Arcimboldo

He wrote a thesis on Arcimboldo’s unknown followers, and worked at a gallery, as well as at the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner archive in Switzerland.

There’s also that hovering green apple revisited again and again by René Magritte; Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s whimsical Vertumnus, which depicts Roman emperor Rudolf II as a Roman god made out of fruit and veg; and even Maurizio Cattelan’s banana, which was duct-taped to a wall and sold for $120,000, before being eaten by another artist at Art Basel in Miami last month.

The exhibition Revisiting Arcimboldo looks at works by the Renaissance master of the fruit-and-veg portrait and runs from December until May 2020.

Any survey of food as art has to feature Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the 16th-century Italian painter whose portraits are montages of food.

There are echoes of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Italian Mannerist painter best known for imaginative portrait heads made entirely of fruits, vegetables and flowers.