A01=Jessica Keating
Art Theory
Author_Jessica Keating
Category=AGA
composite heads
Court Culture
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II
Holy Roman Empire
Imagination
Lombardy
Natural History
Politics
Prague
Sovereignty
Product details
- ISBN 9781836392606
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 24 Aug 2026
- Publisher: Reaktion Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Impossible Nature offers a fresh reassessment of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Lombard painter whose fantastical composite heads became fixtures of the Habsburg court and emblems of imperial imagination. Moving beyond the familiar images, this book argues that court art was never merely decorative: it upheld power even as it subtly unravelled the narratives that power wished to project. Through incisive visual readings, Jessica Keating shows the ways in which Arcimboldo’s work pictured and contemplated anew the codependency of art, nature and sovereignty, and reveals an artist far more conceptually daring – and more urgently relevant – than his playful surfaces suggest.
Jessica Keating is Associate Professor of Early Modern Art History at Carleton College, Minnesota. She is the author of Animating Empire: Automata, The Holy Roman Empire, and the Early Modern World (2018).
