The switch-over to the characteristic Arcimboldo style is due in part also to the artist’s origins in Milan. One senses the major role of the caricature, a genre dear to Leonardo and carried on by his followers. The Head of Cazzi with its multiple phalluses forming a human face, constitutes a crude and comical precedent to Arcimboldo’s works. The Habsburg painter, nevertheless implements this same figurative system in a very different way also : the over-abundance of objects or creatures in these profiles constitutes a tribute to the cosmic power of Maximilian II and his successors. As well as providing a stylistic comparison confirming their attribution, the assembling of the Seasons and the Elements (ill. 1) offers a veritable rhetorical process : by accumulating symbolic objects, Arcimboldo creates unmistakable identities for his personifications.