The Jurist

What appears to be a grave, learned gentleman in a fur-trimmed coat is in fact an elaborate visual pun: the face is built from a pile of books and papers, the brow and cheek assembled from fish, so that the jurist’s very features are composed of the stuff of his trade. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Milanese painter who served the Habsburg emperors Maximilian II and Rudolf II, painted the picture in 1566 as part of the series of composite heads that made him one of the most original masters of European Mannerism. The sitter may be the legal scholar Ulrich Zasius, an identification the museum records with a question; whoever he was, the portrait turns the dignity of the law into an ironic, unforgettable spectacle of metamorphosis. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.