The art of making faces

Patrick Skene Catling

THE ARCIMBOLDO EFFECT edited by Pontus Hulten

Thames & Hudson, f32

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) was the Hapsburg court painter who is said to have invented the conceit of painting human heads composed of other things flowers, fruit, vegetables, animals, fishes and the paraphernalia of various occupa- tions. He painted these ingenious contri- vances of emblematic synthesis to amuse his royal patrons, Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II, and to flatter them, as the most ambitious sets of paintings, of the four elements and the four seasons, were believed to suggest that the Hapsburgs presided over all nature and would rule for ever.

This luxurious and exhilarating book, published on the occasion of the first Arcimboldo retrospective exhibition, at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, is a multidis- ciplinary symposium of art-historians and other scholars. Essays on the Milanese artist and his work and their influence are illustrated with more than 400 reproduc- tions, about half of them in colour (well printed in Milan), of Arcimboldo's own paintings and some subsequent derivative 'transformations of the face,' in the words of the book's subtitle, in the Arcimbold- esque spirit from his time to the present.

Yasha David, who designed the book, writes that it is dedicated to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., because his pioneer exhibition, 'Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism' at the Museum of Modern Art in New York 50 years ago, had the 'merit of presenting Giuseppe Arcimboldo in the context of 20th-century art for the first time.' The Venetian exhibition this spring has rein- forced the impression of Arcimboldo's perennial modernity.

His art may be subjected reasonably to `three different kinds of interpretations,' according to Pontus Hulten, the Palazzo Grassi's artistic director, who sounds the book's keynote hypotheses. Firstly, it may be considered as an 'amusing work of fantasy and invention,' a bizarre caprice, even mere 'child's play or a happy game'; secondly, as an 'allegory related to the Hapsburg Empire and 16th-century scien- ce'; and, thirdly, as a 'metaphysical state- ment: new vision of man.'

As there are only 'sketchy biographies,' Mr Hulten acknowledges that the artist's character and the sources of his peculiar originality must be matters of guesswork. 'It seems likely that Arcimboldo was famil- iar with Horace and Vitruvius and other classical writers,' he guesses, 'and perhaps had read their discussions of such fantastic beings as sphinxes, centaurs, chimerae, griffons, and other grotesques and confuse cose.'

The Seasons (1563), heads made up of flowers, fruit and vegetables to represent spring, summer, autumn and winter, and The Elements (1566), heads representing fire, earth, water and air, presumably had 'several meanings . . . hidden like boxes within boxes.' Perhaps there were sly contemporary allusions. For example, 'the mouth of Water (was she the empress?) is actually the mouth of a Heterodontid shark, a small but not very dangerous shark that swims along the bottom of the sea, scavenging.'

Arcimboldo lived at a time of transition, in some ways like our own: 'Religious wars, economic chaos, changing social structures, important new inventions and discoveries, dogmatism and reaction these provided the background for his era.' Mr Hulten points out that

God was the centre of the mediaeval uni- verse, and in the Renaissance, man and his ego were the most important. In a time of transition, of pessimism and melancholy (states of mind that are very much present in his paintings), Arcimboldo declared that man is not separate from nature: he is part of nature — a part of the elements and of time — and nature is a part of man. Such a metaphysical stand was revolutionary.

Reading R. J. W. Evans's informative contribution on 'The Imperial Court in the Time of Arcimboldo' and Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez's enlightening article on 'The Madrid-Prague Axis,' in which he tells of the Spanish view that there was an affinity between Arcimboldo and Hieronymus Bosch, one can understand how the emper- ors, especially Maximilian, admired Arcimboldo's philosophical sophistication, wit and technical skill. The artist was gratefully employed to design costumes and props for state processions and theat- rical fetes.

The courtiers of Vienna and Prague were polymaths and sybarites who ap- plauded a clever act when they saw one. They must have appreciated affectionate tests like The Librarian, a portrait of Wolfgang Lazius composed mainly of books, and less affectionate jibes like The Jurist, a portrait of an imperial treasurer, Johann Ulrich Zazius, whose nose is de- picted as a new-hatched naked birdling's pointed arse.

Although Arcimboldo was widely im- itated while he lived and immediately afterwards, his reputation lapsed into com- parative oblivion for almost 200 years. The first part of The Arcimboldo Effect deals with the period from 1500 (before he was born) to 1650, the second part from 1800 to 1987.

Aomi Okabe, in `Kao [face] at the Dawn of Modernity,' discusses the controversial- ly provocative work of Utagawa Kuniyoshi in the 19th century. He made woodcut 'caricatures,' Mr Okabe writes, 'in which an intelligent parody was subtly con- cealed'. In his works we find cats or goldfish personifying actors, for instance, or courtesans portrayed as swallows, de- picted with fresh, biting irony and a fantas- tic and original imagination.

Kuniyoshi's portraits, rather than represent- ing the physical characteristics of a per- son, aimed at revealing the soul, in a happy artistic synthesis on themes such as 'A bully becomes human,' The man who mocks others,' A youth who seems an old man.' He created puzzle scenes, Hanji-e, which were known as 'prints of yawn-stopping characters.'

At the turn of the century, anonymous French artists adapted Arcimboldo's tech- nique of visual ambiguity to the composi- tion of erotic picture postcards, such as Un Bon Vivant, in which the head of a bemonocled lecher is composed of a tab- leau of acrobatic female nudes.

Arcimboldo sombrely influenced the already sombre George Grosz, repre- sented here by his nightmarish Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor (1914). Poor old Uncle August consists partly of a motor-car tyre's inner tube coiled like a snake and a cut-throat razor, open, of course.

In 1920, Francis Picabia created a poten- tially incendiary Arcimboldoesque collage, La Femme aux Allumettes, made of hair- pins and matches. In Magritte's painting Le Viol (1934), which was clearly plun- dered, the book shows, from a 1795 pencil drawing by Carl-August Ehrensvard, a woman's eyes are nipples or vice versa and her mouth and nether lips coincide. Dali has long been an enthusiastic Arcimbol- dist, as witness his Paranoiac Visage (1931), whose face is a group of Africans turned sideways, and his painting in gouache of a foyer with curtains (hair and earrings), steps (chins), that famous red sofa (lips) a double fireplace (nostrils) and twin paintings (eyes) which constitute The Face of Mae West (1934-35). Time maga- zine closely imitated Arcimboldo in a photographic anthropomorphic assemb- lage of indigestible foods for a 1972 cover story called 'Eating May Not Be Good For You.'

Was the art of Arcimboldo decadent right from the beginning? The exhibition and the book inevitably give one to specu- late along that line.

Arcimboldo's gloomy pantheism may now be hailed again with sympathetic groans of recognition, as humankind tries to associate itself with other forms of life and the universal environment — getting our act together, it seems, before the dreaded apocalyptic disintegration.