Art world links which caught my eye...
Giuseppe Arcimboldo "Vertumnus" oil on panel, 27 1/2" x 22 4/5" (1590)
On the Italian Mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (April 5, 1526 - July 11, 1593). He made is signature illusionistic works while surrounded by some of the esoteric figures of his time:
"The Milanese painter may be simultaneously playful and mysterious, clever and discomforting, but as Roland Barthes bluntly writes in a 1980 essay on him, his 'art is not insane.' There is a logic that bedevils either the Surrealists or Dadaists: Arcimboldo was doing something else. Barthes writes that he 'makes the fantastic out of the familiar.' Everything 'signifies and yet everything is surprising.' Should these works be viewed as mere visual puzzles, there would be playful wonder enough in his corpus (they were, after all, intended for a Wonder Cabinet). But as Barthes makes clear, to do so would be to eliminate other interpretations of his work, particularly the important strain of understanding Arcimboldo via the remarkable city in which he worked.
"His patron, Rudolf II, assembled in the Bohemian capital courtiers dedicated to alchemy, astrology, conjuration, divination, hermeticism, kabbalah, necromancy, and theurgy, who debated metaphysical theories from Neoplatonism to materialism. In understanding Arcimboldo, it must be emphasized that the court painter was an instrumental presence in his court. Peter Marshall writes in The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology in Renaissance Prague (2006) that the Holy Roman Emperor 'invited some of the most creative, original and subversive minds of the day,' including Arcimboldo. Tycho Brahe, the great silver-nosed Danish astronomer who observed Cassiopeia's supernova of 1572; his student Johannes Kepler, who was the first to mathematically describe the revolutions of the planets; the English wizard John Dee and his unscrupulous assistant Edward Kelley, who conversed in the paradisical language of Enochian with angels in their Aztec scrivening mirror; the Italian heretic Giordano Bruno, whose heliocentrism included the worship of Apollo; and even Rabbi Judah Lowe ben Bezalel, who constructed a golem from the Vltava River's mud. During the Renaissance, 'Magic was a dominating factor,' writes Dame Frances Yates in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (2001), describing our world as ruled by a 'mathematics-mechanics,' the heavens by a 'celestial mathematics,' and the supernatural world by angelic conjuration. Rudolf's orbit, it is clear, didn't distinguish between the natural and the supernatural."
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Summer" oil on panel, 26 2/5" x 20" (1563)
Read the full article here: HYPERALLEGRIC - How Giuseppe Arcimboldo Made the Familiar Bizarre
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