ABSTRACT
The "right" people would know exactly who Giuseppe Arcimboldo had in mind; the sitter's identification would have been a given. With the work of Arcimboldo, denotation—conventionally the elementary part of portraiture—is made an issue. Arcimboldo's paintings are manifestations of his own wit, to be sure, but they serve to claim wit for his patron as well. Arcimboldo's paintings provide the opportunity to demonstrate in particularly dramatic fashion that portraiture's principal function has far less to do with marking who someone is than what that person is—or at least would claim to be. Like all portraits, but demonstrated in an especially dramatic manner, the portrait is not "about" Rudolf's identification but about his identity—marked as a public and political issue. Challenged to make identity visible—in essence, objectively concrete—portraits must "employ" the physical body as the proving ground of the soul, since the body is the only available terrain onto which the nonphysical can be visualized.
