Vase with flowers

Attributed to Brueghel Jan the Elder

(Brussels 1568 - Antwerp 1625)

This refined painting on copper is probably one of the works produced by Jan Brueghel the Elder during his stay in Italy. The Flemish painter, who arrived in Rome in 1591, was highly sought after by an upper class clientele for his exceptionally fine brushwork. This painting shows a glass vase full of flowers, with the image of a window reflected on its surface. Within it is a bouquet, painted on a dark background that highlights the brilliance of the colours and vivacity of the flowers, among which a butterfly and dragonfly flutter. The painting, similar to another one on copper - also attributed to Brueghel (Galleria Borghese, inv. 516) - does not merely reproduce reality in an analytical way, but implies deeper meanings and themes such as vanitas and the transience of life.

Object details

Commentary

   The provenance of this painting is entirely unknown. According to most scholars, it was among the works sequestered in 1607 by Paul V from Cavalier d’Arpino, which then became part of the collection of Scipione Borghese. However, as already observed by Paola della Pergola (1959, p. 155), this painting on copper could have also come to the Borghese family through the inheritance of Olimpia Aldobrandini (Della Pergola 1959, p. 217, no. 60), or the purchase of ‘twelve paintings on copper of fruit and flowers’ sold to the Borghese by Giacomo Costa in 1613 (Curti 2011, pp. 218–219; Della Pergola 1959, p. 217, no. 60). 

Whatever its provenance, it is certain that the painting was noted for the first time in the Borghese Collection in 1693, when it was listed in the inventory for that year (Inv. 1693, room XI, no. 122) as a ‘small painting’ by an anonymous artist.

Seeking to give a name to the artist, the compiler of the fideicommissary lists in 1833 attributed it to Mario de' Fiori, a name accepted a few years later by Giovanni Piancastelli (1891), but rejected in 1893 by Adolfo Venturi, who instead attributed it to Abramo Mignon. This attribution, questioned by Giulio Cantalamessa and Roberto Longhi (1928), was rejected by Paola della Pergola, who instead attributed the painting to Jan Brueghel the Elder, son of the famous painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

The attribution of this painting on copper to the Flemish artist, accepted by Stefania Bedoni (1983), Ferdinando Bologna (1992), Maurizio Calvesi (1996) and Francesca Curti (2011), was instead rejected by Klaus Ertz (1979) who, in a monographic study of the painter, agreed that the Borghese painting is similar to Brueghel’s works, but eliminated it from his oeuvre. In 1995, questioning the authorship of the painting (as her colleagues before her, Maurizio Marini (1981) and Sergio Guarini (1995)), Maria Rosaria Nappi suggested that the Borghese work might be a copy of the lost vase of flowers by Caravaggio reported in the sources (Bellori 1672, p. 202), a theory rejected by Maurizio Calvesi (1996), and contradicted by the archival research of Curti (2011, pp. 65-76, 219), which places Caravaggio in the workshop of Cavalier d'Arpino in 1596, when the Flemish painter had already left Rome. This conjunction of artists (Caravaggio-Brueghel-D’Arpino) tallied with the ideas sketched out by Paola della Pergola and embraced over the years by Federico Zeri (1976), Alberto Cottino (1989) and Mina Gregori (2003). Della Pergola, considering it possible that the Vase came from the collection of D’Arpino, had imagined some kind of link between this work and Caravaggio, a relationship also noted by Aldo de Rinaldis who, however, drawing on a passage in Giovan Pietro Bellori’s Vite (1672, p. 202), hurriedly attributed the Vase – and the other still lifes on the list of objects sequestered from Cavalier d’Arpino - to the young Caravaggio.

The painting depicts a glass vase filled with flowers, and the reflection of a window on its surface. The bouquet is painted on a dark background that brings out the brightness of the hues and the vividness of the flowers. A butterfly and a dragonfly, symbols of resurrection and transcendence, flutter around the flowers.  The work, similar to another painting on copper by Brueghel – also in the Borghese Collection (inv. 516) – is not simply an analytical reproduction of reality, but suggests more profound meanings and themes, such as loved ones, vanitas and the fleeting nature of life, emphasised by the various types of flowers in the bouquet, including the tulip, mallow and carnation, which allude, respectively, to nobility, modesty and death. Finally, according to Calvesi (1996), the spherical shape of the vase is a reference to the world and the window frame reflected on its surface an allusion to the Christian cross.

The dating of this painting, in Ertz’s view about 1606, and so after the Vase of Flowers made by the painter for Cardinal Federico Borromeo (Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana), was fixed by Kristina Herrmann Fiore (2004; idem, 2010) to 1591-1595, a period that coincides with the association of Brueghel and other still life painters with the workshop of D’Arpino, where they would have had the opportunity to explore the play of refracted light on mirrors and spheres (Curti 2011; Berra 2014).

Antonio Iommelli