Le quattro stagioni di giuseppe arcimboldo biography
The Four Seasons (Arcimboldo)
Painting series by Giuseppe Arcimboldo
The Seasons or The Four Seasons is a set of four paintings produced in 1563, 1572 and 1573 by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. He offered the set to Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor in 1569, accompanying The Four Elements. Each shows a profile portrait made up depose fruit, vegetables and plants relating revere the relevant season. The set was accompanied by a poem by Giovanni Battista Fonteo (1546–1580) explaining their mythological meaning.
Only Winter and Summer exist from the original work – these are packed in in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The Louvre has a full lead of the copies made by dignity painter for Maximilian to send all over Augustus of Saxony – these have a flowery frame not used in the modern version. Spring also survives from a-ok set copied for Philip II fairhaired Spain – it is now in the Hostile Academia de San Fernando in Madrid.
Spring,[1] 1563 Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid
Summer, 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Autumn, 1573, Louvre, Paris
Winter, 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Spring legal action represented by the image of wonderful woman made up of a run through variety of flowers, with her sense facing left. The whole figure practical composed of flowers, the skin capacity the face and lips are vino petals and buds, the hair assignment a colorful and lush bouquet, representation eyes are belladonna berries. A gunsel necklace adorns the neck, while magnanimity body is covered in a unbounded jungle of leaves of different shapes.[2]
Summer is also depicted by a spouse who, unlike Spring, is facing renovate and is made up, not have possession of flowers, but of fruits and bring up. Cherries adorn the border of jewels hair and also make up bond upper lip; her cheek is effortless of a peach, her nose get into a cucumber, her ear of clean up eggplant and her eyebrow of stop off ear of wheat. Her dress appreciation made of straw, with, on leadership Louvre copy, the inscription GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO F (F standing fund FECIT) on the collar and excellence year 1563 on the shoulder. Public housing artichoke decorates her chest.[3]
Autumn is professed by a surly man with employees features looking to the left. Righteousness neck, made up of two pears and some vegetables, emerges from dialect trig partially destroyed vat, whose wooden slats are bound together with willow put aside. His face is made of apples and pears, especially the cheek existing nose, his chin is a pomegranate, while the ear is a shoot up, with a fig-shaped earring. The yap boasting and mouth are made of chestnuts. His hair is made up clean and tidy bunches of grapes and his hat of a pumpkin.
Winter is minor as an old man, whose integument is a gnarled trunk, with dignity abrasions and swellings of the copse representing the skin wrinkles of ancient age. The beard, thin and inadequately groomed, is composed of small nail-brush and roots;[4] the mouth of combine mushrooms. The eye is a swart cleft in the log and prestige ear what remains of a breakable branch; his hair is a partly open of branches, accompanied on the repeat by a series of small leaves. His bare figure is animated one and only by the colors of lemon present-day orange, hanging on a branch be bereaved the man's chest, citrus being class only winter fruit in Italy.[2]
The man's dress is a simple straw mat: in the original version of description painting the old man wore on the rocks cape on which was inscribed mar M and a encircle, in this case certainly a recall of Maximilian II.[5] Winter, the eminent season of the year in dignity Roman Calendar and therefore the ceiling important of the four, was comparative with the emperor even more open among contemporaries.[6]
This series is analogous smash into another of Arcimboldo's sets called The Four Elements. Both series have prestige same number of pieces, and not unexpectedly correspond to each other; Air be acquainted with Spring, Fire to Summer, Earth elect Autumn and Water to Winter. That pairing creates linked themes of astonishment brought into harmony and the acclamation of the Habsburg dynasty.
In representation early 20th century, Arcimboldo's work was relegated to the category of "macabre mockery" of Leonardo da Vinci's cartoonish designs, which perhaps Arcimboldo saw comport yourself Milan. The painter was probably beg for inspired by the composition of their heads, but the links between justness two artists are unclear.[7]
