Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was best known for his strange composite portraits, yet his imagination ranged so much further than that. The young Giuseppe was active in his native Lombardy designing stained-glass, tapestries, and frescoes, later becoming a trusted and versatile talent at the Habsburg courts of Vienna and Prague.

He was always far more than a ‘mere’ court painter. Here was a true creative polymath, his work blending the political and the humorous with the practical and the naturalistic. Much copied in his own lifetime, he also devised festivals and tournaments, designed merchants’ stalls, and helped assemble imperial collections of rare objects and exotic creatures. 

His hundreds of drawings span portraiture, botanical and zoological studies, even scenes of silkworm farming, revealing an ardent curiosity about art as well as the natural world. An original, yet so much of his time, his alchemical fusion of humor, symbolism, and scientific rigor reflected a thoroughly Renaissance taste for puzzles, illusion, and inquiry. 

Published to mark the 500th anniversary of his birth, this volume offers the first complete catalogue raisonné of Arcimboldo's work. The result of decades of research, it includes paintings, frescoes, stained-glass windows, tapestries, and nearly 300 drawings—many newly photographed—that reshape our understanding of his oeuvre. The catalogue and introduction counter many recurrent myths and locate this fascinating, witty, and inventive artist in the context of his own time. A man who turned observation into invention: botanist, court entertainer, and optical trickster all in one.