Mr. Fruit Face

The New York Times today has a lovely slideshow of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's work, which is on exhibit at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris.





From the article:

"Mr. Fruit Face, as a friend of mine disdainfully calls him, has always been a guaranteed hit with the Transformer-age crowd. But his art is more serious and self-important than that. You can imagine him to have been the sort of initially jocular, learned dinner party companion whose arrogance makes itself known by the salad course. That he inspired thousands of appalling 20th-century Surrealists, apparently shocked at the genius of conceiving a gherkin to replace a nose, or a rose a cheek, isn’t his fault."