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Italian, Mannerist Painter. Best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books. Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, fruit, sea creatures and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today. Art critics debate whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times.
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