About

Who doesn’t know the paintings of the Milanese Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo? His eccentric and comical work – imaginary portraits in which the faces are dense collages of vegetables, fruit, fish, books or baskets – was much appreciated amongst royalty and the nobility. His paintings ended up in Cabinets of Curiosities, where they were a welcome addition to collections of natural history. Fruits and vegetables were perishable, but in painted form they could still be archived in surveys of the earth’s treasures.

The art of collage remained dormant for centuries until the Dadaists …