Oddlet: Giuseppe Arcimboldo · 1 min read
Oct 1, 2026
The Emperor Made of Vegetables
What do you do when your court painter, a decorated cathedral man, starts rendering your jurist as a heap of raw poultry pinned around a syphilitic face?
Giuseppe Arcimboldo trained the respectable way. His father painted cathedrals; Giuseppe started in 1549 designing stained glass for the Duomo of Milan, then frescoes at Monza, then a tapestry cartoon for Como Cathedral. In 1562, the Holy Roman Emperor summoned him to Vienna to serve as court portraitist to the Habsburgs.
He began painting the courtiers as groceries.
The court historian Wolfgang Lazius he rendered as a tottering stack of books with an open volume for hair, in a portrait he called The Librarian. The court jurist he built out of raw poultry and fish, pinned together around a syphilis-scarred face, and the court reportedly found this hilarious. Contemporaries had a word for the paintings, or rather three: scherzi, grilli, capricci. Jokes, whims, caprices. It is not obvious the sitters were consulted.
Then, around 1590, he turned to Rudolf II himself, the most powerful man in Christendom, and painted the emperor's face as a pile of grapes, cherries, cabbage, artichokes, wheat, figs, and pomegranates, with a pear for a nose.
In 1592, Rudolf made him a Count Palatine and gave him 1,500 Rhenish guilders for his long, faithful and conscientious service.
Only three artists were ennobled in the entire sixteenth century.
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- Wikipedia - Giuseppe Arcimboldo — Comprehensive biography covering birth/death dates, patrons, list of paintings with dates, contemporary descriptions by Lomazzo/Comanini/Morigia, and 20th-century Surrealist rediscovery.
- The Art Story - Arcimboldo — Details early career at Milan Cathedral, Monza, Como, his role as festival designer at the Habsburg court, and the 1592 Count Palatine title and 1500 Rhenish guilders award.
- Wikipedia - Vertumnus (Arcimboldo) — Facts on the 1591 Vertumnus: oil on panel dimensions, specific fruits/vegetables depicted, symbolism, and provenance ending at Skokloster Castle, Sweden.
- Skokloster Castle (official site) — Museum page for Vertumnus documenting the painting's presence in the Swedish royal collection and its accompaniment by Gregorio Comanini's poem.
- National Gallery of Art (Washington) - Arcimboldo exhibition brochure — Museum-level scholarly overview of his court career from Milan stained glass to Prague Kunstkammer.
- Habsburger.net — 'Depicting imperial might in pictures – with fruit'
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