In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I Habsburg court in Vienna and, later, Maximilian II and Rudolph II to his son in the court of Prague. It was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols.
Arcimboldo's conventional work in the traditional religious subjects, has been forgotten, but his portraits of human heads made of vegetables, plants, fruits, marine animals and tree roots, were much admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of Today's fascination. Art critics debate whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind. Most scholars argue that the point of view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and weird Arcimboldo, far from being mentally unbalanced, caters to the tastes of his time.
Arcimboldo died in Milan, who retired after the cessation of Prague. It was during this last phase of his career that produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II and his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career.
When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from the collection of Rudolph II.
His works can be found in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Habsburg Ambras Castle in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, Candie Museum in Guernsey and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid also own paintings by Arcimboldo .
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