Big Bouquet of Flowers in a Wooden Vessel

Time for a piece from Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Today something less serious than the Triptich we showed last Sunday :)

From 1600 on, painting flowers developed into a separate category of still life. Jan Breughel is one of the main representatives of this genre with sixteen paintings of this type attributed to him. Called "Velvet Brueghel" for his skill at painting rich and delicate textures, Brueghel was the second generation in a dynasty of Flemish painters.

Born in Brussels and trained by his grandmother, Brueghel was celebrated in his own time, becoming dean of the Antwerp painters' guild by 1602. He traveled widely throughout Europe. During a three-year trip to Italy in the mid-1590s, he gained the patronage of Cardinal Federico Borromeo who delighted in Brueghel's unrealistic spaces and unexpected vistas combined with flowers and animals depicted from life.

Flowers in a Wooden Vessel - one of the most famous depictions of flowers ever created - is not a reflection of a real bouquet, presenting instead an encyclopaedic panorama of rare species. Art and scientific curiosity are combined in this highly meticulous, virtuosic reproduction of 130 different flowers.