ART AND IMAGES IN PSYCHIATRY SECTION EDITOR: JAMES C. HARRIS, MD Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus: A Portrait of Rudolf II Whoever you are, looking at me, . for on the outside A strange deformed image, I seem a monster, and on the inside With a laugh on your lips I hide a kingly image, and That flashes in your eyes A heavenly resemblance... And stamps your face Holy, invincible, supreme, august With novel happiness And righteous Rudolf, honour of Austria... Gregorio Comanini, The Figino, or on the Purpose of Painting, 15911(p19,24) IUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO and for Earth, various animals; each of the elements. So pleased was Emperor (1527-1593) was a cre- them signifies a human attribute. For Maximilian that he had himself cos- ative force in the courts of example, the crafty fox is shown at the tumed as Arcimboldo’s Winter in a sea- Maximilian II (1527- sonal celebration. Rudolf hung copies of G1576) and his son Rudolf II (1552- paintings of the Seasons in his bedroom 1612), Habsburg emperors of the Holy and ordered additional copies to give to Roman Empire in Vienna and Prague.2,3 leading dignitaries. Arcimboldo also Originally recruited as a court painter, made composite portraits of individu- Arcimboldo saw his role rapidly expand als of the royal household. The Librar- to arranging lavish court ceremonies ian (Figure 1) depicts the curator of the (royal marriages, festivities for a royal imperial collections and historian, Wolf- crowning), designing costumes and gang Lazius (1514-1565), composed in masques for balls, and organizing tour- books. His hair is shown as an inverted naments. He designed ducal coats of arms, open book, the spine of a book forms his decorated organ cases, and proposed a nose, and his fingers are protruding colorimetric system for musical transcrip- bookmarks. tion, wherein a melody might be repre- Roland Barthes, French philoso- sented by small spots of color on a sheet pher, literary theorist, and semiotician, of paper. And he composed poems about writes his paintings. For all these creative ac- tivities, he was granted the title of Count that, like a baroque poet, Arcimboldo ex- Palatinate the year after completing his ploits the “curiosities” of language, plays on portrait of Rudolf II as Vertumnus; the synonymy and homonymy. His painting has a linguistic foundation, his imagination is po- title was a rare honor given to only 3 art- etic in the proper sense of the word: it does ists in the 16th century, one Arcim- not create signs, it combines them, per- boldo shared with Titian. Figure 1. The Librarian. © Skokloster Castle mutes them, deflects them—exactly what a Today he is best known for his re- Sweden. craftsman of language does.4(pp15,16) markable composite portraits (cover) that brow of the head: its tail forms the eye- demonstrate his wittiness and, on view- brows. Earth’s cheek is an elephant, He points out that rhetoric and its fig- ing, surely bring a smile (epigraph). At ures is how the West has always viewed first, Arcimboldo drew on the natural believed in that era to symbolize mod- esty. Moreover, the faces were com- language. In language, there can be trans- world and juxtaposed items such as sea- ferences of meaning (metaboles) that can posed to complement one another and sonal fruits, vegetables, trees, and flow- be coded and named; thus, Arcim- 2 to be displayed together. The seasons ers to create faces. He began with the per- boldo is a rhetorician. In his art, a shell Autumn and Winter and the elements sonification of the 4 Seasons, completed stands for an ear (metaphor), a group- in 1563. Three years later, he finalized the Air and Fire were male, and Spring and ing of fish stands for the Water in which 4 Elements; both series were presented to Summer, Earth and Water, were female, they live (metonymy), and Fire is a flam- Emperor Maximilian II on New Year’s conforming to their Latin grammatical ing head (allegory). The inclusion of Day in 1569. Depicting youth in Spring genders. fruits and ears of grain to compose Sum- and old age in Winter, the Seasons rep- The corresponding pictures—Air/ mer is an allusion. Using a fish for a nose resent the seasons of one’s life. Spring’s Spring, Summer/Fire, Autumn/Earth, and in one place and a mouth in another is face is that of a young man composed en- Winter/Water—complement one an- antanaclasis (repeating a word in a way tirely of flowers while Winter’s face is other in gender and were displayed fac- that changes its meaning). Finally, he framed by a gnarled tree trunk. Summer ing one another. These images were notes that annomination or paronoma- is composed of ears of corn and veg- meant not only to entertain but also sym- sia is a form of punning. It evokes one etables. Autumn is filled with seasonal bolically to glorify the Habsburg dy- thing by another that has the same form: fruit; the eye of Autumn is a small plum. nasty by representing the harmony of the for example, a nose by the rump of a bird. For the element Water, he used empire in representations of humanity Thus, Arcimboldo makes a visual pun sea creatures to form a composite head naturally embedded in the seasons and that may comment on the character of ARCH GEN PSYCHIATRY/ VOL 68 (NO. 5), MAY 2011 WWW.ARCHGENPSYCHIATRY.COM 442 ©2011 American Medical Association. All rights reserved. Downloaded From: https://jamanetwork.com/ on 09/28/2021 the person in his portrait The Jurist, pos- gument, the old woman narrates an Prague for advice. And he carried out his sibly imperial vice-chancellor Johann apocryphal story about the dangers of own experiments in private alchemy. Ulrich Zasius.2(p60) Barthes’ approach to rejecting a suitor.5(pp511-514) Although often not fully appreci- Arcimboldo’s rhetoric challenges the In a tale about Greek youths, Iphis ated, Rudolf’s religiously tolerant court viewer to examine his paintings more is rejected by Anaxarete and threatens in Prague led the transition from the closely. suicide. Anaxarete is unmoved by his fi- thought of the Middle Ages and the Re- The best known of Arcimboldo’s nal plea for her love; Iphis commits sui- naissance to the 17th-century Age of Rea- composite portraits is that of Rudolf II cide by hanging. He positions his body son. Rudolf served as a patron to natu- as the Etruscan god Vertumnus (Latin, outside her door so that as he dies, his ral philosophers, including botanist verte¯re means “to change”). Said in Ro- dangling body bangs against her door. Charles de l’E´ cluse and astronomers Ty- man mythology to be present at the Anaxarete turns away when Iphis’ fu- cho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. He founding of Rome, Vertumnus is the god neral bier passes under her window. To brought humanists—Catholic, Protes- of the changing seasons who retains an punish her emotional coldness, the gods tant, and Jewish—into a single body of underlying permanence3(p66)—surface turn her to stone. When this veiled threat scholars. With Rudolf’s support, Kepler changes but with an enduring pres- also fails to move Pomona, Vertumnus correctly demonstrated that the orbits of ence. He oversaw the seasonal growth finally assumes his true godly form. On Earth and Mars were elliptical; Galileo of gardens, wild plants, and fruit trees. seeing his magnificence, Pomona fi- incorrectly believed them to be circu- Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus was com- nally, but reluctantly, relents and agrees lar. Kepler’s accomplishments were ap- pleted, along with the complementary to marry him. plauded in Prague, but Galileo was con- Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers and Gregorio Comanini’s poem1 (AD demned in Rome. the season of spring (Figure 2), after 1591) remains the best contemporary de- In 1648, nearly 4 decades after the his formal retirement from the Habs- scription of Arcimboldo’s painting and death of Rudolf II, the Swedish sacked burg court to Milan, when conditions Prague during the Thirty Years’ War that there were more favorable to his cre- pitted Catholic against Protestant, which ativity following his “long faithful and followed Rudolf’s religiously tolerant conscientious service” to the emperor. rule. Arcimboldo’s portrait passed into Rudolf’s portrait is a composite of the collection of Queen Christina of Swe- painted fruits, flowers, and vegetables den and afterwards to Baron von Essen harmoniously drawn together from in Skokloster Castle, where it resides to each of the 4 seasons.1 His hair is con- this day. structed from millet, grapes, sheaves of Although Rudolf did not find the phi- wheat, and an ear of corn. His nose is a losopher’s stone, the open-mindedness pear; an apple and peach form the he established in his court toward art and cheeks. His forehead is a melon, and science in an era of religious turmoil be- his beard is made up of nuts and chest- tween Catholics and Protestants set the stage for the modern scientific world nuts. One eye is a cherry and the other 3 a red mulberry. A ripe fig hangs down view. As for Arcimboldo, his creative composite portraits and his serious vi- from his left ear. Seasonal flowers 2 sprout from his chest. Arcimboldo’s sual jokes reveal him to be the true Ver- tumnus, master of changes and trans- transformation of the emperor’s face to 7 that of Vertumnus has political, poetic, formations. and symbolic import. Politically, Rudolf II is shown as master, not only Figure 2.