The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo was created in 1566. The painting is in Skoklosters Slott, Stockholm. The size of the work is 97 x 71 cm and is made as an oil on canvas.
He work has been interpreted as both a celebration and a satirical mocking of librarians and scholarship. K. C. Elhard suggests an opposing view that it may be specifically a parody of “materialistic book collectors more interested in acquiring books than in reading them.”
The Artist: Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo was born in Milan. He was a conventional court painter of portraits for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague. He specialized in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms.
At a distance, his portraits looked like normal human portraits. However, individual objects in each portrait were actually overlapped together to make various anatomical shapes of a human. They were carefully constructed by his imagination. The animal tails, which became the beard of the portrait, were used as dusters. By using everyday objects, the portraits were decoration and still-life paintings at the same time. His works showed not only nature and human beings, but also how closely they were related. Read more
You can order this work as an art print on canvas from canvastar.com
