Flower paintings by unfamiliar artists go on display at gallery

WASHINGTON -- Old masters didn't limit themselves to painting grave biblical scenes and laughing cavaliers. Some loved doing just fruit and flowers, birds and bees.

As the earliest cherry blossoms bloom in Washington, the National Gallery of Art has put together a show emphasizing the work of unfamiliar but distinguished flower painters. One is Giovanna Garzoni, whom Gretchen Hirschauer, assistant curator of Italian paintings, called "one of the most important female painters in Italian art history."

Lucia Tongiorgi Tornasi of the University of Pisa, co-curator of the show, discovered four Garzoni paintings, nearly 400 years old and never exhibited before, in private Italian hands.

At a news conference the curators compared Garzoni with her contemporary in the 1600s, Artemisia Gentileschi. Both worked at important European courts and won big reputations in their time, but have since been outshone by the male competition.

Gentileschi is the subject of a current novel, a recent New York play and an exposition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She "ran with a pretty tough crowd," said Hirschauer, while Garzoni "lived a very simple but very refined life."

Garzoni stuck to subjects thought appropriate for women: flowers, fruit and portraits. She livened her flower paintings with birds and insects -- a beetle or a carpenter bee -- or the reflection of her studio window in a glass vase.

Gentileschi chose men's subjects: biblical and historical scenes. She depicted strong and aggressive women, like Susanna spurning the elders who spied on her bath, and Jewish heroine Judith cutting the throat of enemy general Holofernes.

The show opened last week and is called "The Flowering of Florence." It celebrates work patronized by the Medici family, who ruled that Italian city and its nearby territories for 300 years. Known for their support of the arts, the Medici also took an enthusiastic interest in botany, developing Italy's first big gardens around their 14 villas. Grand Duke Ferdinando I commissioned a Flemish artist, Giusto Utens, to do big semicircular paintings called lunettes of all 14. Some are in the show.

The Medici spent a lot of money on their gardens and wanted painted records of them and related subjects. So in addition to the lunettes and Garzoni's demure still lifes, they had another artist, Bartolomeo Bembi, depict both a 160-pound squash grown in the vicinity and another work detailing 115 varieties of pears, each carefully labeled, in a single painting nearly eight feet wide.

Curator Hirschauer believes many of the pear varieties no longer exist.

"I can't imagine what a pear called 'Goose Beak' tasted like," she mused.

The exhibit will be open, admission free, through May 27.