One of the earliest surviving items from these is a "shaker box" of green moss containing replica snails, insects and tortoises that move when the box is shaken. Another survivor is a wax portrait of Rudolph II, while a painting records a "Nile horse" - a stuffed hippopotamus - he had in his cabinet of curiosities. It must have been as awesome as the elephant seal you can still see in Vienna.
Rudolph's collections made explicit the belief of the Renaissance that everything in nature is linked by resemblance and correspondence. According to this cosmology, the sublunar world is strictly hierarchical, with stones at the bottom and above them, in ascending order, plants, animals, human beings and angels.
By the right use of talismans and charms, practitioners of "natural magic" believed, you might ascend to a higher link in the chain of being. This cosmology, rather than anything like modern classifications, shaped the early museums and survives in Arcimboldo's art. In his portraits of the four elements, Earth swarms with brown soil-hued beasts that crawl on the ground; Air is a squawking assembly of birds; Fire is made of heat-forged metals, fireworks, guns and cannon, a "firestone" and a blazing candle, its hair a bright bonfire.
None makes sense in modern schemes of classification - the head of Water mingles vertebrates and invertebrates without any sense that they are different. Arcimboldo's composite heads are archetypal objects from a cabinet of curiosities. Heads made of shells survive from such collections. These paintings hung with wax objects and stuffed beasts in the emperor's curious chamber.
Arcimboldo was one of the first artists accurately to observe nature since ancient times, when Greek artists were famous for the verisimilitude of paintings that have long since vanished. His several sets of heads of the four seasons are meticulous, at their best almost miraculous, perceptions of nature. Eighty flora have been identified in the head of Spring, including dog rose and columbine, strawberries and spinach leaves, jasmine and nettles.
In the most beautiful version of this composition, now owned by the Louvre, petals give the young man a fresh pink complexion, cabbage leaves wrinkle his shoulder, and nettles entwine his chest, all painted with a precision worthy of a scientific illustrator. Yet heads composed of fruit and flowers, however accurately studied, would just be a gimmick if they did not possess something deeper.
There is a formidable power in these seasons and elements. They are more than their parts; they are not mere optical tricks, but characters or personae. They are a bit frightening, for there is at their core a life force that verges on the demonic. Arcimboldo's nature is superabundant. Even in abeyance, it is rich and full: in deepest midwinter, it is busy.
His Winter is a twisted, gnarled tree stump, and yet, far from being denuded of leaves and life, it is encrusted with parasitic growth: ivy proliferates in the woody roots of its hair, its white lips are tree fungi, two lemons hang on a sprig.
Veins bulge from its bark. In Spring, this old man is replaced by a young face pink and green with lewd vitality. The uninhibited brightness of the young world is almost painful - and this becomes still more unsettling in the face of Summer, whose ripe fruits form a mad, wild grin.
Summer's laughing cherry eyes are heartless, unthinking, sublimely potent. The softer profile of Autumn seems wiser, savouring grapes and grains. The year is a living creature that metamorphoses from one form to another through its abundant cycle.
Continuing with the model of exhibitions such as those held on Giandomenico Tiepolo in and 17th Century Flemish and Dutch Still Lifes in , this is a small-format exhibition with few but exquisite works and a very care installation. Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Flora meretrix, c Private collection. Flora, Private collection, Berlin, until ; The Klesch Collection. Bologna, Natura in Posa , Bergamo, , ill.
Barthes R. Porzio, F. Veca, Paradeisos , Bergamo, Galleria Lorenzelli, , p. In order to increase the dramatic impact of his paintings and to capture the complex poses of his figures, Tintoretto prearranged his compositions using small wax models on a stage and experimented with lamps to achieve striking chiaroscuro contrasts. Having seen works by Giulio Romano in Mantua and studied paintings by Parmigianino, he had already developed his own distinctive brand of classicism; balanced and harmonious in composition, but with a lively, often festive, content and an ability to combine anecdotal incidents with a calm sense of dignity.
His wall and ceiling frescos in the Palladian Villa Barbero at Maser, near Treviso, show views of the surrounding countryside and architecture populated by youthful aristocratic and divine figures. The licence he took with sacred subjects such as a scene commissioned for the refectory of the convent of Santi Giovanni e Paolo — Feast in the House of Levi — attracted censure from the Inquisition.
He was asked to account for the presence of ''buffoons, drunkards, dwarfs This and his other large religious feast scenes painted during the s, his Allegories of Love c. In contrast to Tintoretto's religious intensity. Veronese excelled at depicting the theatrical splendour of Venice in its Golden Age. He later moved to Venice and is thought to have been a pupil of Titian, although his work shows more of Tintoretto's influence; on a visit to Rome, he saw both Michelangelo's frescos and Raphael's paintings.
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