ABROAD
Arcimboldo’s Feast for the Eyes
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: October 10, 2007
PARIS — Aside from World Cup rugby and Vélib’, the self-service
bike-sharing program that at the moment seems to obsess le tout
Paris, the most amusing cultural diversion here is the Giuseppe
Arcimboldo exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg.
Kunsthistorisches Museum
“Summer” by Arcimboldo.
Multimedia
Slide Show
Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Richard Harbus for The New York Times
The Arcimboldo exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg.
Around the city kiosks advertise fashion magazines offering advice to
young women on how to flirt at Vélib’ parking stations (with hair
aptly wind-swept, feign difficulty with the automated pay system
whenever a desirable man appears), and they also display colorful
posters of puffy-cheeked faces made out of corn, pickles, garlic and
cherries to promote Arcimboldo, the 16th-century Italian gimmick
painter.
I had my doubts. But it turns out that the show’s a charmer, not too
shallow, admirably concise, almost chic. The glad mobs, forming
polite, cheerful scrums before these stately paintings of people with
vegetable faces and fish eyes seem to recognize in Arcimboldo
something of the French impulse to bring order to everything.
There is a temptation to find in the show’s popularity a metaphor for
the general mood here. France’s hyperactive president, Nicolas
Sarkozy, has embarked on a campaign of economic transition and
tough love. He is pushing a new French globalism in lieu of the
comfortable old welfare system that has guaranteed early retirement
and many other benefits, along with high unemployment, especially
among disenfranchised immigrants, to whom he has done
conspicuously little to endear himself.
Arcimboldo’s subject was the instability of life, its changeability in a
widening world, his purpose being to inspire a fresh but not always
entirely comforting sense of possibility and wonderment. Mercantile
conquests by 16th-century European powers, France included,
uncovered new continents, from which an ear of corn, exotic and rare,
could serve not just as a visual pun for a human ear but also as a
political symbol of faraway places, economies, peoples — of nature
itself — brought to heel.
That said, I would hazard that the general horde of visitors, a good
percentage of whom seem to be strapped into strollers and under four
feet tall, don’t dwell overmuch on metaphorical meanings. They wait
in a long line that every day snakes out the front door of the museum
into the Luxembourg Gardens, where parents dragoon reluctant
children from the ancient carousel and pony rides out of the autumn
sunshine toward the show, girded by the assuring sight of happy
families exiting it.
Mr. Fruit Face, as a friend of mine disdainfully calls him, has always
been a guaranteed hit with the Transformer-age crowd. But his art is
more serious and self-important than that. You can imagine him to
have been the sort of initially jocular, learned dinner party
companion whose arrogance makes itself known by the salad course.
That he inspired thousands of appalling 20th-century Surrealists,
apparently shocked at the genius of conceiving a gherkin to replace a
nose, or a rose a cheek, isn’t his fault.
Born in Milan in 1536, the son of a local artist, he started out painting
conventional, darkling portraits. They’re brittle but deft. He paid
obeisance to Leonardo da Vinci via intermediaries like Bernardino
Luini, who is said to have been a family friend. Commissions for
stained glass and tapestries, permitting minor flights of peculiar
fancy, eventually landed him in the employ of Maximilian II, in
Vienna, then of Maximilian’s cultivated son, Rudolf II.
There he finally cooked up his famous faces. They satisfied a taste for
exoticism. This was the era of high humanist curiosity. Newly
rediscovered ancient texts like Pliny’s natural history circulated
among scholars and artists; in the show, watercolors of animals and
fish by Arcimboldo, exacting models he adapted for parts of faces,
show him to be firmly grounded in science and real observation.
Global exploration and advances in fields like optics and engineering
stirred Rudolf, like other enlightened patrons, to wish to possess
whatever was the rarest, the finest, the strangest, the most
inexplicable art and artifacts. From such cabinets of curiosities —
attempts to catalog and rationalize the irrational — evolved, one day,
the modern museum. This was Arcimboldo’s milieu and motivation.
Usefully, the show includes more than a few works by sculptors and
decorators who also catered to a fixation on the marvelous. Coconuts,
conch shells, ostrich eggs and coral, gathered from the distant corners
of the earth, become goblets, bowls and hilts for swords, threedimensional versions of his painted faces. They’re about art’s roots in
mysticism and magic. Painting itself is a sleight-of-hand trick, after
all: colored dirt becomes an illusion.
Along which lines Arcimboldo clearly picked up pointers from Bosch
and no doubt from Persian miniaturists. A gorgeous show of classic
Iranian art happens to have just opened at the Louvre, and it includes
several astonishing paintings from Arcimboldo’s time: fantastical
landscapes populated by wild creatures. Stare at the mountain scenes,
and faces can begin to suggest themselves in the salt-taffy rock
formations and trees.
All artists have their niches, and this commonplace slip of the mind
became for Arcimboldo a virtual cottage industry. A bust of a bearded
librarian, with a tin-man face made of books, and bookmarks for
fingers, is a clever feat of virtuosity, like the “reversible” pictures he
painted: right side up, they’re still lifes; upside down, portraits.
More interestingly, he also painted a three-quarter view of an old
man, grossly desiccated, memorably perverse because somehow still
dignified, almost courtly in his dotage, with branch stumps for a
stubble, and a portrait of a German jurist, the humanist Johann
Ulrich Zasius, with a plucked chicken for a head, a fish mouth and
fish-tail chin. It’s scary in ways that can almost remind you of
Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, troubling the mind like a
half-remembered nightmare.
So too a quartet of stiff, plain-spoken little portraits of the family of
Pedro Gonzalez, whose distinction was to grow hair all over their
faces, like the Wolf Man, an accident of nature akin to the Virgin
Mary’s portrait appearing in a grilled-cheese sandwich.
The universe concocts such marvels, which man emulates through art
and industry, hoping to best. That was Arcimboldo’s bottom-line goal,
and his ambition, so frank and intellectual, gives to his prankish,
often grotesque work its stylish hauteur.
Come to think of it, no wonder the French love him.
“Arcimboldo” continues at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris
through Jan. 13; museeduluxembourg.fr.
N