Botanicals in art for the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show
Depictions of botanical subjects date back to between 50 and 70 CE. They grew in popularity during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as artists became increasingly interested in realistic depictions of the natural world – not only for decorative, but also scientific, medicinal and allegorical purposes. Before photography, it was the painted or drawn image that botanists relied upon.
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Joseph Banks 'Florilegium Syzygium Suborbiculare (Bentham) Eugenia Cymosa- Plate 125' |
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In celebration of the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show, (March 26–30, Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens) this week’s curation dissects the botanical specimen. Plants can be salves and poisons, metaphors for virtue – as the white lily was for the Virgin Mary – and sin, with Narcissus condemned to become a flower in punishment for his vanity.
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They are also vehicles for an artist’s technical ability, evocations of the memento mori or death, and documents of history, as Joseph Banks’s ‘Florilegium Syzygium Suborbiculare (Bentham) Eugenia Cymosa- Plate 125’ is. Artists have used the universal syntax of a flower – stem, bud and leaf – to push the boundaries of figuration, taking florals to the precipice of abstraction.
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For some collectors, there is a synchronicity between tending to art and the garden. Both offer pleasures in and of themselves, prizing beauty, patience and slow looking. Both can also reap unexpected fruit, each work of art or bulb a self-sustaining life that is well-suited to our stewardship. To the green thumbed collectors who plan to visit the festival, prosper your other passion and visit us down the road on Gertrude Street.
