Great Themes in Art 1: Flowers

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In advance of the imminent publication of my Guide to the Great Themes in Art, I will be delivering a new series of talks on the themes in the book, discussing each in the context of the changing social circumstances, artistic periods and individual styles of the artists.
A clear overview of the development of art history from the middle ages to the 20th century will emerge as you attend this series .

The themes are all familiar to us today:
Love and Marriage
The Body
Animals
Food
Sickness and Healing
Death
Making a Living
Leisure
War
Nature
The Self ( Identity )
The Other
Faith
Dreams and Visions
Mythology
Domesticity
Time

To celebrate the arrival of Spring today's theme is Flowers.

The painting of flowers, contrary to popular expectation, has not been the province of Sunday painters or women artists. Nor has it only manifested itself in paintings of flower arrangements. Although way down in the hierarchy of painting types in their own right, flowers nevertheless played a key role in the wider context of religious and secular art.

Their use increased with the knowledge of plant species acquired by horticulturalists, botanists and gardeners, and their depictions often boasted the same degree of accuracy, as illustrations in the medicinal herbals or botanical books, which were beginning to proliferate from the Middle Ages onwards. Their role, however, was initially mostly symbolic: in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance in Northern Europe especially, flowers carried symbolism of passion and suffering in altarpieces featuring the Virgin Mary, and they populated enclosed gardens symbolic of Mary’s virginity. The Italian Renaissance saw the introduction of flowers into mythological themes such as Echo and Narcissus, and the goddess Flora became the embodiment of Spring with flowers as her attributes. When floral arrangements finally appeared in 17th century Dutch paintings, they were elevated to a high status by virtue of the rarity of some of the species depicted. It was not uncommon for the single tulip depicted in a painting to be worth a hundred times as much as the painting itself. The floral arrangements, unaffordable in real life, would boast species grown at different seasons and showed an accurate knowledge of the latest breeds, thus feeding an insatiable appetite for collecting and speculating on rare plants. They would also, however, introduce symbols of transience and decay to warn and temper undue worldly enjoyment. Enjoyment and the experience and depiction of pleasure, on the other hand, were the very essence of the Rococo in pre-revolutionary France, and flowers imparted an aura of beauty and sensual delight to scenes of courtship and intrigue. Victorian insistence on ‘truth to nature’ brought flowers right back under the dogged and almost scientific scrutiny of the Pre-Raphaelites, the potentially dull and worthy results only tempered by the symbolism they imparted to the story told. The modernists in late 19th century France, made flowers but one incidental part of a spontaneously observed scene, with the notable exception of Van Gogh and other post impressionists, who endowed their flowers with personal or universal symbolism. Finally, distilled to their essence and magnified in scale, flowers began to herald the possibilities of abstraction in early 20th century America.))