The Librarian

Step back from this painting and you see a man in a scholar's robe. Step closer and he falls apart into books. The face is a stack of open volumes, the hair a fanned-out sheaf of pages, the fingers slips of bookmark ribbon, the beard a feather duster of the kind used to keep dust off the shelves. Giuseppe Arcimboldo built dozens of these composite heads at the Habsburg imperial court in Vienna and Prague, where he served as portraitist to a run of emperors and staged their pageants and collections. The sitter here is thought to be Wolfgang Lazius, a humanist and historian in Habsburg service. People still argue about the mood of it, whether Arcimboldo meant to honour a great collector or to gently mock the kind of man who owns books more than he reads them. The picture ended up in Sweden as war booty, carried off when Swedish troops looted Prague in 1648, and it hangs today at Skokloster Castle.