It's a 450 year old painting called The Librarian, by the wildly inventive artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
And his other paintings only get stranger...
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593) was born in Milan and worked in the court of three different Holy Roman Emperors, in Prague and Vienna.
His career coincided with the Late Renaissance, when Mannerism had become the dominant artistic style.
Mannerism was a movement which reacted to rather than rejected the principles of the High Renaissance.
For painters like Leonardo and Raphael and Michelangelo had seemingly perfected art. In their shadow, what more could be achieved?
Well, their work had been graceful and composed, full of harmony and a splendid simplicity; their colours were mellow and their scenes were elegant.
The Mannerists, beginning in the 1520s, started introducing more drama, emotion, colour, and vibrancy into their art.
This applied to sculpture as well. Compare something like Michelangelo's famous David (1504), with its cool repose, to the high drama of Giambologna's Abduction of a Sabine Women (1583), with its contorted poses:
In some sense they became experimental, pushing far beyond what Leonardo & co did.
One of Mannerism's defining traits is a subtle lengthening of the human limbs, the idea being to create a superhuman elegance.
As most famously in Parmigianino's Madonna, from 1540:
And so that was the broad artistic context in which Arcimboldo worked.
That being said, his role as a court painter came first. Arcimboldo made plenty of "normal" paintings. Like this portrait of Emperor Maximilian II and his family, from 1563:
But it was for his satirical portraits in which he constructed human faces from objects that Arcimboldo became popular.
They were almost certainly made as a form of frivolous entertainment for the Imperial Court.
You can imagine the laughter and intrigue when this was revealed:
Which can be turned upside down to look like a normal basket of fruit!
Though, within the broader context of Mannerism, it perhaps makes sense that such wildly inventive, playful, and experimental art had an audience.
Indeed, Arcimboldo even painted a portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, in which his face was made of.... vegetables.
That may sound like something which might get a man killed. But Arcimboldo was everybody's favourite entertainer, it seems.
Sometimes he would pick out a particular profession and make a mockery of them; Arcimboldo was as much a satirist as an entertainer.
Like this, the Jurist.
His use of plucked poultry for the face is rather revolting, but that's the point. Arcimboldo is parodying lawyers.
Or the Waiter, made of beer barrels & wine jugs.
Arcimboldo also did several series based around a theme.
Such as the four seasons. There has been speculation about how serious these paintings are. Were they merely entertainment, or were they related to deeper cultural trends?
Arcimboldo also did a series on the four elements; this one is Fire.
It's hard not to speculate, looking at this, that Arcimboldo's portraits speak to a sort of proto-scientific cultural interest, what with his deconstruction of the world into its constituent parts.
Though, looking at Water, it's equally tempting to believe that Arcimboldo was simply creating objects of fascination, art intended to delight and intrigue, to explore the bizarre and the dream-like, to experiment and provoke, to humour and to mock.
This is Earth.
Arcimboldo was clearly a talented draughtsman, for his detailing, his perspective, forms, and colours are all of the highest quality.
What made him paint such strange things? Perhaps he was a little mad.
This is Air.
Or perhaps Arcimboldo knew exactly what he was doing. A highly skilled artist, a brilliant entertainer, and somebody well-aware of the trends of his day.
Did he get sick of producing these portraits, or did he delight in giving his audience what they wanted?
His work ranges from the grotesque to the delightful, walking a fine line between satire and simple folly.
Those members of the Holy Roman Court were lucky indeed. No doubt Arcimboldo gave them cause for as much laughter as discussion.
This one is the Cook:
Arcimboldo's paintings are bafflingly brilliant, and as captivating (& hilarious) now as they were nearly 500 years ago.
How serious are they? We'll never know.
But his work is an important reminder that our ancestors were no less inventive or playful than we are now.
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Angkor Wat in Cambodia is one of the most famous places in the world, and rightly so.
But what is it, who built it, and when?
Well, the first thing to say is that Angkor Wat stands at the heart of a colossal, abandoned city...
Angkor is the name of an historic (and ruined) city in northwestern Cambodia.
It was the capital of the Khmer Empire from the 9th to the 13th centuries AD, and in those years it rose to become one of the world's major urban centres.
But Angkor was abandoned in the year 1431.
Angkor Wat itself was built during the 12th century, in about thirty years, under King Suryavarman II.
Suryavarman had reunited the Khmer Empire and extended its borders — Angkor Wat was supposed to be both the empire's primary temple and his final resting place.
174 years ago there was a huge storm in northern Scotland, and it uncovered something strange.
From beneath the soil emerged a perfectly preserved village older than the Pyramids, and it even had furniture.
This is the 5,000 year old story of Skara Brae...
Orkney is the name of an archipelago just off the coast of northern Scotland.
It was here, in 1850, that a colossal storm partly destroyed a grassy hill by the sea.
When locals investigated they discovered that it had revealed what seemed to be walls made of large stones.
A local landowner and amateur archaeologist called William Watt started a proper dig, and after excavating four houses he brought in an expert called George Petrie.
By 1868 the importance of the discovery — which some claimed to have known about for years — was clear.
Rembrandt, who lived 400 years ago, is usually called one of the greatest artists who ever lived.
But why? What made him so good?
Strange as it sounds, what made Rembrandt special was the way he painted himself — and how many times he did it...
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in the Netherlands in 1606.
By 18 he was a painter, but unlike others of his generation he refused to study in Italy and remained at home.
At 22 he painted this brooding, supremely confident self-portrait — and a star was born.
This was the Dutch Golden Age, a time of cultural and economic flourishing when the Netherlands found itself at the centre of global politics and its cities were booming with trade.
And, of course, an impossibly talented generation of artists like Vermeer and Rubens had arisen.
The Rosetta Stone was discovered exactly 225 years ago today — inside the wall of an old fortress that was being demolished.
This is the strange story of the stone that brought Ancient Egypt back to life...
Why is it called the Rosetta Stone?
Because it was discovered near a town called Rashid in northern Egypt — when the French invaded in the late 18th century they corrupted its name to Rosetta.
So, there are three parts to this story.
First: what is it?
The Rosetta Stone is a slab of granodiorite (a rock similar to granite) mined at Aswan in southern Egypt; it's over 1 metre tall, 3/4 of a metre wide, and weighs 3/4 of a tonne.
Why do the badges of the England and Spain football teams look the way they do?
It's a story that involves the Holy Roman Empire, a purple lion, Hercules, and the possible origins of the dollar sign...
When England first played an international match in 1872 — the first international game in history, against Scotland — they simply wore three lions as a crest.
The ten roses were added in 1949, one for each region of the Football Association.
(That first game was a 0-0 draw).
Why three lions?
Well, they have been a symbol of England for about 800 years — since 1198, to be precise, when King Richard I adopted them as his symbol.
He ruled from 1189 to 1199 and has long been a romanticised hero, as in this 1841 painting by Merry-Joseph Blondel.