Dali’s great-great-great-grandfather
“Portrait of Frau Isabel Styler-Tas”, sometimes called “Melancolia”, appears in the Dali Planet biography (here), but I didn’t realise that it pays homage to Giuseppe Arcimboldo (as well as Mrs Styler-Tas) until I read a Guardian review of the Arcimboldo exhibition that’s at Vienna’s Kunsthistoriches Museum until June 29.
Specifically, he’s alluding to “Winter”, shown above, from the 16th-century Milanese master’s series on the seasons, though I have no idea what he had in mind in making it a mirror image of the good frau, as seen here.
There’s an image of the full painting at the bottom of this post.
The surrealists’ shared affection for this 400-year-old precursor would have come naturally, to pun on Arcimboldo’s keen eye for nature (which isn’t as bad as the Guardian’s use of the term “family tree”). It said the 1937 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art actually featured works by the Italian antecedent, who was famous for his visual puns and double meanings. At right is “The Librarian” from 1566.
And, like Dali, Arcimboldo’s state of mind has been called into question on the basis of the gargoyles he came up with, which some find as scary as anything by Hieronymus Bosch. Even art historian Sylvio Leidi speaks of “nightmarish visions” in the catalogue for the current exhibition, and traces his ghoulishness back to early tapestries in which grimacing old men and ape-like faces vie for attention. See the rest.
