Allegory of Winter

For a long time this panel was treated as an echo. Giuseppe Arcimboldo's famous Four Seasons, heads assembled from the produce of each time of year, were painted in 1563 for the Habsburg court in Vienna, and the Munich Seasons were taken to be a variant of that set. The Alte Pinakothek now sees it the other way round. It dates its own pictures to around 1555 to 1560 and thinks they were probably made in Milan, before Arcimboldo left his home city in 1562 to become a court painter in Vienna and later in Prague. If that is right, the strange invention of the composite head did not start at court as an imperial entertainment. Winter here is an old, gnarled tree trunk turned into a face. The picture came into the museum from Schleissheim Palace, outside Munich.