On show in Milan on surrealist genius of Giuseppe Arcimboldo

LONDON - were alive today, would be a commercial success. More than four hundred years later, the heads of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Milano 1527-1593), on display at the Royal Palace until 22 May, never cease to fascinate the public. So much to come right in the collective imagination: those who have never seen on television or some book, The Librarian, rather than the cycle of seasons. Still, the figure of Arcimboldo seems to have remained muted. Note to all are the works of the Viennese period (Seasons, Elements) and late-Milan (the reversible heads, the famous Verturno and head of the four seasons of the year), while the artist's life were untraceable. For it is even more difficult to place in a given period of art history, so the work seems to anticipate the times. Conversely, for critics and art historians, Arcimboldo is a follower, one of the school of Leonardo, to be known more of curiosity than necessity.

Main merit of this exhibition, curated by the director of the Art Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Sylvia Perino-Pagden, is to clear the field of misunderstandings. The figure of Arcimboldo is recontextualized in a well-defined historical period, that of sixteenth-century Milan, between the death of the last Sforza (1535) and the spread of the plague Frederick (1630). Milan is in those years, the capital of the arts on luxuries, the city of goldsmiths, the furniture, the turners, the wax modellers, engravings of stones, embroidery. Arcimboldo breathe that atmosphere, and keeps it in his works. But there's more. Arcimboldo is one of the Leonardo school. The links between the father, Biagio, and Bernardino Luini, a pupil of the great Tuscan, are certain, incontrovertible. These are the years in which it spreads a passion for nature and anatomy. They drafted the first encyclopedic collection, declined in the two kinds artificial and natural, and made their first appearance the "ridiculous paintings" (the term is Paleotti Gabriel, 1582), next to the caricature. This trend Leonardo and his disciples are an unsurpassed example, where Arcimboldo not indifferent.

Deeply rooted in his time, Arcimboldo, however, went further, imposing a change of pace in the history of portraiture. If there is a flaw in the show, this is the lack of attention to the fortunes of the great Milan. Why Arcimboldo is one who, in his own way, did the school. In the immediate future, influencing developments closely in Lombardy like "Still Life" (one of the scholars of the genre, a very young Caravaggio). In the long run, inspiring some acrobatic inventions of the Surrealists. What to his contemporaries was primarily the divertissement of a courtier, not without an undercurrent of social controversy (think of paintings as The Lawyer and The Librarian, which put to shame some of the characters of the court of Maximilian II of Habsburg) in our eyes, after Freud, Borges, Kafka, Ernst, Magritte and Savino, looks like the sophisticated game of a restless intellectual, which even then was beginning to wonder about the problem of 'identity. Traditionally anchored a few indisputable certainty, with Arcimboldo suddenly it is put into question. The traditional employer-employee relationship that links nature to culture is reversed, and never recovered. Look at the portraits of Arcimboldo remains then, as now, a duty, that tells us who we were and where we are going.