This exuberant pair of flower still lifes was painted in Italy in the latter half of the 17th century, a time when floral and botanical collecting held important cultural significance in Europe. Delicately executed in tempera on vellum, their style and technique bear the hallmarks of an artist familiar with the work of Florentine court painter Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670), whose compositions are characterised by an exquisite finesse of touch and attention to detail.

Born into a family of Venetian artisans residing in Ascoli Piceno, in the central Italian region of the Marche, after practicing as a painter in Venice, Naples, Turin and possibly Paris and London (Casale, 1991, pp. 7-9), between 1646 and 1651 Garzoni settled in Florence, where her small-scale still lifes in tempera on vellum were highly prized by the Medici Grand Dukes. She subsequently moved to Rome, where she continued to work for her Florentine patrons and equally received commissions from the papal court and the local nobility. Her renown as a painter is testified by the fact that, in Rome, she took part in the artists’ meetings that were held at the prestigious Accademia di San Luca, and in the later years of her life, when infirmity left her bedridden, many academicians are recorded to have visited her home before her death in 1670 (Casale, 1991, pp. 11-12).

Inspired by the rich traditions of Italian and Dutch flower painting, Garzoni’s temperas celebrated the abundance and marvel of the natural world and were intended to decorate the finest interiors. Often bringing together flowers that bloomed at different times of the year and originated from different lands, such compositions served as visual testimonies of the wealth of their owners, whose collections of decorative objects could serve as models for the urns and vessels the flowers were depicted in.

In the case of the present paintings, the richly decorated vases’ blue backgrounds appear to evoke lapis lazuli, a precious stone quarried in the far-away mountains of Badakhshan (now Afghanistan), while their decorative friezes emulate gilt metal, often used in this type of container. One such example is a lapis lazuli flask mounted in gold and gilt copper designed by Bernardo Buontalenti (1523-1608) for Francesco I de’ Medici, now in Florence’s Pitti Palace. This echo suggests our pair of still lifes may have been painted in Florence, although Garzoni scholar Elena Fumagalli points out (email correspondence, 29 May 2024) that their handling of the brush does not visibly match that of any of Garzoni’s documented followers in the Tuscan city. Fumagalli further denotes that Garzoni’s influence on Roman artists is yet to be the subject of an extensive study, which may, in due course, yield more information on the authorship of the present compositions.

Related Literature
G. Casale, Giovanna Garzoni, "insigne miniatrice" 1600-1670, Milan, 1991
G. Casale ed., Gli incanti dell'iride: Giovanna Garzoni pittrice nel Seicento, exh. cat., Milan, 1996
S. Barker ed., "The immensity of the universe" in the art of Giovanna Garzoni, exh. cat., Florence, 2020