Description
Giuseppe Arcimboldo – Water
| Year of creation: | 1566 |
| Original size: | 67 cm × 52 cm |
| Painting style: | Mannerism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria |
Oil on canvas Water is so rich with different types of aquatic animals that it would be almost impossible to list them all. As with Arcimboldo’s other paintings, this animal is painted very realistically, but the painter has freely adjusted their actual sizes. At first glance, the painting seems chaotic due to the multitude of animals, but the impression of chaos is only superficial. Animals intertwined in harmony also represent a hymn to Emperor Maximilian, because it is only because of his benevolent rule that people live in peace and harmony.
The Four Elements
This painting belongs to a cycle. All four are available here:
- Giuseppe Arcimboldo – Water
- Giuseppe Arcimboldo – Air
- Giuseppe Arcimboldo – Fire
- Giuseppe Arcimboldo – Earth
As a matched group of four there is a single shared size today: 30 × 40 cm. Larger sizes exist for individual paintings, but not across all four at once.
More on both cycles as a wall group: Arcimboldo’s Four Seasons and Four Elements as a wall group
Close to, it is a crush of sea bodies: a flatfish for the cheek, an eel curling across the temple, a shrimp beneath the eye, a sprig of coral above the brow. Step back and they settle into a calm profile wearing a pearl. The picture was made for a court that read this ingenuity as a compliment to its ruler rather than a joke. The original hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Technique: a hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas, made to order in the size you choose.
