GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO (maniera di)

(Milan, 1527 ; 1593) Allegory of Summer Oil on canvas, cm 99X73.5 Provenance: Rome, private collection This anthropomorphic depiction of Summer reflects compositional models devised by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who painted fantastic figures composed of fruits and natural elements in the late 16th century for Emperor Rudolf II and his father Emperor Maximilian. As we know, by 1562 Arcimboldo was court painter in Prague, and the erudite symbolism of his works appealed to the Mannerist taste for the rare and the curious. Indeed, it was Maximilian who commissioned a series of heads composed of still life elements emblematic of the Seasons (Louvre, Paris) and the Elements (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Arcimboldo's extraordinary inventions met with extraordinary success, and it was to Francesco Zucchi's credit that he perpetuated the fashion as Giovanni Baglione attests in his Lives of Painters, Sculptors & Architects (1642), attributing to him the invention of a 'way of composing and coloring the heads of the Four Seasons with their fruits, flowers and other things that in the time of those seasons nature habitually produces' (Cf. L. Salerno, La Natura Morta Italiana, 1560-1805, Rome 1984, p. 54). Modern critics have since found that such works were also made by another Roman artist, Giovanni Stanchi (1608 ; after 1673; Cf. M. S. Proni, La famiglia Stanchi, in Pittori di Natura Morta a Roma, artisti italiani 1630-1750, edited by G. Bocchi, U. Bocchi, Viadana, 2005, pp. 245-328, figs. FS.31 ; FS.36). The canvas under consideration, in fact, finds comparison with some similar series and individual canvases such as the one exhbited at Sotheby's in London on April 9, 1986, lot 32 (Cf. Zeri archive no. 85036; M. Chiarini, Natura morta italiana del Sei e Settecento, 1987, p. 12).