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What sixteenth-century Milanese painter was popular with some of the surrealists because of what he did with "fruits, vegetables and flowers"?
Question
#87337. Asked by Flem-ish. (Oct 15 07 11:37 PM)
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tragic_flawed
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Best known for his surreal human heads famously compounded of various fruits, vegetables and flowers, the Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldi - also, less correctly, known as "Arcimboldo" (1527 - 1593 ) was, in addition to his work as a painter of anthropomorphic still-lives, an accomplished portraitist. Born into a distinguished Milanese family (his grandfather was an Archbishop), his abilities were employed by three successive generations of Hapsburg rulers: He was originally engaged as a portraitist by Ferdinand I for whom he painted the present portrait group. He was induced to move to Vienna in 1562 by Maximilian II to whom, on New Years' Day, 1569, he presented the first series of his signature vegetable portraits. In 1570 he traveled to Prague to produce a series of elaborate festival designs, and where he remained in the employ of Emperor Rudolf II (the middle child in the present picture) who preferred to reside in the Bohemian capitol. He immortalized Rudolf in the most famous of his anthropo-vegetable portrait masterpieces, the Vertumnus of 1591, which allegorizes that decidedly eccentric Emperor as the Roman god of nature.
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