From Duccio, who sneaked a vase of lilies into his depiction of the Annunciation, to Georgia O’Keeffe, who plunged viewers straight into the heart of her poppies, Michael Prodger explores how flowers have inspired artists across the centuries
NO one knows which bloom was the first ever to catch the eye of an artist. Although it withered and died deep in historical times, that f lower inspired one of art’s most venerable and joyous genres. It was most likely an anonymous Egyptian artist-artisan, who, walking by the Nile, saw in the lotus f lower a plant of pleasing shape and pattern and decided to record it. From that first insight, lotus flowers began to appear on papyrus and wall paintings, ceramics and amulets, clothing and jewellery. By then, the f lower, as so many other blossoms were to gain over the centuries, had a symbolic association as well—with the sun, in the case of the lotus, because the f lower closes and sinks at dusk and rises and opens again at dawn—so, when depicted by artists, it was not merely a thing of beauty, but carried meaning, too.
By the middle of the second millennium BC, flowers were to be found ever ywhere in Egyptian art, architecture and decoration —so much so that at the Festival Hall of Thutmose III at Karnak there is a stone relief depicting 275 different species of plants. The fashion for f lora that started on the southern shores of the Mediterranean quickly crossed the sea to Europe, where it spread like bindweed. By the 5th century BC, the Greeks were using the acanthus plant as a pattern on columns and friezes, and the Egyptian lotus was Hellenised and re-emerged as ‘eggand-dart’ moulding, which snaked its way around temples and civic buildings and remains familiar to us thanks to innumerable 18th- and 19th-century Greek Revival buildings and furniture.
The Romans, in thrall to both Egyptian and Greek culture, took things further still. In his encyclopaedia Natural History (Naturalis Historia), Pliny the Elder described both the fecundity and the uses of the plant world and the artists employed by the Empress Livia, wife of Augustus, took this accurate approach when working for her.
At her countryside retreat, The House of the White Hen, a few miles north of Rome, they painted a spectacular garden room so she could entertain her guests in a setting where fantasy and reality were indistinguishable.
The building was uncovered in the late 16th century, only to be abandoned for another 300 years, but, eventually, excavations revealed a room decora
