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| Arcimboldo, Fruit Basket (c1590) |
Above Painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo titled Fruit Basket. Oil on panel, c1590. It is a reversible still life of fruit. Turned upsidedown (as shown here), it resembles the head of a person.
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Herbert Simon, Models of my life. NYC: Basic Books, 1991, p. 5—
Whether during his fourth summer or on some later occasion, the boy [the author] was among a party picking wild strawberries. The others filled their pails in a few minutes; there were only a few strawberries in the bottom of his. How could the others see the berries so easily amid the closely matching leaves? That was how he learned that strawberries are red and leaves green, and that he was colorblind.
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Postscript As Simon comments in his autobiography, he would later marry a woman with red hair. In view of his being colorblind (he continues): “'How did you know her hair was red?' the perceptive reader might wonder. Well, I had early been told that there were no green-haired people, nor any red lawns. Ergo. . . ."
In relation to the use of ambiguous, pun-like images in art (such as this painting by Arcimboldo), it may also be of interest to view my recent video called EMBEDDED FIGURES, ART AND CAMOUFLAGE.
