Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian Renaissance painter known for his intricate paintings, which combined inanimate or found objects into a portrait that would resemble the portrait subject.
Most of Arcimboldo’s remaining works are of collected objects, which have been assembled to resemble people. He used fruits, flowers, vegetables, fish, and books, and other things, (among them slabs of meat), and arranged them in such a way as to not only resemble a person, but the person’s resemblance as well.
Due to his strange rendition of the human figure, there is a debate among art critics as to whether or not Arcimboldo’s paintings are the work of a deranged mind. A more likely explanation, however, is that the paintings are a product of the Renaissance era in which he lived, which was fascinated with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre. If this was the case, then Arcimboldo’s strange depictions were only just catering to the tastes of the time.
