From twenty feet away, the portrait projects Renaissance dignity. Up close, the nose is a warty zucchini, the hair is tree roots, and the beard is a bundle of animal-tail dusters. This episode explores the life and mind of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, born in Milan in 1527, who began with respectable stained glass and church frescoes before joining the Habsburg court in 1562, where he served Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolf II as painter, costume designer, and creative director.

We look at why the Habsburgs, obsessive collectors building cabinets of curiosities, wanted a visual language that said they owned the natural world, and how Arcimboldo’s composite heads delivered it. We break down The Librarian as satire of book hoarders, the Four Seasons and Four Elements as political propaganda equating the dynasty with nature itself, and Vertumnus, which cast Rudolf II as a god of the seasons made of ripe fruit. We also cover his place in Mannerism, Plato’s Timaeus, Roland Barthes’s reading of his visual language, and the neuroscientists who now use his paintings to study face processing and brain lesions.

• How Habsburg cabinets of curiosities shaped the demand for encyclopedic, marvelous art
• The satire, symbolism, and heraldic branding hidden in the composite portraits
• Why the Four Seasons and Four Elements were hung to face each other in silent dialogue
• Global versus local visual processing and why the brain stutters looking at his work
• His erasure after the Thirty Years’ War and the Enlightenment, and his revival by the Surrealists