Now everyone in Paris can breathe a sign of relief as the fever pitch of Rugby World Cup madness has thankfully ebbed without causing any lasting damage or too much scarring. The month-long stint of the giant rugby ball dangling from the Eiffel Tower has come to its natural culmination, and everyone can get on with looking stylish whilst riding on bicycles. Things can just get back to normal.

Which gets me thinking about normality and surrealism – and where better to ponder that than in the halls of the Musée du Luxembourg with visual stimulation provided by 16th century Italian artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo?

And here I was thinking that rugby players had cauliflower ears – they don’t even come close!

In quite possibly the most interesting exhibition I’ve seen in Paris thus far, the Arcimboldo collection is a creepy but amazing display of the possibility of imagination – or the product of derangement. The extent to which either or both are applicable is still being debated.

For those who aren’t familiar with Arcimboldo’s works, he is famed for his anthropomorphic natural images – where the contents of one’s modern-day grocery trolley take the form of realisable human form portraits.

Fruit, vegetables, seafood and flowers transform into eyes, ears, mouths and noses. In his repeated studies of the seasons, the youth of spring is light garlands of flowers, summer is heavy with ripe fruits, autumn brings its substantial harvest, and then winter presents a harrowing image of decay and withered remnants.

Far from being a light-hearted take on painting, a lot of the images are really haunting. For squirm-value, ‘Water’ has to be seen to be believed. A collection of crustaceans and slippery sea-dwellers have been assembled to create a rather aristocratic portrait. The image is so true to theme, it’s even adorned with pearl jewellery!