b.c. 1527, Milan, d.1593, Milan Italian Giuseppe Arcimboldo Galleries Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527, the son of Biagio, a painter who did work for the office of the Fabbrica in the Duomo.Arcimboldo was commissioned to do stained glass window designs beginning in 1549, including the Stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria vitrage at the Duomo. In 1556 he worked with Giuseppe Meda on frescoes for the Cathedral of Monza. In 1558, he drew the cartoon for a large tapestry of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, which still hangs in the Como Cathedral today. In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "The Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols. Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, fruit and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today. Art critics debate whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind.. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci, a fellow Milanese), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times. Arcimboldo died in Milan, to which he retired after leaving the Habsburg service. It was during this last phase of his career that he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II (see above), as well as his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career. His hidden-face still-lives are a possible influence on his younger Lombard contemporary Caravaggio, whose painting of fruit in the Brera museum in Milan ranks as one of the earliest independent still-lives. When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years' War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from Rudolf II's collection. His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris, as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, and the Candie Museum in Guernsey also own paintings by Archimboldo.  Related Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo :. | the jurist | Water | Spring | Water | Emperor Rudolf II as a Vertumnus |
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Baldung
b.c. 1484, Schwäbisch Gm??nd, W??rttemberg [Germany] d.1545, Imperial Free City of Strasbourg [now Strasbourg, Fr.] Hans Baldung Gallery
Constantin Daniel Stahi
(November 14, 1844 - June 18, 1920) was a Romanian painter and gravure artist. In 1862 he entered the National School of Fine Arts from Iaşi where he was taught by Gheorghe Panaiteanu Bardasare and Gheorghe Şiller. He continued his artistic education in Munich where, for seven years, he studied painting, metal gravure and xylography. He painted still life paintings representing small objects that were surrounding him, such as old books, newspapers, religious items, chairs, shoes, plates and especially fruits. Also, he painted many portraits of famous people of his time (for example Gheorghe Asachi, painted in 1881). Many others of his paintings take inspiration from the simple life in the countryside in idyllic compositions and by painting peasants having as models people living in Bavaria and Moldova regions. Beside his artistic career, he was a professor and, later on, the headmaster of the National School of Fine Arts in Iaşi between 1892 and 1902, following Gheorghe Panaiteanu Bardasare. He died in his house on Bărboi street in Iaşi on June 18, 1920 and was interred at Eternitatea Cemetery.
Rene Schutzenberger
Rene Schutzenberger (Mulhouse July 29, 1860, Paris December 31, 1916), also known as Paul Rene Schutzenberger, was a French painter. Born in an Alsatian family of famous brewers, his father Paul Schutzenberger (1829-1897) was a French chemist. The painter Louis-Frederic Schutzenberger (1825-1903) was his cousin. He studied at the Academie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens. He started to exhibit at the Salon des artistes français since 1891, at the Salon des Independants since 1902 and at the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts since 1907. He got an honourable mention at the Salon of 1897 and at the Universal Exhibition of 1900. He practices genre painting, portraits, nudes and landscapes. He treats subjects of the daily life and intimists subjects. His style is close to the Post-Impressionism movement. His drawings are influenced by the Nabis.