Summer
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526 to 1593) · 1563
A head in profile turns to the left, and every part of it is a fruit or a vegetable. The cheek is a peach, the chin a pear, the nose a cucumber, the lips a pair of cherries and the teeth peas in a pod. The eye is a cherry with a sprig of hair, the ear an ear of corn, and the hair a tumbling harvest of plums, grapes, cherries and mulberries with wheat ears standing up like a crest. The collar and coat are woven from straw. It is a portrait of the season of Summer, and once you have seen how the face is made it is impossible to see it as anything else.
Arcimboldo was a Milanese painter who came to the Habsburg court in Vienna in 1562 and made his name with these composite heads. The Four Seasons of 1563 were his first set, followed by the Four Elements, and they delighted Emperor Maximilian the Second, who kept them in his private rooms. The paintings were more than jokes. Each fruit and flower is painted with the precision of a botanical illustrator, and the seasons together formed a compliment to the emperor, whose rule was as constant as the cycle of the year. Look at the straw collar, where the artist has woven his own name, and at the shoulder, where the date 1563 is stitched in.
The museum owns Summer and Winter from this first set, and both hang together in this small cabinet, so you can compare the ripe, cheerful profile of Summer with the gnarled tree stump face of Winter. The Surrealists rediscovered Arcimboldo in the 1930s and Salvador Dali claimed him as a forerunner. Children usually find the pea pod teeth first; adults tend to notice the artichoke on the chest last.
Did You Know? Arcimboldo signed the painting by weaving his own name into the straw of the collar, and stitched the date into the shoulder.
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