Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) was a favorite artist of some of the most powerful European emperors of the late Renaissance. Yet he is remembered not for his court portraits but for his strange composite heads, built from plants, animals and objects of every kind. DADA investigates his work in sixteenth-century Europe, a world fascinated by cabinets of curiosities, and reveals the secrets behind this unusual artistic recipe. Many modern and contemporary artists have since borrowed from it, among them Dalí, Duchamp, Tinguely and Koons.

The story begins in New York in December 1936. Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is about to open an exhibition on fantastic art, Dada and Surrealism. Among works by Duchamp, Dalí, Magritte and Miró hang pieces by an artist born four hundred years earlier. Visitors face five paintings by a certain Arcimboldo, a name most had never heard. They look like still lifes of fruit, vegetables, animals and other objects, but on closer inspection they turn out to be portraits. These composite heads were hard to forget, and they went on to join the most famous images in art history. Dalí himself called Arcimboldo the father of Surrealism, and his work has kept inspiring artists ever since, with echoes of it appearing throughout this issue.

Arcimboldo's paintings still resonate today partly because not all of their secrets have been uncovered. By painting faces made entirely of natural elements, he suggests that humankind, long convinced it stood at the center of the world since the Renaissance, is only a small part of a greater whole. Amusing at first glance, his works continue to surprise.