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 :. | Spring | Museum art historic the summer | Water | Fire (mk45) | Erzherzogin Anna |
Related Artists:
FLORIGERIO, Sebastiano
Italian painter, Friulian school (b. ca. 1500, Conegliano, d. 1543, Udine).
Charles Furneaux
(1835 - 1913) was born in Boston and became a drawing instructor in that area. For many years he lived in the town of Melrose, Massachusetts. In 1880, Furneaux moved to Hawaii, where he cultivated the friendship King Kalakaua and other members of the Hawaiian royal family, from whom he later received several commissions. In the late 1880's,he was commissioned in Honolulu by Alexander Joy Cartwright, widely credited as the "father of baseball" and another dear friend of King Kalakaua, to paint the only oil portrait of his 72 year life. While living in Honolulu he taught at the private schools Punahou and St. Albans (now known as Iolani School). In 1885, he received the order of Chevalier of Kapiolani from King Kalakaua in 'recognition of his services in advancing Hawaiian art'. He died in Hawaii in 1913. His reputation is mainly based on the paintings he executed in Hawaii, especially those of erupting volcanoes. The Bishop Museum (Honolulu), the Brooklyn Museum, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Iolani Palace (Honolulu) and Mount Holyoke College Art Museum (South Hadley, Massachusetts) are among the public collections holding works by Charles Furneaux.
Franz von Lenbach
Shrobenhausen 1836-Munich 1904 German painter. The son of a master builder, he trained for his father's profession at the Kenigliche Landwirtschafts- und Gewerbeschule in Landshut, also working from 1851 in the sculpture studio of Anselm Sickinger (1807-73) in Munich. His elder brother, Karl August Lenbach (1828-47), had already become involved with painting, and it was through him that Franz Lenbach met Johann Baptist Hofner (1832-1913), an artist who had studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste in Munich. They went on sketching expeditions together, and Hofner introduced him to plein-air painting. After spending two semesters at the Polytechnische Schule in Augsburg (1852-3), and some months in the studio of Albert Grefle (1807-89), a portrait painter in Munich, Lenbach entered the Akademie in Munich in 1854. In 1857 he attended the classes of Karl Theodor Piloty (later von Piloty), who was renowned for his history paintings. Lenbach produced his first important painting, the Angel Appearing to Hagar in the Desert (1858; destr.), while in this class, followed by Peasants Trying to Take Shelter from a Thunderstorm in a Chapel (1858; destr.; oil sketch, Schweinfurt, Samml. Schefer). The sale of this picture, together with a scholarship, enabled him to accompany Piloty on a journey to Rome with Ferdinand von Piloty (1828-95),