Four Seasons in one Head by Giuseppe Arcimboldo was created in 1590. The painting is in National Gallery of Art Washington D.C. The size of the work is 60 x 45 cm and is made of oil on panel.
The Four Seasons has the additional interest of the more engaging three-quarter view, unlike the strict profile Arcimboldo adopted for the Seasons and the Elements. The Four Seasons stands out in other respects as well. By contrast to the whimsical character of much of Arcimboldo’s work, the mood is darker and more somber. The Four Seasons is also the most closely related of all Arcimboldo’s composite heads to the physiognomic studies of Leonardo da Vinci.
The Artist: Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo was born in Milan. He was a conventional court painter of portraits for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague. He specialized in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms. At a distance, his portraits looked like normal human portraits. However, individual objects in each portrait were actually overlapped together to make various anatomical shapes of a human. They were carefully constructed by his imagination… Read more
You can order this work as an art print on canvas from canvastar.com
