Two chestnuts as eyes, a fig as a nose, two onions to make the cheeks, a quince to make the forehead, an artichoke as and two artichoke bracts to make large drooping moustaches. Until now we all knew the “Composite Heads” by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the great Mannerist painter, burlesque portraits created by combining, in a sort of trompe-l'œil, fruit and vegetables, fish, birds, books, metaphorically linked to the subject represented. Now, however, it has been discovered that Arcimboldo's pictorial inspirations had a counterpart in sculpture, by an anonymous Lombard artist between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century who created a stone sculpture The Keeper of the Garden almost two meters high.
Sculpture that from 12 April to 21 September 2025 can be admired in the Extra Art Space of the Horti dell'Almo Collegio Borromeo in Pavia.
A rare case of sculptural transposition of the poetics of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593), the statue was lent by Ernesto Della Torre Piccinelli and placed in dialogue with the permanent pictorial intervention of the British painter David Tremlett present inside the space. Organized in collaboration with the Canesso Gallery, the exhibition highlights the meaning of communion with Nature of the work and its highly topical message of becoming one with Nature to protect it.
In this work, the “fashion” started by Arcimboldo has a plastic coherence that distinguishes it from many often mediocre imitations, revealing wisdom and imagination in the creation of a body made of fruit and vegetables. Susanna Zanuso, an expert in Lombard sculpture, dates the sculpture between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, an expression of that late Lombard Mannerism linked to the Leonardo tradition of character heads, which ties in well with the decoration of the Hall of Frescoes of the College. In fact, the Collegio Borromeo, established in 1561 from the project of the architect Pellegrino Pellegrini known as Tibaldi (1526-1596), shares the same historical period with The Keeper of the Garden.
The power of this stone colossus expresses not only the union between man and Nature but also the protective role that all humanity should have towards it. The existence of man, in fact, intrinsically depends on the health of the world he inhabits: and if, five hundred years ago, the sculpture was designed to protect a simple private garden, today it becomes a symbol of the need for a Guardian for the entire Earth.
