By Jennifer Schneider
Floriography, also called the language of flowers, has been a means of cryptological communication for centuries. Through arrangements of specific flowers, coded messages could be delivered to recipients. In addition, plants have traditionally represented metaphors for virtue or vice.
The origins of plant symbolism can be attributed to the literature of antiquity, religious writings, and the documented study of medieval herbology. The Bible includes many instances where trees, fruits, or flowers lend themselves to sacred allegories.
Many devout writers and artists from the medieval period through the Renaissance used floriography as a means to explain and interpret religious beliefs.
The seventh-century English Benedictine monk Bede the Venerable likened the Virgin Mary to the lily by describing “the white petals signifying [her] bodily purity, the golden anthers the glowing light of her soul.” Thus, the lily flower has become a symbol of purity and humility.
The use of botanical imagery flourished in the 15th and 16th centuries as many artists became interested in illustrating objects from nature with greater realism.
Prior to the 17th century, flowers were primarily symbolic decorations in service of the main subject. To provide more depth and context to a painting, a plant would either give clues to the identity of the subject or offer a moral description of the subject.
Ludger tom Ring the Younger, a 16th-century German portrait painter, created a pair of flower paintings that have been regarded as the first independent flower pieces. The inscriptions on both vases read, “God is the word, in the plants (in herbis), and in the stones.”
Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, Münster, Germany.
Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder was the first great Dutch painter of botany, and the head of a family of artists. He started a tradition of floral painting that influenced a generation of fruit-and-flower painters in the Netherlands.
Bosschaert and other Dutch painters often referred to herbals and other botanical texts when composing floral arrangements. These bouquets typically combined flowers from different countries and continents in one vase, arrangements that were quite popular with patrons and nobility across Europe.
The theme that predominated this period of Dutch still life is that of the vanitas. A vanitas is an artwork that symbolizes the impermanence of life relieved by the prospect of salvation and resurrection. Flowers became the ideal symbol of transience and impermanence.
