Life of Wry

That’s probably true of absolutely everything, but it’s now certifiably true about my garden faces. Marty commented on my most recent FB post that featured the latest — and last — of the season’s garden faces. He said something about how Arcimboldo would be proud. Not knowing who (or what) that was, I AI Googled and learned me some art facts.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, also spelled Arcimboldi (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe artʃimˈbɔldo];^[1] 5 April 1527 – 11 July 1593), was an Italian Mannerist painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.^[2]

These works form a distinct category from his other productions. He was a conventional court painter of portraits for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague; also producing religious subjects and, among other things, a series of coloured drawings of exotic animals in the imperial menagerie. He specialized in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms.^{[3][full citation needed]}

The still life portraits were clearly partly intended as curiosities to amuse the court, but critics have speculated as to how seriously they engaged with Renaissance Neo-Platonism or other intellectual currents of the day.

Whattaya know.

Here’s a sample, probably the most famous of his fruit (and vegetable and flower) faces:

I’ll have to up my game in 2026.