Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, & books arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject. His father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist. Like his father, Giuseppe Arcimboldo started his career as a designer for stained glasses & frescoes at local cathedrals when he was 21 years old. In 1562, he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, & later, to Maximilian II & his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. Arcimboldo's conventional work has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, plants, fruits, sea creatures & tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries & remain a source of fascination today.
