Allegory of Winter

Arcimboldo's Allegory of Winter, painted around 1560 on panel and now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, is among the earliest and most austere of his Four Seasons compositions. Winter's head is constructed not from living abundance but from the season's characteristic materials: a gnarled, bark-covered trunk forms the face and skull, dried mushrooms and bracket fungi serve as lips and ear, while dead leaves and lichen create texturally varied surfaces. Ivy, the only plant that remains green in winter, climbs the trunk-face as a symbol of endurance, while the figure is wrapped in a woven reed cape against the cold. The deliberate starkness of Winter compared to the lush abundance of Spring and Summer makes this the most philosophically interesting of the series — a meditation on age, death, and the endurance of life through extremity.

The panel technique allows Arcimboldo the precise surface differentiation needed for Winter's tactile variety: rough bark, dry fungi, brittle lichen, and the coarser texture of the reed cape all require distinct paint-handling approaches. The muted, desaturated colour palette — grey, ochre, brown — gives Winter its characteristic bleakness, while the small touches of green ivy provide the only note of continuing life.