Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter best known for creating portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books -- 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 Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to his son Rudolf II, both of whom seem to have much liked Arcimboldo's extraordinary portraits. He was also the court decorator, costume designer, and general art expert. His style of early pre-surrealist portraiture was much copied by his contemporaries, making it difficult at times to differentiate his work from that of imitators. Ironically, given the fame of the imaginary portraits, Arcimboldo's conventional work has been all but forgotten.

One can find the artist's work in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Amras in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris, as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and at the Candie Museum, Guernsey, also contain pieces of his work. A series of erotic satirical paintings is based on Arcimboldo's art work. Instead of portraying people by employing fish, birds, and other animals or vegetation, these imitations of his style use nude female forms to parody the famous men and women whom the paintings parody, frequently depicting their subjects as rakes, satyrs, or devils. Among those who have been satirized in these paintings are Richard Wagner, Napoleon I, Leopold III of Belgium, and Charles Dickens.