Arcimboldo’s Seasons
Arcimboldo’s Seasons have returned to the walls of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre Museum after a restoration by Roberto Merlo of the Arcanes workshop, who transformed them and allowed the composite heads to be restored to their original format with impressive monumentality and sculptural relief. The figures breathe on the black background. The intervention has restored the subtlety of the palette and much more ambiguous expressions. The dialogue imagined by Arcimboldo between the four seasons is thus much more lively.
The series was offered by Emperor Maximilian II of Habsburg to Elector Augustus of Saxony. When he received the commission in 1573, Arcimboldo had been at the court in Vienna for eleven years. An official portrait painter, he was especially famous for his “composite heads”, assemblages of plants, animals or various objects that symbolized an allegorical figure or a real person.
The Seasons are virtuoso and amusing inventions and they also have a symbolic and political dimension. They evoke the four ages of man (childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age), the Elements (Air, Fire, Earth, Water) and the temperaments (sanguine, choleric, atrabilious, phlegmatic), according to a game of correspondence between the different parts of nature, specific to the spirit of the Renaissance.
