6 de março de 2011

Jan Brueghel "The Elder" - Flowers in a Wooden Vessel

Flowers in a Wooden Vessel - 1606-7
Kunsthistorisches Museum - Vienna

I saw, for the first time, "Flowers in a Wooden Vessel" , last year, at the  Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna and it immediately captured my attention for its poetic composition and the perfect brush strokes made by master Brueghel The Elder. It was painted for Archduke Albert VII, the sovereign regent of the Spanish Netherlands, and became one of the most famous floral still lifes in European art. The grand format, the perfect painting technique and the highly successful composition make it a characteristic piece for an art collection of the time. It’s interesting that the references usually found in floral still life related with the transitoriness of earthly things occurs here in an incidentally way: we can see that some flowers that have fallen are wilted or have been damaged by insects but in the all picture they aren’t relevant enough to caught our attention. This painting also has another curiosity which is to aggregate flowers associated with different seasons of the year. Here they all bloom at once, a situation only found in the “eternal spring” of Paradise. In a letter written by Brueghel The Elder it’s interesting what he says about this painting:

”when winter approaches, covering everything in ice, I take pleasure in the view – and in my imagination even in the scent – of flowers, if not the real ones then the artificial kind found in the painting”.

Source: Masterpieces of the Picture Gallery - Kunsthistorisches Museum - Vienna by Cecilia Bischoff

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