Breaking the code

Although there is more to some paintings than meets the eye, the quest for pictorial symbols can often be fruitless. Sometimes, a rabbit is only a rabbit,

- Michael Hall

ONLY seven flower paintings by the 17th-century Dutch artist Dirck de Bray are known, which makes his Flowers in a White Stone Vase remarkable for more than its great beauty. Painted in 1671 and currently on loan to the National Gallery, London, from a private collection, it depicts a bunch of spring flowers—including peonies, alliums, aquilegia, morning glory and borage—loosely thrust into a plain white pot, or tumbling onto a marble ledge. Paradoxically, however, its very simplicity and realism will alert anyone knowledgeable about the tradition of Dutch flower paintings that there is more here than meets the eye.

Artists who specialised in this genre almost invariably painted artfully arranged bouquets of flowers that bloomed at different times of the year and so could never have been seen together in life. De Bray (about 1635–94), a Roman Catholic who in about 1680 became a monk, has, by limiting himself to spring flowers, produced a symbolic devotional painting. He must have been aware of the long tradition in medieval and Renaissance art that endowed certain flowers with religious meaning (see box). All his flowers are associated with the Virgin Mary—for example, another name for morning glory is Virgin’s mantle, thanks to its delicate blue shades. In addition, spring is a season closely linked to the Virgin, whose principal feast day, the Annunciation, is in March. The painting’s meaning is reinforced by the inclusion of a ladybird, an insect said to have been created by a miracle of the Virgin in answer to a plague of aphids: its seven black spots have been held to symbolise the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady.

Flowers in a White Stone Vase is exceptional among Dutch still-life paintings in being clearly symbolic in meaning. Flowers were often included in the era’s so-called