Bouquets of Art

A gorgeous compendium that illuminates the rich history of floriography through the lens of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's expansive collectionThis volume draws upon the rich history of the language of flowers in order to offer a new perspective through which to explore the permanent collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Featuring a sampling of floral imagery selected from across cultures, periods, and media, this guide builds on the methods of floriography as a means for navigating how the collection's expansive array of objects intersects with the rich histories of floral symbolism and communication.Looking across the Fine Arts Museums' holdings of American art, works on paper, costume and textile arts, European painting, and European decorative arts and sculpture, this selection of 50 floral objects presents the collection through a new lens, with accompanying texts that explore a rich variety of source material, including poetry, etymology, folklore, botany, popular music, biblical verse, mythology, histories of exploration and colonization, and systems of belief. A branch of azaleas recalls lines of poetry from the oldest extant collection of Japanese verse; the deep purple irises of a stained-glass window suggest the myth of Iris, the Greek goddess who carried...