==Biography==

[[Image:Arcimboldovertemnus.jpeg|thumb|150px|left|''[[Vertumnus]], a portrait of today''.<ref name=Souren>{{cite news|last=Melikian|first=Souren|title=Giuseppe Arcimboldo's hallucinations: Fantasy or insanity?|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/arts/05iht-melik6.1.7766101.html?_r=0|accessdate=30 December 2012|newspaper=NY Times|date=October 5, 2007}}</ref> [[Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor]] painted as Vertumnus, Roman God of the seasons, c. 1590-1. [[Skokloster Castle]], Sweden.]]

His father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist of [[Milan]]. Like his father, Giuseppe Arcimboldo started his career as a designer for stained glass and frescoes at local cathedrals when he was 21 years old.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.giuseppe-arcimboldo.org/biography.html |title=Giuseppe Arcimboldo Biography |publisher=Giuseppe-arcimboldo.org |date= |accessdate=2012-07-16}}</ref>

In 1562, he became court portraitist to [[Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor|Ferdinand I]] at the [[Habsburg]] court in [[Vienna]], and later, to [[Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor|Maximilian II]] and his son [[Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor|Rudolf II]] at the court in [[Prague]]. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. [[Augustus, Elector of Saxony]], who visited [[Vienna]] in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "The Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic [[symbol]]s.

Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, plants, fruits, sea creatures and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today.

At a distance, his portraits looked like normal human portraits. However, individual objects in each portrait were actually overlapped together to make various anatomical shapes of a human. They were carefully constructed by his imagination. Besides, when he assembled objects in one portrait, he never used random objects. Each object was related by characterization.<ref>Maiorino, Giancarlo. ''The Portrait of Eccentricity: Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque.'' The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Print.</ref> In the portrait now represented by several copies called ''The Librarian'', Arcimboldo used objects that signified the book culture at that time, such as the curtain that created individual study rooms in a library. The animal tails, which became the beard of the portrait, were used as dusters. By using everyday objects, the portraits were decoration and still-life paintings at the same time.<ref name="Elhard, K. C 2005">Elhard, K. C. "Reopening the Book on Arcimboldo’s Librarian." ''Libraries & Culture'' 40.2 Spring 2005. 115-127. ''Project MUSE''.</ref> His works showed not only nature and human beings, but also how closely they were related.<ref name=KAREN>{{cite news|last=ROSENBERG|first=KAREN|title=Several Obsessions, United on the Canvas|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/arts/design/24arcimboldo.html?_r=0|accessdate=30 December 2012|newspaper=NY Times|date=September 23, 2010}}</ref>

After a portrait was released to the public, some scholars, who had a close relationship with the book culture at that time, argued that the portrait ridiculed their scholarship.{{cn|date=September 2013}} In fact, Arcimboldo criticized rich people’s misbehavior and showed others what happened at that time through his art. In ''The Librarian'', although the painting looked ridiculous, it criticized some wealthy people who collected books in order to own them, instead of to read them.<ref name="Elhard, K. C 2005"/>

[[Art]] critics debate whether his paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged [[mind]].<ref name=Souren>{{cite news}}</ref> A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of [[Leonardo da Vinci]]), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times.{{Citation needed|date=June 2013}}

Arcimboldo died in [[Milan]], to which he had retired after leaving the Prague service. It was during this last phase of his career that he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II (see above), as well as his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career.

When the [[Sweden|Swedish]] army invaded [[Prague]] in 1648, during the [[Thirty Years' War]], many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from [[Rudolf II]]'s collection.

His works can be found in Vienna's [[Kunsthistorisches Museum]] and the [[Ambras Castle|Habsburg Schloss Ambras]] in [[Innsbruck]]; the [[Louvre]] in Paris; as well as in numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in [[Cremona]], [[Brescia]], and the [[Uffizi Gallery]] in [[Florence]]. The [[Wadsworth Atheneum]] in [[Hartford, Connecticut|Hartford]], [[Connecticut]]; the [[Denver Art Museum]] in [[Denver, Colorado]]; the Menil Foundation in [[Houston]], [[Texas]]; the Candie Museum in [[Guernsey]] and the [[Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando]] in [[Madrid]] also own [[painting]]s by Arcimboldo.