b.c. 1527, Milan, d.1593, Milan Italian Giuseppe Arcimboldo Galleries Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527, the son of Biagio, a painter who did work for the office of the Fabbrica in the Duomo.Arcimboldo was commissioned to do stained glass window designs beginning in 1549, including the Stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria vitrage at the Duomo. In 1556 he worked with Giuseppe Meda on frescoes for the Cathedral of Monza. In 1558, he drew the cartoon for a large tapestry of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, which still hangs in the Como Cathedral today. In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "The Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols. Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, fruit and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today. Art critics debate whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind.. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci, a fellow Milanese), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times. Arcimboldo died in Milan, to which he retired after leaving the Habsburg service. It was during this last phase of his career that he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II (see above), as well as his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career. His hidden-face still-lives are a possible influence on his younger Lombard contemporary Caravaggio, whose painting of fruit in the Brera museum in Milan ranks as one of the earliest independent still-lives. When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years' War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from Rudolf II's collection. His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris, as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, and the Candie Museum in Guernsey also own paintings by Archimboldo.  Related Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo :. | Fire | aus einer Serie der Vier Jahreszeiten | Winter | Vegetables in a Bowl or The Vegetable Gardener | the jurist |
Related Artists:
Theodor Rocholl
(1854-1933), German military painter and war artist. Rocholl was born in Sachsenberg (Waldeck) on June 11, 1854, the son of Rudolf Rocholl, the Lutheran theologian and philosopher. He was a student in Munich in 1877, then at the Dresden Academy. After a year, he moved to Munich where he studied historical painting under Karl von Piloty. He ocmpleted his art studies at the Desseldorf Academy where he developed his interest in military art under the influence of Wilhelm Camphausen; his contemporaries in this field were Carl Röchling and Richard Knötel. The artist observed the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent German army manoeuvres between 1883 and 1888; in 1890, he traveled to Russia to view the German Garde-Korps on manoeuvre. Later in the decade, he was attached to the Turkish Army and covered the conflict in Thessalia in 1897 between the Turks and the Greeks; his sketches of the fighting were published the following year. He covered the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 as the official artist of the German expeditionary force. A decade later, he covered the fighting between Turkey and Albania. Many of his paintings depict German military scenes, especially the battles of the Franco-Prussian War. One of his most famous pictures depicted King William at the Battle of Sedan, meeting his triumphant soldiers after the victory. Rocholl also painted a large mural for the Evangelischen Padagogiums in Bad Godesberg. In his 60th year, he became a war artist covering the campaign on the Western Front. His War Letters printed in 1916 in which he described the fear and destruction. An autobiography of his life as a painter appeared in 1921. He died in a streetcar accident Desseldorf in his 80th year on September 14, 1933.
Jean Joseph Vaudechamp
(1790 - 1866) was a French painter born in Rambervillers, Vosges. He was a pupil of Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson. The market in Paris was competitive, so in the winter of 1831 - 32, he went to try his fortunes in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Louisiana Creole people identified with French culture and selected Vaudechamp to paint portraits for them. Over the next ten years he spent winters in New Orleans, and was a leading portrait painter in the region. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1866.
Armand Palliere
painted Pedro II of Brazil, aged 4 in 1830