Ceres (Allegory of Summer)

Look at the horn of plenty Ceres carries. Among the cabbage leaves, apples, figs, peaches and plums there are cobs of maize, a plant that had reached Europe from Mexico only in the previous century. When Jan Boeckhorst painted this around 1635, the Roman goddess of the harvest could already hold a crop from the Americas as naturally as wheat. She wears ears of grain and poppies in her hair and carries a scythe, the tool of the summer reaping. The picture stands for Summer in a set of the four seasons, and its companion Flora, standing for Spring, hangs in the same room. Both spent a long time in Tyrol, at Ambras Castle near Innsbruck, one of the Habsburg collections, and were brought to Vienna in the early 19th century.