_Uffizi Gallery, Florence_]
The graceful pose of the head, inclined to one side, suggests the soft
languor of a southern temperament. It was often adopted by Titian, and
we see another instance in the attitude of the Venus. We fancy that the
painters liked particularly the long curve thus obtained along the neck
and shoulder. The angle made on the other side between head and shoulder
is filled in with the falling hair.
The title of Flora is given to the picture after the fashion of Titian's
time for drawing subjects from mythology. The revival of classic
learning had opened to Italian art a delightful new field of
illustration. We see how Titian took advantage of it in such pictures as
Medea and Venus. In England the love of the classics was seen in the
poetry which took much the same place there that painting held in Italy.
Flora was the ancient goddess of flowers and is made much of in
Elizabethan verse.[28] Some pretty lines by Richard Carlton describe
"When Flora fair the pleasant tidings bringeth
Of summer sweet with herbs and flowers adorned."
In our picture the goddess holds a handful of flowers, roses, jessamine
and violets, as a sign of her identity. We confess that her type of
beauty hardly corresponds to our ideal of Flora. She is a gentle,
amiable creature, but not ethereal and poetic enough for the goddess
of flowers. Were we to choose a character for her from mythology it
would be Juno, the matronly "ox-eyed" goddess, who presided over
marriage and whose emblem was the productive pomegranate.
As we compare Flora with the other fair women of our collection, we see
that her beauty is of a less elegant and aristocratic type than that of
the Bella, and less delicate and refined than that of the Empress
Isabella. Her face is perhaps too broad to satisfy a connoisseur of
beauty, and she is quite plainly of plebeian caste. Like Lavinia her
charm is in the healthy vitality which was the special characteristic of
the Venetian beauties of the time. The figure glows with warm pulsing
life.