Giussepe Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527 in Milan, Italy - 1593) was a distinctive and eccentric painter who is best known for creating portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruit or vegetables or flowers -- that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject. In 1562 he became the court portraitist to Maximilian II at the Hapsburg court in Vienna, and later, to his son Rudolph II, both of whom seem to have much liked Arcimboldo's extraordinary portraits.