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The Four Seasons
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I admit it...I had ice cream for dinner last night and I can’t stop buying tomatoes from Slow Food. I also can’t help but think of one of my favorite painters, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, as I peruse that wonderful fruit and vegetable stand that sells fresh goods from Vertical Harvest and all our local organic growers. He was a painter best known for imaginative portrait heads. What we often forget when viewing his work is that these works were painted in the mid to late 1500’s! Giuseppe specialized in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms. The still-life portraits were clearly partly intended as whimsical curiosities to amuse the court, but critics have speculated as to how seriously they engaged with Renaissance Neoplatonism or other intellectual currents of the day.
Neoplatonism's general idea is found in the spiritual writings of many mystics and contemplatives in many cultures. Basically, it suggests that mundane reality as it is generally perceived is only the most superficial level. Beyond that is the imagination, which, if undisciplined, blurs into mere fantasy and dreams. Beyond that, if the mind is disciplined, and with the help of “self-purification”, one can discern realms of a higher mind. That is why we create. The immediate reactions to an Giuseppe Arcimboldo painting by someone without preconceived ideas are curiosity, fascination and attraction to the details of the image. The second interpretation is that it comes to us as an allegory of science, a complicated language of symbols closely connected to the political and spiritual culture at that time. Questions such as, “Why are the mouths of the people portrayed always open?”
Many mysteries remain concerning Arcimboldo’s unique series of heads. The paintings possess a fascination related to the subconscious as well as to the rational. Arcimboldo was obviously a great painter and a very complex human. He lived at a time of transition...not unlike today; wars, economic chaos, changing social structures, important new inventions and discoveries, the great values of the Italian Renaissance were being questioned and starting to crumble. The other explanation for his compositions may have been a desire for a metaphysical transformation of the human. Arcimboldo declared that humans were not separate from nature: humans are a part of nature and nature is a part of being human. Such a metaphysical thought was revolutionary.
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Scientists, artists, thinkers, activists and journalists gather for meals and conservation in an episode of Pan y Circo, hosted by Diego Luna (center).
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