In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Flowers of the Renaissance
  • Lisa Boutin Vitela
Celia Fisher, Flowers of the Renaissance (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum 2011) 160 pp., 150 color ill.

Celia Fisher’s Flowers of the Renaissance is a significant contribution to the study of plants and gardens represented in Renaissance works of art. This comprehensive text serves as an important addition to Fisher’s previous publications that considered the role of flora in art, Flowers and Fruit (National Gallery 1998) and The Medieval Flower Book (British Library 2007). The text will also be of interest to those who are familiar with the research of Mirella Levi D’Ancona, who has published extensively on Renaissance plants and gardens, including studies of the flora represented in Botticelli’s Primavera and Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise. More recently, scholars have published many thought-provoking studies of Renaissance gardens and villas. Examples include a volume of essays on gardens in and around Florence, Genoa, Milan, Venice, and Ferrara entitled The Italian Garden: Art, Design, and Culture that was edited by John Dixon Hunt (Cambridge 1996), and Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto’s Medici Gardens: From Making to Design (University of Pennsylvania 2008), which explores the development and purposes of the Medici gardens. Despite this attention to Renaissance vegetation and gardens, the study of plants in paintings is often relegated to a subspecialty within art history. Due to the current aversion to iconography as a methodology, the flowers depicted in paintings are often ignored by art historians in favor of discussing issues related to the larger historical context. Celia Fisher’s Flowers of the Renaissance serves as a reminder to consider the role of plants in Renaissance art.

The book includes a brief introduction, a section on the Renaissance garden and gardening, and sections on individual flowers, plants, and fruit that were frequently depicted in Renaissance works of art. A thorough index lists the artists, patrons, places, works of art, and common artistic motifs and themes that appear in the text. A bibliography is not included, and the text does not include footnotes. Thus, the text serves as an informative, but rather general source for art historians, historians, and botanists. The book’s numerous rich color illustrations and succinct passages of analysis provide an excellent starting point for researchers interested in representations of plant life by European artists from the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries.

Fisher introduces the text by asserting the importance of flowers in Renaissance works of art. Through an example from Hugo van der Goes’s Portinari Altarpiece, she demonstrates that assemblages of flowers can possess layered meanings. Fisher suggests that during the Renaissance artists represented flowers with greater accuracy than in previous periods and that this attention to [End Page 191] detail was part of the Renaissance interest in science and close observation. As the author acknowledges, the works of art featured in the text, dating to the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, expand beyond the traditional temporal boundaries of the Renaissance.

The first section of the text about gardens and gardening serves as a useful starting point for analysis of plants and works of art. Fisher examines a page of a French manuscript and painting of a paradise garden by an unknown German master as examples of the northern Renaissance garden. While the author identifies the iconography and discusses important stylistic features, she does not explain what is especially “northern” about these artworks. This lack of specificity leaves the reader wondering whether the flowers and fruit in these images were more common in the northern Europe than elsewhere. In the author’s discussion of the Italian Renaissance garden, Fisher analyzes Botticelli’s Primavera with its central myrtle bush and abundant orange trees. She also analyzes a painting of one of the many Medici villas, known as La Petraia. With its formal gardens and orderly orchards, Fisher highlights desire for symmetry and balance during the Italian Renaissance. The final part of the first section is a brief discussion of the practice of gardening. Fisher demonstrates that by the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century planting and harvesting had become activities worthy of artistic representation.

For the remainder of the book, Fisher describes the types of...

pdf

Share