Follower of Giuseppe Arcimboldo Northern Italy, circa 1600-1650
An anthropomorphic landscape with a grotesque giant and a drinking donkey

Oil on canvas, 102,5 x 81,6 cm

PROVENANCE
Private collection, Belgium;
Anonymous sale, S.A. Servaerts, Brussels, May 2001, lot 317;
Private collection, France;
Raffael Valls, Ltd., London;
Sotheby's, London, 10-16 December 2021, lot 333 (unsold);
Raffael Valls, Ltd., London;
From whom acquired by a European private collection

PRICE
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EXHIBITED
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Metamorphoses, Ovid and the arts, 6 February – 25 May 2026, cat. no. 84.

LITERATURE
Frits Scholten, in exhibition catalogue: Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Metamorphoses, Ovid and the arts, 6 February – 25 May 2026, cat. no. 84.

Painted landscapes, rock formations or cloudscapes containing hidden faces and other recognizable figurations are examples of visual coincidence, forms that arise in nature by chance, without human intervention, yet can be interpreted as something else. This 'aleomorphism' relies in turn on the psychological phe-nomenon of 'pareidolia' - the perception and interpretation of specific features in random, natural structures. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) described this process in De statua
(c. 1450-1460) when explaining the origin of sculpture. Authors in Classical Antiquity recognized the phenomenon too, however, and even the gods of that era regularly resorted to artifice to 'spontaneously' trans-form raw matter into a familiar form. Jupiter, for instance, fashioned a female figure called Nephele or Nubes out of clouds in order to deceive Ixion whose eye had fallen on the supreme god's wife Juno a metamorphosis mentioned by various classical authors.

In the course of the sixteenth century, artists actively began to vie with nature itself to create ambiguous images of this kind. Landscapes in particular, in which faces and occasionally (as here) entire figures are hidden, became a genre in themselves. Pioneers of this 'cryptomorphism' included Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525-1569), who concealed faces and animals in the Alpine landscapes he engraved in 1555-1556. In later generations, however, the meticulousness with which he did so gave way to a less refined visual game, in which the landscape took second place to the form hidden within it. Motifs were presented a little too conspicuously, rendering them 'suspect' in the eyes of the viewer, who takes little time to spot a face or figure in the arrangement of different natural details and hence to witness the metamorphosis of a landscape into a living being.

This curious painting by an unidentified follower of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593) is made up of an extravagantly rocky coastal landscape with a setting sun against a turbulent cloudy sky. On closer inspection, however, the rocks turn out to be some kind of crouching human bird, apparently laying an egg in the shape of the setting sun. The monstrous hybrid wears a hat depicting a house on fire, the flames of which form a wreath or crown around its head. The profile, with its almost beak-shaped nose, recalls Arcimboldo's The Cook - Meat Platter. In the steep, wooded cliff on the far right, we make out the shape of a donkey's head with cypresses for its pricked-up ears. In the foreground, mean-while, and on the grassy meadows that form the crouching monster's back, all sorts of people are active, some of them hunting large flightless birds. There is a variation on this work, painted in lighter colours and lacking the expressively cloudy sky and setting sun, in which the squatting figure is a giant emptying its bowels.

The precise meaning is not clear, which might well have been the intention: to encourage the viewer to search for solutions in this visual puzzle. Is the rock formation a crouching man or maybe an owl? The humour of the anthropomorphic landscape is likely to have derived in part from the fact that the people in the painting are oblivious to what is going on beneath their feet. Perhaps the donkey's head is meant therefore as a surreptitious commentary on their stupidity?

(Quoted from Frits Scholten).