Giuseppe Arcimboldo was born in Milan around 1527 and after 1562–1563, having completed his training in Lombardy, he became a court artist in the service of the Habsburgs, successively under the emperors Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II, probably in Prague and then in Vienna. As the royal family’s portraitist, he assured his remuneration by producing completely classical canvases in the conventional style that reflected an official art form. At the same time, Arcimboldo produced some rather surprising works: composite heads and hybrid metamorphoses of the human face in which deception and illusion triumphed. With Arcimboldo blurring human perceptual reference points, his contemporaries referred to his canvases as scherzi, grilli and capricci, ‘jokes’, ‘caprices’ and ‘grotesques’, a marvellous and confusing mixture of genres. Still fascinated by these paradoxical, neither beautiful nor ugly, virtuoso and unusual portraits, our contemporaries call it ‘Mannerism’.