Bouquet of flowers

This bouquet could never have stood in a single vase. Jan Brueghel the Elder, son of the famous Pieter Bruegel and known in his own day as Velvet Brueghel, painted flowers that bloom in different months of the year, so tulips, roses and blossoms from spring and high summer crowd together in a way nature never allows. He built it from studies made over many months in the Brussels garden of Archduke Albrecht, the Habsburg governor of the Southern Netherlands, drawing each specimen at its own moment and assembling them later. Look closely and the arrangement is quietly alive: some petals are already dropping, and around 20 kinds of insect creep and settle among the stems. That was the point. A caterpillar, a fresh bloom and a fading one together let a viewer read the whole turning of a life in one still image. It is among the largest and most elaborate of the flower pieces that made his studio famous, close in idea to the panel he had painted a few years earlier for Cardinal Federico Borromeo in Milan.