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Open pea pods for eyelids, a pear for a nose, apples for cheeks. Underneath the produce, the Habsburg jaw is portrait-accurate.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo spent a quarter century as court painter to the Habsburgs in Vienna and Prague, and his official duties were conventional: portraits, festival designs, costume schemes for tournaments. His fame rested on the sideline: composite heads, faces assembled entirely from painted things, fruit, fish, roast birds, books, kitchenware, each one a catalogue pretending to be a person. The emperors could not get enough of them. When he finally retired to his native Milan in 1587, Rudolf II let him go on the understanding that the pictures would keep coming. The last and best arrived in Prague around 1591: the emperor himself as Vertumnus, the Roman god of the turning year. The portrait is botanically ruthless. Rudolf's cheeks are apples, his nose is a pear, his eyelids are open pea pods, his mustache is a pair of hazel catkins, his beard is chestnut burrs; wheat, grapes, cherries and plums crowd the crown of his head, and a cabbage carries the imperial shoulders. Contemporaries counted the species and found the four seasons growing simultaneously, which was the entire message, spelled out in an accompanying poem: under Rudolf, the empire enjoys every season's abundance at once, a perpetual golden age with a pear for a nose. Rudolf, whose court ran to alchemists, astronomers and a pet lion, was delighted, and made the painter a Count Palatine for it. The golden age proved less durable than the vegetables. Rudolf died deposed by his own brother; the collection he had piled up in Prague Castle, the greatest cabinet of wonders in Europe, was looted by Swedish troops in the last year of the Thirty Years' War, and Vertumnus went north in a baggage wagon. It hangs today in Skokloster Castle outside Stockholm, war booty that never went home. Arcimboldo himself died in 1593 and was forgotten with impressive speed; for three centuries the composite heads were filed under curiosities, until the Surrealists found him in the 1930s and declared him a father. Dalí borrowed the double-image trick outright. The painting keeps a courtier's secret in plain sight: comparison with Rudolf's sober state portraits shows the likeness underneath is accurate. The heavy Habsburg jaw is there, built in squash and turnip. Flattery that resembles you is the rarest kind, and Arcimboldo managed it in produce.