The Fruit Basket

By around 1590 Arcimboldo had spent most of his working life as court painter to the Habsburgs in Vienna and Prague, entertaining emperors with faces built out of vegetables, fish, and books. Back home in Milan near the end, he made this small panel, and it carries the trick further. Hang it one way and you see a plain basket of fruit on a table. Turn it upside down and the same grapes, apples, and pears become a ruddy human face, cheeks and lips and a leafy cap. Nothing is added or taken away; the fruit does both jobs at once. A few years later the young Caravaggio painted a boy holding a basket of fruit in Rome, and some think he had seen an idea like this one.