Art by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (also spelled Arcimboldi; 1527 - July 11, 1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books – that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject.
Arcimboldo was born in Milan, the son of a painter who was working at the Duomo. He is known as author of the cartoons for the Stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria for the stained glasses of the Duomo. In 1556 he worked with Giuseppe Meda for frescoes in the Cathedral of Monza.

In 1562 he became the court portraitist to Maximilian II at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague, both of whom seem to have much liked Arcimboldo's extraordinary portraits.
He was also the court decorator, costume designer, and general art expert. His style of early pre-surrealist portraiture was much copied by his contemporaries, making it difficult at times to differentiate his work from that of imitators. Ironically, given the fame of the imaginary portraits, Arcimboldo's conventional work has been all but forgotten. He died in Milan.
When the Swedish army raided Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years' War, many of his works were stolen from Rudolf II's collections, by orders of Queen Christina of Sweden.