Giuseppe Arcimboldo Read the text below before answering the questions.
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The Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo was a popular Renaissance painter whose strange portraits and puzzle pictures brought him celebrity in his time and still intrigue us today.
Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527, the son of a painter, and he died in 1593. At first he made a living by designing conventional stained glass windows with religious themes and tapestries. But when he went to Prague to become court painter to the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian and to his successor, the Emperor Rudolph, he began to paint portraits of leading figures in court. These were recognisable allegorical portraits which shared one original but puzzling feature: the heads and torsos are wholly composed of painted collages of different elements such as fruit, flowers, fish or domestic objects.
These bizarre paintings became very popular and Arcimboldo was honoured by the Emperor Rudolph, who made him a Count as a reward for the portrait of him as Vertumnus, the Roman God of Seasons and Change.
Arcimboldo's work continues to be popular today, yet fewer than thirty portraits still exist, half of which are copies made by the artist himself.
The type of visual pun that he used in his portraits was much appreciated by Surrealist artists in the twentieth century and is a device that is still often imitated in contemporary advertisements.