Flora

Flora, circa 1540, in the Louvre, depicts the Roman goddess of flowers and spring — or a young woman portrayed as Flora — in the tradition established by Titian's celebrated Flora in the Uffizi. The subject occupied a productive ambiguity: Flora was simultaneously a goddess, an allegory of spring, and a conventional guise for Venetian beauties ranging from wives to courtesans. Bordone's Louvre version belongs to his production for the Venetian luxury market and shows his mature ability to handle the soft, luminous skin and abundant loose hair that characterized the type. The Louvre acquired this work through the French royal collections that absorbed Italian art continuously from the fifteenth century onward.

The Flora type demands specific technical solutions: loose, abundant hair rendered as flowing silk-like strands; warm glowing flesh visible at décolletage and arms; flowers held or worn as attributes. Bordone's technique addresses each of these with warm glazed skin, carefully individual hair strands, and delicately observed botanical forms in the flowers.