To those with a passion for "topsy-turvy" inverted illusions and optical twists, here is an artist that centuries before the invention of computer generated graphics, holographic cameras and dye-lasers applied his talent to create a form of painting called the "composite head" where faces and human features are painted, not in flesh, but with rendered clumps of assorted vegetables, fruit and other materials, such as - you name it - tree branches, meat, fish and other unlikely objects such as pots and books.

Often referred as the precursor of surrealism, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1530 - 1593) constructed people's faces from fruit, employing anthropomorphic, cumulative methods where unique pictural conceptions result into expressions of simple yet magnificent metaphors: spring consists of flowers, summer consists of fruits, and so on, all brilliant demonstrations that "the whole is something else than parts", for "the whole is more than just parts". Some have compared this phenomenon with our contemporary design of multimedia softwares.

Arcimboldo's illusions can be viewed either right-side up or up-side down. Each view has a different meaning. The painting featured on this page looks like a normal bowl of fresh produce. But once inverted, it resembles a man's face with mushrooms for lips.

Could this painter, at the center of Rudolf II's eccentric menagerie of artists, scientists and charlatans, have also been the precursor of gestalt psychology?

GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO (1530-1593)

Italian painter. In the middle of the sixteenth century Arcimboldo made a normal debut with youthful works including designs for windows and tapestries respectively in Milan and Monza cathedrals and frescos for the cathedral of Como. None of these gave any inkling of the bizarre originality he would soon develop. In 1562 he was summoned to the Imperial court in Prague and almost immediately his original and grotesque fantasy was unleashed. He invented a portrait type consisting of painted animals, flowers, fruit, and objects composed to form a human likeness. Some are satiric portraits of court personages, and others are allegorical personifications.

Vegetables in a Bowl, or the Gardener