The Gardener

Turn this painting one way and you see a plain brown bowl heaped with root vegetables, onions, a radish, dark mushrooms. Turn it upside down and the bowl becomes a hat, the vegetables a ruddy peasant face, the gardener of the title. Arcimboldo had spent decades in Prague and Vienna as court painter to the Habsburg emperors, inventing composite heads like this to amuse a sophisticated audience that prized clever, surprising things. He made this after returning home to Milan late in life, around 1587. It is one of the few of his pictures built to be flipped, and it still hangs in Cremona, where a visitor has to do the work, tipping it over to find the man hiding in the harvest.