sets the soul vibrating automatically."
In the Louvre, I was about to leave when I realized that I had not gone to visit the Archimboldos. The Louvre has two of the Four Season series, famously familiar for his use of flowers and vegetables in the visual sculpting of this series of portraits. The effect is mesmerizing, the features grand but grotesque, the portraits of these unknown members of an Italian Renaissance Court. I have always been fascinated by this set of paintings, and by Archimboldo's reaction to the Renaissance's visual realism - he was centuries ahead of his contemporaries, seeing an abstract view of his subjects that compels the viewer to dig beneath the surface; the overall portrait is fascinating and lovely - the individual features slightly horrifying. It is this intermingled sense of being simultaneously drawn and repulsed that I think is what makes me wish there had been more -
- Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)
In the Louvre, I was about to leave when I realized that I had not gone to visit the Archimboldos. The Louvre has two of the Four Season series, famously familiar for his use of flowers and vegetables in the visual sculpting of this series of portraits. The effect is mesmerizing, the features grand but grotesque, the portraits of these unknown members of an Italian Renaissance Court. I have always been fascinated by this set of paintings, and by Archimboldo's reaction to the Renaissance's visual realism - he was centuries ahead of his contemporaries, seeing an abstract view of his subjects that compels the viewer to dig beneath the surface; the overall portrait is fascinating and lovely - the individual features slightly horrifying. It is this intermingled sense of being simultaneously drawn and repulsed that I think is what makes me wish there had been more -
Paul Klee's Bauhaus portrait of a Man sinking into senility is the closest comparison I think I can draw to the Archimboldo; the portraits share the same banal expression, but like the Renaissance predecessor, Klee's portrait draws the viewer into the subject's jumbled sense of reality. Again, the features are hideous, the face is tortured and torn in a world moving on around him, but the effect is mesmerizing and beautiful.
Like Klee, Kandinski painted a portrait of a man reflected in the mechanization and structure of the twentieth century; his features are reduced to the angles provided in architecture. Kandinski took the elaborate definition of Archimboldo's labored archetype and distilled it to a few lines - keeping the mystery of the man behind the panel alive. Kandinski, like Klee, like Archimboldo was able to express in a nameless man's face, the reaching story of his time. The man is environment, crime, war, love and disturbed silence.
I am glad I went back to visit the Archimboldo's. I had read that to see them in a book is as real as to see them in life. That they are flat, that they are more curiosity than art. I disagree; to me they have a very real life, and seeing them in person only served to confirm to me that I may only be beginning to understand his mind.
