A Little Fruit with those Veggies, Please

I’ve been meaning to post this for so long that it seems appropriate to do it now while I’ve just mentioned Mardi Gras costumes, which conjures dressing up in disguise.

This reminds me of  Arcimboldo exhibit that my son Piers and I saw at the National Gallery of Art while he was in town for winter break. I had studied Archimboldo for my Art History major but wasn’t really familiar with the details of his work. I was mesmerized by how everything he painted, in exceptional detail, had some sort of symbolic meaning and or was attributed to the world’s fascination, at the time, with new found flora and fauna in Nature and even with the grotesque. Not to mention, the exceptional skill it took to assemble all these elements to paint a trompe l’oeil painting that was an imaginative and representational portrait. He was highly regarded and popular during his lifetime (unlike so many artists). He was the court painter for three different monarchs, Ferdinand I (Habsbourg), Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II (Prague). Leonardo was probably aware of his work and later, Salvador Dali, among others, were influenced by his surrealistic style. The more you look at his paintings, the more will be unveiled.

Here’s a picture that we took of an incredible modern sculpture that was inspired by Arcimboldo’s Winter montage/ portrait, above.

Since I normally post about Murals on Mondays, how could I forget. Here’s a wonderful trompe l’oeil mural of a humorous grocery/ fruit stand scene in Osaka, Japan.