He was a conventional court painter of portraits for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague; also producing religious subjects and, among other things, a series of coloured drawings of exotic animals in the imperial menagerie.

[3] The still life portraits were clearly partly intended as curiosities to amuse the court, but critics have speculated as to how seriously they engaged with Renaissance Neo-Platonism or other intellectual currents of the day.

Augustus, Elector of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his The Four Seasons which incorporates his own monarchic symbols.

[citation needed] Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, plants, fruits, sea creatures and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today.

[5] In the portrait now represented by several copies called The Librarian, Arcimboldo used objects that signified the book culture at that time, such as the curtain that created individual study rooms in a library.

[8] A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times.

[citation needed] In 1976, the Spanish sculptor Miguel Berrocal created the original bronze sculpture interlocking in 20 elements titled Opus 144 ARCIMBOLDO BIG as a homage to the Italian painter.

The exhibition entitled "The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the face from the 16th to the 20th Century” at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1987) includes numerous 'double meaning' paintings.

Arcimboldo's influence can also be seen in the work of Shigeo Fukuda, István Orosz, Octavio Ocampo, Vic Muniz, and Sandro del Prete, as well as the films of Jan Švankmajer.

[13] Arcimboldo's works are used by some psychologists and neuroscientists to determine the presence of lesions in the hemispheres of the brain that recognize global and local images and objects.

[18] Arcimboldo's works are stored in the state museums and private collections of Italy (including Uffizi Gallery), France (Louvre), Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain, Sweden, and in the US.

B. Geyger, who for the first time raised these questions, relied mainly on judgments of contemporaries—Lomazzo, Comanini, and Morigia, who used the terms "scherzi, grilli, and capricci" (respectively, "jokes", "whims", "caprices").

[21] Arcimboldo speaks double language, at the same time obvious and obfuscatory; he creates "mumbling" and "gibberish", but these inventions remain quite rational.

In Hocke's opinion, during the Renaissance era the artist had to be first of all a talented handicraftsman who skillfully imitated nature, as the idea of fine art was based on its studying.

[23] In Umberto Eco's On Ugliness Arcimboldo is described as belonging to the manneristic tradition for which "...the preference for aspiration to strange, extravagant and shapeless over expressional fine" is peculiar.

According to Plato's dialogue Timaeus, an immemorial god created the Universe from chaos by a combination of four elements – fire, water, air and the earth, as defines all-encompassing unity.

Images of seasons and elements are always presented in profile, but thus Winter and Water, Spring and Air, Summer and Fire, Fall and Earth are turned to each other.

[29] Turning to contemporary Latin American literature, the first and last sections of 2666 (2008), Roberto Bolaño's last novel, concern a fictional German writer named Benno von Archimboldi, who takes his pseudonym from Arcimboldo.

[31] The 1992 novelette The Coming of Vertumnus by Ian Watson counterpoints the innate surrealism of the eponymous work against a drug-induced altered mental state.

In Harry Turtledove's 1993 fantasy detective novel, The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, the alternate history's version of Arcimboldo incorporated imps – a common, everyday sight in that world – along with fruit, books, etc., into his portraits.

Arcimboldo-style fruit people appear as characters in the films The Tale of Despereaux (2008) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016), as well as in the Cosmic Osmo video game series.

In David Foster Wallace's story The Suffering Channel, there is a "large framed print of someone's idea of a circus clown's face and head constructed wholly out of vegetables",[32] possibly in reference to Arcimboldo's paintings.