Inside 1562 he became the court portrait painter to Maximilian II at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later on, to his boy Rudolf II, both of whom seem to have very much liked Arcimboldo's extraordinary portraits.

He was too a court decorator, costumier, & general art adept. His style of early pre-surrealist portraiture was much traced by his coeval, making it hard at days to differentiate his function from either that of imitators.

His paintings come within Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and in the Habsburg Schloss Amras in Innsbruck. Withwithin Italy, his operate is in Cremona, Brescia, and a Uffizi Gallery in Florence. A Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, also contains pieces of his work.