Dali House

“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.

The original “Winter” from 1563, a decade before he painted the one at the top of this post.

Those who think him deranged, though, are surely ignoring his sense of humour, as people so often did with Dali. His ghouls are far less frightening than an Edmund Dulac illustration for a child’s fairytale.

From among Arcimboldo’s Frankenstein portraits patched together with the week’s shopping, “Spring” and “Summer” are trotted out every time a food magazine needs a graphic for a story on vegetable soup, and I imagine the fish department at Harrod’s in London is still assembling ornate sculptures with its daily catch like the one I vividly remember seeing in 1969.

Yet some regard the Arcimboldo portraits as terrifying, particularly when they encounter his less-known elements series, like “Water”, details seen here and below.

Arcimboldo (1527-1593) was a Milan painter’s son who learned early on to do stained-glass windows and frescoes, but he found his living elsewhere, and by his 40s was Maximilian II’s official portraitist in Vienna. He later worked for Max’s son, Rudolf II in Prague, and duplicated his four seasons for King Augustus of Saxony.

Sylvio Leidi thinks these aristocrats loved weirdness so much that Arcimboldo was either obliged to feed their fantasies or having hallucinations of his own — or just expressing a twisted psyche. In “Fire” from “The Four Elements”, she thinks Arcimboldo may be playing at sadism.

He was celebrated in his own time, but forgotten soon after, and it took Dali to excavate him from deep in the subconscious.

Arcimboldo was the topic of discussion for Dali and the Spanish muralist Jose Maria Sert when the former came up with the idea for the painting below, 1936’s “The Great Paranoiac”. It became part of Edward James’ collection and now resides at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

“The face,” Dali explained, sort of, “is formed with the people of the Ampurdan [his home territory in Catalonia], who are the greatest paranoiacs.” If you can see the double image, he said, it shows that you too are paranoiac.

Sert’s best-known public murals were made for the Hotel de Ville in Paris, the Cathedral of Vich in Catalonia, the League of Nations in Geneva and, in New York, the Waldorf-Astoria and 30 Rockefeller Center, the GE Center. There, his “American Progress” replaced Diego Rivera’s controversial homage to Lenin.