In this series, the curatorial team presents one work from the Meural art library we find essential. (See all installments.)

Many works of art are fitting for Halloween—The Scream (or any Munch, really), de Goya’s‘s The Witches’ Sabbath or Saturn Devouring His Son, much of Redon or Bosch—but I believe the holiday should be truly terrifying, and nothing is more ghastly than the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. It is hard to look at it for long without feeling your own mortality. It’s as if each work is saying: we are made of nature, and once we’re gone, that is where we’ll return.

Though Arcimboldo started his career with more traditional work—stained glass and frescoes featuring traditional religious subjects—he is known only for his portraits of humans made from non-human objects. As is true of any artist whose hand is immediately recognizable, his reputation often proceeds him. In fact, the upfront conceit of his work tends to mask the real talent behind it. Arcimboldo was a painter first, applying his skill to create meaning, no less than many of his famous contemporaries. (He was born in Italy during the late Renaissance.) Though the most straightforward interpretation of his work is often cited (we are what we consume), he’s not always that easy. One reading of The Librarian, for example, is that Arcimboldo is depicting a philistine: a wealthy man who owns books only to show that he’s well read, but who hasn’t actually read them. With Arcimboldo, we can never be sure if we’re seeing how the subject wants to be seen or how Arcimboldo sees them.

In Four Seasons in One Head, the two are likely the same. Often thought to be a self portrait, the work was one of Arcimboldo’s last. (It was painted in 1590, three years before he died.) By this point, he had long mastered his own form. Recalling the same seasonal symbolism from other works, we have, literally, the four seasons in one head: flowers for spring, cherries for summer, grapes and apples for autumn, the bare trunk for winter. But it differs from the bulk of his oeuvre in that the majority of the face is made from a stump, and so by design less creative in its allocation of fruits and vegetables. In this way we see a recognition of death, Arcimboldo’s own. It is terrifying, yes, but it is also an honest depiction of someone preparing for the afterlife; we seem him, literally warts and all.

How does Arcimboldo fit into the history of art, if at all? Temporally and geographically he aligns with the Late Renaissance or Mannerism, just a bit too soon to be called Baroque. The Mannerist label has also been applied by critics (if not only recently). In many ways he exemplifies the movement’s most salient traits. Mannerists often strived to show the connection between humans and nature; Arcimboldo did this arguably more than any other artist. Mannerists learned from and built upon the legacy of da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo, all while incorporating unusual tension; it’s hard to think of a better description of Arcimboldo’s work. In some way he was also a precursor to surrealism, though he was centuries ahead of the movement.

What’s most surprising about Arcimboldo’s art historical legacy is his lack of one. There are no artists (at least none in the canon) whose work can be drawn directly back to him. Nor did his work inspire a new lexicon. He is known simply by his own name. In many ways, he was his own movement.

— Andrew Lipstein, Head of Editorial