“Do you believe people can change?”
The question came from a student—young, curious, caught somewhere between hope and cynicism. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, and I doubt it will be the last. But in that moment, the words that rose from me were more weathered than definitive.
“No,” I said, “not in the way you mean.”
Their face fell, just slightly, as though I had shut a door they were hoping would open. But I wasn’t done. “I don’t believe people change—not all at once, not from one thing to another like a magician’s trick. I believe people weather. I believe they grow.”
This answer—organic, imperfect—has stayed with me. And in the since, it has continued to unfold, like a vine climbing a forgotten trellis. Because what I meant, and what I continue to mean, is not that change is impossible. Only that we misunderstand its shape.
If we imagine the self, it is tempting to see it as a wax tablet—easily written upon, smoothed over, rewritten again. But the Renaissance, with all its obsessions and contradictions, offered another vision: not of blank slates, but of compositions.
It is this vision that Giuseppe Arcimboldo gives us in Vertumnus, his 1591 portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. At first glance, the painting seems whimsical, even absurd: a face constructed from pears, peaches, barley stalks, cucumbers, and figs. But the longer one looks, the more one senses its allegorical weight. Here is a ruler not in armor, but in harvest. Not cast in marble, but composed in season.
To Arcimboldo, identity was a matter of arrangement. He did not deny that a person had a core—but he questioned whether that core could be represented in a single material. Better, perhaps, to suggest that a human being is seasonal: built of what they bear, what they store, what they endure.
This, to me, feels truer than the myth of the shapeshifter.
I think again of that student, and of the metaphors I reached for in response. The first was stone. I believe we each have something in us that is stone—formed early, layered over time, compacted through pressure. The stone may crack. It may wear. It may be reshaped by the currents of time and circumstance. But it does not become something else.
Michelangelo, when asked how he carved his figures, famously said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” The self, then, may be hidden rather than built. Revealed rather than changed.
But we are not only stone. We are also trees. We grow.
And this is where Arcimboldo’s imagery returns. For what is Vertumnus, if not a tree in human form? A figure assembled from things that once grew—fruits and vegetables, blossoms and roots—arranged not by accident, but by intelligence. Arcimboldo, after all, was not just a court painter. He was a naturalist, a student of plants, a curator of the imperial Wunderkammer. He saw no contradiction in combining art with science, nor in making nature into portrait.
In this way, Vertumnus is less a depiction of Rudolf II than a meditation on the human condition: that we are composed of what we consume, what we grow, what we shed. That we are bound to the rhythm of seasons. That what is visible is not always fixed, and that what is fixed is not always visible.
The philosopher Marsilio Ficino, writing a century earlier, declared: “The soul is in all things, and all things are in the soul.” For the Renaissance polymath, the soul was not a static object, but a reflective one—a mirror of the cosmos. To know oneself, then, was to study the stars, the plants, the body, the divine. There was no sharp line between the self and the world—only a flowing exchange.
Modern psychology—though dressed in clinical robes—has circled back to this insight. The self, we now understand, is not a fixed trait, but a narrative we construct. As psychologist Dan McAdams puts it, “We are storytellers, and the stories we tell become our identities.” We do not change by becoming different people, but by reinterpreting the person we were.
Our past is never erased. It is folded in.
The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson spoke of identity as both a continuity and a crisis—a lifelong task of synthesis. The human mind, he argued, is not content with isolated moments. It demands coherence, even as that coherence shifts. This echoes the structure of Arcimboldo’s paintings: each element distinct, yet all contributing to a recognizable whole.
Even Carl Jung, who spent much of his life studying archetypes and inner transformation, insisted that individuation—the process of becoming oneself—was not about change in the modern sense. It was about integration. “The privilege of a lifetime,” he wrote, “is to become who you truly are.”
And so, when my student asked if people can change, I offered the answer I could: not a revolution, but a turning. Not a reinvention, but a recomposition.
What Arcimboldo paints in Vertumnus is not a man pretending to be something else, but a man revealed through what surrounds him. He is not cloaked in grapes and gourd to deceive. Rather, he is declared through them. Rudolf is the harvest. He is the product of the land he rules, the seasons he governs, the court he commands.
The painting’s humor does not diminish its insight. In fact, it deepens it. The grotesque and the regal live side by side—reminding us that identity is never one thing. Like a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities, we are collections, both deliberate and haphazard. We are masks and mirrors.
We are not blank pages waiting to be rewritten. We are manuscripts written in layers, annotated by experience, illuminated by moments of grace and grief.
So yes, people change. But not because they discard who they were. Rather, because they weather. Because they grow. Because, like Vertumnus, they are remade in season.
And perhaps the truest change is not in becoming someone new, but in learning to see the composition we already are—with all its bruised peaches, overripe cherries, sun-hardened roots, and blooming basil.
To see it, and to say: yes. This, too, is me.