Giuseppe Arcimboldo

In 1562 Giuseppe Arcimboldo left a career designing stained glass and frescoes for the cathedral in Milan, Italy, and travelled north to Vienna, Austria, to become court portraitist to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I. He stayed in imperial service for about 25 years, first in Vienna, later in Prague, now the capital of the Czech Republic, under Ferdinand's son Maximilian II and then his grandson Rudolf II.

The job was not only painting likenesses. Arcimboldo designed pageants, tournaments and court festivals, and built mechanical devices for the emperors' amusement, work that ran alongside the paintings he is remembered for now, portraits built entirely out of objects, a face assembled from fruit, vegetables, fish or books, arranged so the composition reads as a person from a distance. His Four Seasons series, made around 1563 for Maximilian II, turned the changing year into four such composite faces.

The most famous of these, Vertumnus, painted around 1591, depicted Rudolf II himself as the Roman god of the seasons, built from grapes, pears, ears of corn and other harvest produce, a portrait of the emperor as the source of the empire's abundance. Arcimboldo returned home to Milan in 1587 and died there six years later.