# 49
This week, another trip to Dulwich Picture Gallery raises the old Arcimboldo Question[i]. A thorn in the deliberations of art historians for several centuries, contemporary critics still ignore it at their peril. Arcimboldo’s conundrum deserves revival at this seminal mo.…Hang on, the more assertive among you cry, the what question?
Okay, sorry, it’s all bluff – there is no ‘Arcimboldo Question’, or rather there wasn’t until about five minutes ago when I invented it. I wanted something that sounded like an issue we would have affected to understand back in our sixth form days and which the intervening years have let slip from sight. It needed a history of never quite being resolved (shades of Gladstone and ‘The Eastern Question’) combined with hints of a decent intellectual pedigree (an Italian-sounding name beats 'Reggie Plank' every time). Something that, in the nineteenth century, might have caused riots in the Latin Quarter (try ‘Salon des Refusés’[ii]). More recently, it could have underlain some totally esoteric dilemma – perhaps one hand- knitted by Tam Dalyell (try ‘The West Lothian Question’[iii]). Ideally, it would lead ultimately to a tantalizing paradox that might have been cited in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe[iv].
Turns out (unless you’re Douglas Adams) it’s surprisingly difficult to manufacture a phoney theory and imply it has a convincing back-story, steeped in controversy. Douglas often hit the nail. He observed, for example, that civilizations tend “to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.”[v] By the last quarter of the twentieth century the central question confronting our technologically advanced societies was no longer ‘How can we eat?’ nor even ‘Why do we eat?’ but had become – in Douglas ’ words - ‘Where shall we have lunch?’
Talking of which, where was I? Oh yes, back somewhere four hundred years ago with Giuseppe Arcimboldo. As a Mannerist painter working in the late sixteenth century, what might his question have been, had history recorded that he asked one? He is mainly remembered now for his paintings of the Four Seasons in which each season is depicted separately in a portrait of a human head composed from seasonal vegetables, plants, fruit, sea creatures and tree roots. From a distance the paintings look normal. It’s only closer that they are revealed as still life paintings of fruit & veg arranged to represent heads. He chose his plants with care according to what they signify. Most obviously, in ‘Spring’ the nose is composed of flowers whereas ‘Winter’ uses tree roots to represent the annual retreat of life into the soil for survival and replenishment.
The question that I believe arises from Arcimboldo’s work is not ‘How did he do that?’ but ‘Why?’ The ‘How’ is answered visually. It is plain that Arcimboldo worked in two stages. First, he assembled his chosen items into the form of a head, then he painted these from life. The portrait in oils is thus a depiction of previously arranged pieces of fruit and flowers and bark and roots etc. A more modern sensibility might have persuaded him to make several paintings of each assemblage, recording how the passage of time caused the fruit to ripen then decay and the flowers to wilt. Each face would be seen to age as the fruit and flowers decayed.
We can only speculate as to why Arcimboldo decided to make portraits the way he did. Clearly, his inspiration came from an appreciation of nature. He also shared the general Renaissance fascination with puzzles, riddles and the bizarre. Interpretations might include ‘you are what you eat’ but I like the humorous possibilities that arise from his portrait of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor[vi]. Contrast the florid depiction of Rudolf with the Biblical observation concerning ‘the lilies of the field’[vii]. Surely the satire in that would not have escaped a sixteenth century viewer?
Salvador Dali called Arcimboldo ‘the father of surrealism’. Picasso, George Grosz and Rene Magritte all acknowledged his influence. In about 1928, Rene Magritte painted a picture of a smoker’s pipe and called it ‘La trahison des images’. Below the pipe he wrote, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. The painting is not a pipe; it is a representation of a pipe. The image is not the thing itself. And now along has come Philip Haas and made four monumental[viii] sculptures in painted fibreglass of the heads in Arcimboldo’s Four Seasons. These are on view in the gardens of Dulwich Picture Gallery until 16th. September 2012. And with Haas’ intervention my newly minted ‘Arcimboldo Question’ shifts decisively from How to Why?
Inside the gallery are four maquettes, also made by Haas, presumably as preliminaries to the larger pieces. These are close to life-size and therefore close to the size of the original paintings. The maquettes work, the monumental sculptures don’t. The reason is that the fruit and veg represented in the maquettes are convincing. They are believably close to their natural size and so too are the complete heads. In the large versions the exaggerated scale only amplifies their unreality and everything reads as fibreglass not face or fruit or flower. There is no revelation of difference when you get closer, as there is with the original paintings. In fact the incorporation of a plinth into the body supporting each head produces a farcical effect. The four heads, free standing in the garden, look like a bunch of daleks preparing for the Notting Hill carnival. Philip Haas has not so much lost the clarity of Arcimboldo’s two distinct stages as missed it entirely. By opting for both fibreglass and monumental scale, he has focused entirely on How and failed to consider Why. What’s the point of such monstrosities?
Hopefully, something akin to the “old” Arcimboldo Question has haunted film director Danny Boyle during preparations for the opening ceremony to the London Olympics. Back in June he unveiled a maquette of the proposed stage set. You may remember this; it took the form of an idealised rural landscape, a piece of ‘Merrie England
“I smell a rat…Caliban, monster offspring of a witch, makes no mention of Isles of Wonder. Instead he inhabits an island awash in conflict, drink, sex and dark arts…(which) he is trying to seize and return to primeval anarchy…by driving a stake through saintly Prospero’s head, helped by two drunken hooligans.”
Ouch!
More recently, aerial photos of preparations underway inside the Olympic stadium show a ground plan of London bisected by the familiar meandering of the Thames [ix]. The previous ‘rural idiocy’[x] is currently absent…suggesting that the opening tableau of a ‘green and pleasant land’ will quickly succumb to an underlying milieu more suggestive of ‘dark satanic mills’ and proper urban angst. The ceremony on July 27 will reveal somebody’s vision, somebody’s representation of London , of England , of Britain
[i] Giuseppe Arcimboldo (aka Arcimboldi). Italian painter, 1527 – 1593.
[ii] In 1863, the Salon jury rejected Manet’s ‘Le déjeuner sur l’herbe’.
[iii] If you don’t already know, best not to ask.
[iv] The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Douglas Adams, 1980. Pan Macmillan, London
[v] Ibid.
[vi] See Arcimboldo’s portrait ‘Vertumnus’ (1590-1) in which the Holy Roman Emperor is painted as the Roman god of the seasons.
[vii] From the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:28-30 (KJV):
”Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these…”
[viii] Each sculpture stands about 4.5 metres (15 feet) high.
[ix] See opening or closing credits to ‘EastEnders’ on BBC 1 Television.
[x] See Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter 1. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels. 1848.
I like to mention the old boys from time to time.
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