Vertumnus

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was a sixteenth-century artist most famous for his bizarre representational portraits, paintings of a range of objects arranged in human form. The painting below is entitled Vertumnus, and merges together fruit, vegetables and flowers in a celebration of life and vitality, whilst simultaneously showing Vertumnus (the Roman god of seasons and change), and is officially a portrait of Rudolf II, ruler of Bohemia and the surrounding countries. And it looks amazing.

Rudolf II was a strange, reclusive ruler whose political career paled beside his patronage of contemporary culture, research into alchemy and the occult, and his sprawling collections of art that he kept in his residence at Prague Castle. Arcimboldo is one of the most well-known artists who walked the corridors of that castle, and his imaginative portraits have had a deep impact on artists, particularly of the last century such as the Surrealists (in particular Jan Svankmajer, whose brilliant animations often directly reference Arcimboldo - alot more Svakmajer discussion to come in this blog!). But Guiseppe Arcimboldo also had the important job of managing the massive Wunderkammer (a larger version of a "cabinet of curiosities") in Rudolf II's court. He devoted huge wings of his castle to a dense collection of objects from around the globe, objects that ranged from globes and atlases, to skeletons and rare furs, to rocks and precious gems, to tapestry and painting - almost surrealist in its juxtaposition, but highly realist and modernist in its encyclopaedic aims.

Here is where I make the convuluted link between Rudolf II's "cabinet of curiosities" and my humble blog, which I intend to be a mystery window into my own mental cabinet of curiosities - both a record for myself of things I find (music, films, photography, websites, articles), and a chart of my own creative output. Hopefully this will be a way of stepping back from the individual bits of artistic material I find and create all the time, allowing me to view everything from a wider angle.

You can expect regular updates and a wide range of material, and a promise that my future posts won't contain any of the border-line pretentiousness contained in the this post.