Attributed to Jan Brueghel the Elder

Among the works under this name are two small flower pieces on copper at the Galleria Borghese. The larger, 28 by 21 centimetres, shows a glass vase whose surface reflects a window, with a tulip, a mallow and a carnation, a butterfly and a dragonfly. The smaller, 16 by 12, is a rounded glass carafe crowded with blooms, with fallen petals on the table below.

Jan Brueghel the Elder, son of Pieter Bruegel, spent the early 1590s in Rome and later became famous in Antwerp for jewel-like flower painting of exactly this kind. Paola Della Pergola, who catalogued the Borghese paintings in the 1950s, gave both coppers to him. Klaus Ertz, author of the Brueghel catalogue, left them out, and attributed to is the museum's way of keeping the name while that disagreement stands.

The larger copper may once have belonged to the Cavalier d'Arpino, a leading painter in Rome whose collection was seized in 1607, and the gallery dates it to around 1591 to 1595, when Brueghel was in contact with his workshop. The smaller one may be among 12 little coppers of flowers and fruit bought for the Borghese in 1613.