Vincenzino

A Vase of Tulips, Carnations and Roses

Artist
Giuseppe Volò called Vincenzino
(Milano, 1662-Milano, 1700 )

Details
Oil on canvas, 71.1×52.1 cm

Exhibition
«From Light to Enlightenment»:Italian old master paintings from 16th to 18th centuries, ShanghaiArt Museum, China, 12-17 November 2005.

Literature
«From Light to Enlightenment»: Italian old master paintings from 16th to 18th centuries, Exhibitioncatalogue, Shanghai Art Museum, China, 12-17 November 2005, n 33.This canvas is an exercise in elegant decoration: it is an intimate, a vertical composition representinga glass vase poised on a stone surface and observed close up; it is lit from the left and contains tulips,carnations and white roses, among others.Far more than they do today, people were aware of the symbolism of individual flowers (the rose issacred to Venus), as well as their price (a tulip is more valuable and rare than a carnation)–but thesepaintings were not made for symbolic purposes; rather, they were (and still remain) exuberantexpressions of nature, and for those who owned them they represented a celebration of the floralworld within a domestic interior.