Impossible Nature

Impossible Nature offers a fresh 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 unravelled the narratives that power wished to project. Through incisive visual readings, Jessica Keating shows the ways in which Arcimboldo’s work pictured and contemplated anew the codependency of art, nature and sovereignty, and reveals an artist far more conceptually daring – and more urgently relevant – than his playful surfaces suggest.