step was "purification," but since the nature of all alchemical process was cyclical,
and was symbolized by the circle, purification could
also be the beginning of another cycle.27 Alchemists also sought to bring about perfect
health through the balancing of four bodily humors. The
choleric, symbolized by yellow, signified bad temper, whereas white stood for the calm
phlegmatic humor. Blood, the sanguine humor, was
signified by red, and melancholic, the depressive humor was signified by black.28 The
uniting of opposites was symbolized by the
androgynous figure or the hermaphrodite. Transmutation was symbolized by the
hybridizing of animal, bird, or plant forms with humans.
Vessels used in alchemical process were used as symbols of those processes.
This displacement is the opposite of images presented by Northern Renaissance artists,
who
retain the human head, but replace the body with that of an animal. This reversal may be
seen as a result of the Surrealist reaction to the
brutality of human beings to one another during World War I, and as a revolt against the
ends to which intellectualism had brought the world.48