Winter

In 1563 Arcimboldo had been at the Habsburg court in Vienna for only a year, hired as a portraitist and kept busy staging tournaments and wedding festivities. That year he painted a set of the four seasons as heads, and Winter is the oldest and the grimmest of them. The face is an old tree stump. Split bark makes the skin, a broken branch the nose, a shelf fungus the mouth, and a tangle of bare twigs and ivy grows out of the scalp. Nowhere on it is there a patch of ordinary skin. The only fruit is a lemon and an orange hanging near the chest, the kind of thing that still ripens in cold months. Look at the collar of plaited straw, where a letter M is worked in. The museum reads it as Maximilian, the Habsburg heir for whom the series was probably made, and who became emperor the following year.