花瓶中的花

No such bouquet ever stood on a table. Jan Brueghel, nicknamed Velvet for his finish, built pictures like this from flowers that bloom in different months, tulips, roses, irises, and cyclamen that could never open at the same time. He studied each one from life as it came into season, then combined them, so the finished vase is really a year of looking, painted around 1620 in Antwerp. Tulips like the striped ones here were newly fashionable and costly, still a couple of decades before the notorious speculation in bulbs. The insects and the single fallen petal carry the old reminder that all of it is short-lived. Look low and you often find a fly or a beetle on the ledge, painted at exactly life size.