French Manufactory

Zephyrus and Flora

Paris, ca. 1730

silk and wool weft (8-9 warp threads per cm)

298 x 552 cm

Inv. no. 468

BBVA Collection Spain


This
depicts one of the myths told by Ovid in his poems. According to Greek legend, Zephyrus, the West Wind and Herald of Spring, fell in love with the beautiful goddess Chloris and gave her the domain of flowers, which is why she is called Flora in Roman mythology.

The goddess is depicted reclining on a divan, set within a natural landscape. She is surrounded by amorini and beautiful maidens picking flowers. Zephyrus is holding her hand, while a winged angel spills a cornucopia of flowers over her head. In the background one can see a cortege of satyrs and maenads.

The scene is framed by a floral edge that also includes vases and jars of Chinese pottery, delimited on either side by two Louis XIV style (1638-1715) pilasters of fake marble also decorated with flowers.

Similarly to Offering to Ceres with which this
forms a pair, there are no markings to indicate the manufactory, although it was made with the same techniques as some of the most celebrated series produced by Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) for the Gobelins factory, with an architectural framing added to the usual
bordure .

The use of classical myth as an allegory of a season (Spring) or an element (Air) was a signature feature of the Gobelins factory since the period of Le Brun, who had represented Spring and Summer in some of his series through offerings to Flora and Ceres, as in the pair of tapestries in this collection. Both come from a series on Ovid’s Metamorphoses woven on old models that had already been used at the workshops of Marc de Comans (1563-1640) and of Raphaël van den Planken († ca. 1661), known in France as Raphaël de la Planche.

Registered in some inventories as a Dutch work, it may well be of French origin, possibly from the
. While the flowers and the
are reminiscent of the style of that factory, the bordure is more in tune with the Dutch taste, in the manner of Daniel Marot (1661-1752) in the typical ceramics from Delft created to exhibit tulips, a flower which was the basis of a thriving industry in the 18th century and is represented in the pilasters seen on both ends of the
.