Benato Natali (1883-1979) was born in Livorno-Italy, from a modest family, where perhaps the father, hatter by profession, led him to enroll at the School of Arts and Crafts. Not too temperamentally suited to the school system began to devote himself to drawing a self-taught, and even when one of his companions urged him to attend the study of Guglielmo Micheli little and did so against his will.
As he did in "The four seasons", in the series of "The four elements" Arcimboldo assigned to any element a face formed by the most characteristic of any of them. Nevertheless, the series possesses some elements that make it quite different, and even more interesting, than the previous one.
First, and contrary to the previous series, every face is formed by only one kind of element. The face of "The Earth" is formed exclusively by land animals, "The Air" is made of birds, and "The Water" by fish and marine animals.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted numerous series about "The four seasons" (one in a private collection in Bergamo, painted around 1572; another one, painted in 1573, in the Louvre Museum) being each of them a copy without many variations of the previous one, reflecting the success of the series. The painter represented the hypothetical faces of every season with the most typical element of any of them. Thus the face of the spring is made of flowers, the summer has a face of fruits and a body of wheat, while the autumn is a curious summary of fallen leaves, fruits and mushrooms.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, also spelled Arcimboldi (1527-1593) was an Italian painter best known for working in the Mannerism style and 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 recognisable likeness of the portrait subject.
For biographical notes and painting works by Arcimboldi see Part 1 - Painting.
