Pat term 2:

Seasons of life
Four personal seasons of life

Season of winter – sadness, heartbreak, loneliness, sickness.

Season of spring – hope, new beginnings, opportunities.

Season of summer – signs of growth, need for protection, an abundance of distractions.

Season of fall – successes and achievements, failures.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo
(1526 or 1527 – 11 July 1593)
was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made completely
of items such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books.
From his other creations, these pieces belong to a separate category. He worked as a
traditional court painter for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague, creating
religious subjects as well as, among other things, a series of colored drawings of exotic
animals in the imperial menagerie. His work is known for its grotesque symbolic
arrangements of various inanimate objects—such as fruits, animals, and landscapes—
arranged into human shapes.
Critics have questioned how seriously the still-life portraits engaged with Renaissance Neo-
Platonism or other intellectual currents of the time, though it is obvious that they were
created in part as whimsical curiosities to amuse the court.
At the age of 21, Giuseppe Arcimboldo began his work as a designer of stained glass and
frescoes for nearby churches.
He was hired as Ferdinand I's royal portraitist at the Habsburg court in Vienna, Austria, in
1562, and later for Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He also
designed costumes and the court décor. When visiting Vienna in 1570 and 1573, Augustus,
Elector of Saxony, saw Arcimboldo's artwork and ordered a replica of The Four Seasons that
included his own royal insignia.
While Arcimboldo's more traditional works, which dealt with traditional religious themes,
have since been lost to time, his portraits of human heads made of various plants, animals,
marine creatures, and tree roots continue to fascinate people today.
His pictures appeared to be typical human portraits from a distance. Individual items in each
portrait, however, were actually layered on top of one another to create different human
anatomical forms. His imagination was meticulously constructing them. Each portrait's
assortment of items was not arbitrary; instead, they were all connected by characterization.
As a 16th-century Mannerist, he is well recognized. Mannerism was a transitional era that
borrowed some artistic components from the High Renaissance and inspired others in the
Baroque era. Through his portraits, Arcimboldo also attempted to convey his love of the
natural world. The human portrait in The Spring was made up entirely of seasonal plants and
blossoms. Every component of the portrait, from the hat to the neck, was made of plants,
with the exception of the lips and nostrils, which were made of flowers. On the other side, in
The Winter, human beings were primarily made of tree roots. A straw mat served as the
human portrait's outfit, and some evergreen tree leaves and other tree branches served as
hair.

Spring,1563, Real Summer, 1563,

Academia de Bellas Kunsthistorisches
Artes de San Museum, Vienna
Fernando, Madrid

Four Seasons in One Head, c. 1590,

National Gallery of Art, U.S

Autumn, 1573, Louvre Winter,1563,

Museum, Paris Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna
Alphonse Mucha
Alfons Maria Mucha(known as alphonse mucha ) was a Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic
artist best known for his distinctively stylized and ornamental theatrical posters, especially
those of Sarah Bernhardt, who lived and worked in Paris during the Art Nouveau era. He
created designs, advertisements, decorative panels, and illustrations that went on to
become some of the most well-known pictures of the time.He returned to his native country
at the age of 57 to begin work on The Slav Epic, a set of twenty monumental canvases he
completed between 1912 and 1926 and which chronicles the history of all Slavic peoples
worldwide. He gave the series to the Czech people in 1928, the tenth year of
Czechoslovakia's freedom. He regarded it as his most significant achievement.
Early on, Mucha displayed an aptitude for drawing, and a local businessman who was moved
by it gave him paper for free even though it was a luxury. In the preschool period, he drew
solely with his left hand. He was a violinist and alto singer, so he had musical ability as well.
He wished to continue his education after Volksschule, but his family couldn't afford it
because they were also paying for the education of his three step-siblings. He was able to
continue his musical studies at the Gymnázium Brno in the Moravian capital of Brno thanks
to his singing skills, but his real aspiration was to become an artist. He got some work
creating stage props and other decorations. He submitted an application to the Prague
Academy of Fine Arts in 1878, but it was denied. At the age of 19, he took a trip to Vienna,
the imperial center of politics and culture, where he worked as an apprentice scenery
painter for a business that created stage sets.
He also learned about Hans Makart, a well-known academic painter who produced murals
for many of Vienna's palaces and governmental structures and was a master of large-scale
portraits and historical works. His artistic direction led Mucha in that way, and his style
influenced his subsequent work. He also started experimenting with photography, which
would eventually play a significant role in his output.
His posters focused almost entirely on beautiful women in lavish settings with their hair
usually curling in arabesque forms and filling the frame.
His graphic works, which featured powerful centered compositions and idealized and
allegorical female figures in sensual or provocative postures, were best exemplified by
Mucha's Seasons series. In some ways, Mucha's panels resemble Japanese woodcuts.
Mucha, like many other European artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, was undoubtedly
inspired by Japanese art.
In Mucha's paintings, the female figures are "entwined in vaporous hair and light dresses
inspired by nature, such as willowy foliage," as well as adorned with extravagant
gemstones.These works' backgrounds are covered in floral or abstract patterns by
Mucha.The pieces are also enhanced by the use of natural hues and gold, and Mucha's
drawings are frequently framed by useful and decorative friezes.His Four Seasons series
paintings would become hard to find.

Mucha captures the moods of the seasons - innocent Spring, sultry Summer, fruitful Autumn and
frosty Winter, and together they represent the harmonious cycle of Nature.

Sesshū
One of the greatest masters of the Japanese art of sumi-e, or monochrome ink painting,
Sesshū, also known by the aliases Ty, Unkoku, and Bikeisai, was an artist of the Muromachi
era. He was born in Akahama, Bitch Province, Japan, in 1420, and passed away near Masuda,
Iwami Province, on August 26, 1506. Sesshu modified Chinese designs to reflect Japanese
aesthetic values and artistic principles. He created landscapes, Zen Buddhist artwork, and
screens with floral and animal decorations. His brushstrokes are vigorous and forceful, and
his conceptions are intense, both of which define his style.
Sesshū was disappointed with contemporary Chinese painting, which, under the Ming
dynasty (1368–1644), had turned away from the spiritual and aesthetic ideas prevalent
during the Song period. Nevertheless, the magnificent scenery of China, as well as the
contact with the Chan monasteries, was a source of great inspiration to Sesshū, who often
referred to these experiences in his later life.
The Tokyo National Museum houses Sesshu scrolls in addition to four early landscapes that
are thought to have been drawn in China and three of his mature works. Hanging scrolls
(kakemono), which stand for fall and winter, are two of them.
The so-called "Long Landscape Scroll," also known as "Sansui chokan," also known as
Landscape of Four Seasons, 1486, is frequently referred to as the greatest Japanese ink
painting and is widely regarded as Sesshū’s masterpiece. It is more than 50 feet long and
depicts the four seasons, starting with spring and finishing with winter. (15 metres). It is
based on Chinese models in both theme and design, but it has a Japanese feel to it.
Compared to typical Song paintings, it has thicker lines, sharper differences between dark
and light tones, and a flatter sense of space.

Sesshū: Landscape of Four Seasons

Sesshū: Landscape