Who says flower thinks scent, color, even flavor, so many of them are edible. Our relationship with flowers therefore passes through our senses, it is emotional and generally rather positive. Through their living beauty, they do us good. They are used in the composition of care products, lend their names to the streets of our cities and to newborns, mainly female, but also sometimes male.
Flowers, wild or cultivated, accompany us in many circumstances of life, surround us for our well-being: garden, balcony, interior. They colonize the furniture and objects of our daily life: wallpaper (in the stairwell, a nostalgic nod from Claire Liengme with her fading floral sketches), carpets, curtains, crockery, etc. They invade our clothes and, through tattooing, even our skin.
Even when cut, they continue to play the role of lucky charm for a number of events that we wish to be happy: declaration of love, wedding, birthday, reunion, invitation, gratification (nomination, prize, etc.). As such, they take on the value of consolation or compensation in less favorable circumstances: apologies for wrongs committed, consolation (illness), mourning (ceremony, burial).
A subject almost as old as the arts
With this theme, the Jura Museum of Arts looks at a chronologically and metaphorically very vast part of the history of art. Stylized or naturalistic flowers have been among the subjects favored by artists since ancient times, as evidenced by the capitals of columns, both Egyptian and Greek friezes, and the frescoes of cities swallowed up by the eruption of Vesuvius, such as Stabies, for example. The Middle Ages did not neglect flowers either, as evidenced by illuminations or heraldry (fleur de lys).
Already in these times, with the Renaissance and even more during the following centuries, the flower saw itself reinforced in its symbolic charge, varying according to its appearance. Bright or cut flowers, chosen for their essence, accompany the figures, especially female (the museum devotes an entire room to them), to signify beauty, purity, virginity (the Marian lily), fragility, loss of life. virginity (the rose; an intriguing painting by Gérard Bregnard seems related to this theme).
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