As the flowers surrounding the museum beautifully bloom this spring, floral imagery enlivens the galleries inside. Early modern Netherlandish and Flemish painting plucked the floral subject not only for its aesthetic quality, but its symbolism and evocativeness.

In the late 1400s, flowers gained religious significance as they decorated ornate Books of Hours: the rose as Virgin Mary, with its thorns representing sins; the white rose for purity and chastity; the red rose for Christ’s Passion; the white lily for virginity;  the iris as royal, signifying Mary as Queen of Heaven; and the columbine, violet, daisy, pansy, and strawberry plants with their tripartite leaf arrangements evoking Christianity’s Holy Trinity.

In August 1606, Jan Brueghel the Elder wrote to Federico Borromeo about his Vase of Flowers with Jewel, Coins and Shell (1606), “I believe that so rare and varied flowers never have been finished with similar diligence; in winter this painting will make a beautiful sight. A few of the colors are very close to nature.”

Many of these dynamic bouquets could never have existed in real life as artists combined flowers from different seasons and regions. In the 1600s, the expression Ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is brief) was fundamental to the Dutch still-life, or naer het leven (painting from life).

In 1628, Borromeo wrote about the scent of Brueghel’s painted blossoms, "Then when winter encumbers and restricts everything with ice, I have enjoyed from sight — and even imagined odor, if not real —fake flowers...expressed in painting."

Take a look at the paintings in the slideshow below. Do the flowers of artists Joos van Cleve, Willem van Aelst, and Isaak Soreau have the same effect?