"Mille fior, mille frutti, Dove n'havea Natura, Fatto un lieto miscuglio E membra di questo ha finto. Dimmi hor tu, se t'aggrada Di veder quant' io celo C'hor ne tolgo il velo" Gregorio Comanini (1590)

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Giuseppe Arcimboldi, a famous italian painter of the 16th century, was the first artist to begin a type of pictorial search that at present we could define “surreal”. He painted the allegories of the four seasons and of the four natural elements with a style oscillating between the magnificent show of the Nature, the caricature and the grotesque, that is portraing human profile (famous is the portrait of the emperor Rodolfo II of the 1591) putting together different flowers or fruits or even animals. He was very famous in his time and a lot of his contemporary artists tried to copy his style, but this is absoluty understandable if we think of the great diffusion of the illusionistic and imaginative painting in the following centuries and in the our time with the historical surrealism, the dadaism, the american pop art etc. The four original pictures of Arcimboldo “The four season” are now exposed in the Louvre Museum of Paris. The masks of “LA NATURA MASCHERATA” are works of the italian set designer Piero Lorenzini. They are a clear reference to the Arcimboldo's portraits, but they are not a simple pictorial copy, they become a real three-dimensional object where the colours and the forms of Nature loose their usual meaning and trasnform in a zygoma, a cheek, a nose or in an eyebrow. The natural elements such as leaves, flowers etc. have the purpose to mix together the allegoric and fantastic sides to the purely decorative aspect. The final result is a particular view of changes and metamorphosys. See masks Visitatore n. 04980 - 1 online ora

Summer, 1563 Spring, 1563 Winter, 1563 Autumn, 1563