Giuseppe Arcimboldo's portraits

Born to a Milanese artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo became a court portraitist in 1562, when he began delighting his Hapsburg patrons with lavish and bizarre portraits composed entirely of fruits, vegetables and other organic elements.

He first presented these composite portraits in 1569 in two sets of four. One set, "The Four Seasons," contained portraits rooted in seasonal crops and plants, while another set, "The Four Elements," assembled faces out of sea creatures, birds, mammals and flammables to represent water, air, earth and fire.

The pictures' popularity stemmed not only from their zoological and botanical attention to detail and scientific accuracy, but also for their unusual wit and humor. They even included a few visual homonyms, like a human ear being represented by an ear of corn.

Corny jokes aside, the paintings were also meant to represent the royal family's dominion over all things natural, from the fish in the sea to the birds in the sky. It was no accident that Arcimboldo included crops such as eggplant, which were brought back from far-flung colonies in the New World.

After his death in 1593, Arcimboldo’s work was scattered for centuries before its rediscovery in the early 1900s, at which point he became a prominent Surrealist movement inspiration.