IMPOSSIBLE NATURE

A fresh introduction to the life and art of the sixteenth-century Italian painter.

Impossible Nature offers a reassessment of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Lombard painter whose fantastical composite heads became fixtures of the Habsburg court and emblems of imperial imagination. Moving beyond the familiar images, this book argues that court art was never merely decorative: it upheld power even as it subtly unraveled the narratives that power wished to project. Through incisive visual readings, Jessica Keating shows the ways in which Arcimboldo’s work pictured and contemplated the codependency of art, nature, and sovereignty anew, revealing an artist far more conceptually daring―and more urgently relevant―than his playful surfaces suggest.

Jessica Keating is associate professor of early modern art history at Carleton College. She is the author of Animating Empire: Automata, The Holy Roman Empire, and the Early Modern World.