Impossible Nature
The World of Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Jessica KeatingA reappraisal of Arcimboldo’s visionary, startlingly subversive art
Impossible Nature offers a fresh reassessment of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Lombard painter whose fantastical composite heads became fixtures of the Habsburg court and emblems of imperial imagination. Moving beyond the familiar images, this book argues that court art was never merely decorative: it upheld power even as it subtly unravelled the narratives that power wished to project. Through incisive visual readings, Jessica Keating shows the ways in which Arcimboldo’s work pictured and contemplated anew the codependency of art, nature and sovereignty, and reveals an artist far more conceptually daring – and more urgently relevant – than his playful surfaces suggest.
A reappraisal of Arcimboldo’s visionary, startlingly subversive art
Impossible Nature offers a fresh reassessment of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Lombard painter whose fantastical composite heads became fixtures of the Habsburg court and emblems of imperial imagination. Moving beyond the familiar images, this book argues that court art was never merely decorative: it upheld power even as it subtly unravelled the narratives that power wished to project. Through incisive visual readings, Jessica Keating shows the ways in which Arcimboldo’s work pictured and contemplated anew the codependency of art, nature and sovereignty, and reveals an artist far more conceptually daring – and more urgently relevant – than his playful surfaces suggest.
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This richly illustrated life of Arcimboldo delightfully narrates the complexity of the artist’s journey between Milan, Vienna, and Prague through close study of his varied artistic production within the context of the cultural, social, and political circles he traversed. Like Arcimboldo’s playful paintings themselves, Jessica Keating’s study brings joy at the same time that it reveals the paradoxes of the early modern world.
'Lia Markey, Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies, Newberry Library, Chicago
Introduction
1 Lost Origins
2 Nature Studies
3 Nature and Empire
4 Harmonious Bodies
5 Impossible Desires
6 To Make a Face
Conclusion
References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
Jessica Keating is Associate Professor of Early Modern Art History at Carleton College, Minnesota. She is the author of Animating Empire: Automata, The Holy Roman Empire, and the Early Modern World (2018).