Blooming marvellous

From Duccio, who sneaked a vase of lilies into his depiction of the Annunciation, to Georgia O’Keeffe, who plunged viewers straight into the heart of her poppies, Michael Prodger explores how flowers have inspired artists across the centuries

NO one knows which bloom was the first ever to catch the eye of an artist. Although it withered and died deep in historical times, that flower inspired one of art's most venerable and joyous genres. It was most likely an anonymous Egyptian artist-artisan, who, walking by the Nile, saw in the lotus flower a plant of pleasing shape and pattern and decided to record it. From that first insight, lotus flowers began to appear on papyrus and wall paintings, ceramics and amulets, clothing and jewellery. By then, the flower, as so many other blossoms were to gain over the centuries, had a symbolic  association as well with the sun, in the case of the lotus, because the flower closes and sinks at dusk and rises and opens again at dawn-so, when depicted by artists, it was not merely a thing of beauty, but carried meaning, too.

By the middle of the second millennium BC, flowers were to be found everywhere in Egyptian art, architecture and decoration -so much so that at the Festival Hall of Thutmose III at Karnak there is a stone relief depicting 275 different species of plants. The fashion for flora that started on the southern shores of the Mediterranean quickly crossed the sea to Europe, where it spread like bindweed. By the 5th century BC, the Greeks were using the acanthus plant as a pattern on columns and friezes, and the Egyptian lotus was Hellenised and re-emerged as 'eggand-dart' moulding, which snaked its way around temples and civic buildings and remains familiar to us thanks to innumerable 18th- and 19th-century Greek Revival buildings and furniture.