There, he finally cooked up his famous faces. They satisfied a taste for exoticism. This was the era of high humanist curiosity. Newly rediscovered ancient texts like Pliny's Natural History circulated among scholars and artists; in the show, Archimbold's watercolors of animals and fish, exacting models he adapted for parts of faces, show him to be firmly grounded in science and real observation. Global exploration and advances in fields like optics and engineering stirred Rudolf, like other enlightened patrons, to wish to possess whatever was the rarest, the finest, the strangest, the most inexplicable art and artifacts. From such cabinets of curiosities - attempts to catalog and rationalize the irrational - evolved, one day, the modern museum. This was Arcimboldo's milieu and motivation.
Usefully, the show includes more than a few works by sculptors and decorators who also catered to a fixation on the marvelous. Coconuts, conch shells, ostrich eggs and coral, gathered from the distant corners of the earth, become goblets, bowls and hilts for swords, three-dimensional versions of his painted faces. They're about art's roots in mysticism and magic. Painting itself is a sleight-of-hand trick, after all: colored dirt becomes an illusion.
Along which lines Arcimboldo clearly picked up pointers from Bosch and no doubt from Persian miniaturists. A gorgeous show of classic Iranian art happens to have just opened at the Louvre, and it includes several astonishing paintings from Arcimboldo's time: fantastical landscapes populated by wild creatures. Stare at the mountain scenes, and faces can begin to suggest themselves in the salt-taffy rock formations and trees.
All artists have their niches, and this commonplace slip of the mind became for Arcimboldo a virtual cottage industry. A bust of a bearded librarian, with a tin-man face made of books, and bookmarks for fingers, is a clever feat of virtuosity, like the reversible pictures he painted: right side up, they're still lifes; upside down, portraits.
More interestingly, he also painted a three-quarter view of an old man, who, grossly desiccated, is memorably perverse by being somehow still dignified, almost courtly, in his dotage with branch stumps for stubble. Or there is the portrait of a German jurist, the humanist Johann Ulrich Zasius, with a plucked chicken for a head, a fish's mouth and a fish-tail chin. It's scary in ways that can almost remind you of Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, troubling the mind like a half-remembered nightmare.
So too are a quartet of stiff, plain-spoken little portraits of the family of Pedro Gonzalez. Their distinction was to grow hair all over their faces like the Wolf Man, an accident of nature akin to the Virgin Mary's portrait appearing in a grilled-cheese sandwich.
The universe concocts such marvels, which man emulates through art and industry in hopes to best it. That was Arcimboldo's bottom-line goal. His ambition, so frank and intellectual, gives to his prankish, often grotesque work its stylish hauteur.
Come to think of it, no wonder the French love him.
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