A New book on the Louvre’s 2nd Biggest Draw
by Jon Lackman | 7 May 2010 | Books, Renaissance
In the April 2010 issue of The Art Newspaper, Sylvia Ferino reviews Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s book Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-life Painting:
Since the most recent exhibitions devoted to Arcimboldo, in Paris and Vienna in 2007-8, his composite heads of “The Four Seasons” series, 1573, in the Louvre are said to have become that museum’s most popular paintings, second only to the Mona Lisa. This undoubtedly reflects the fact that Arcimboldo’s highly original creations appeal in the age of the “visual turn.” Further exhibitions are planned (at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and Palazzo Reale, Milan, in 2010-11) and promise to prolong this success …
Arcimboldo’s unique imagination still manages to captivate even visually jaded viewers. What is its secret? … [Kaufmann] is interested less in the artist, the concrete creative processes or the imagery than in revealing the sophisticated connections between these pictorial forms and descriptions of such phenomena in literature … His aim is to reconstruct the intellectual mood of the scholarly milieu that inspired the artist to produce these works … Over more than 300 pages, this elegantly illustrated book offers us an abundance of complex and elliptical reflections on art, nature, philosophy and poetry … What the book perhaps lacks is something of that trenchant irony Arcimboldo used when caricatured himself as a “man of letters” in a drawing where his face is composed of strips of paper.
I was guessing Michelangelo.
Obviously not Monet, given the question.