ABSTRACT
“When Homer sang in ancient times at Corinth, no one lis-W tened to his verses. In our own era in Paris, Poussin earned too little to live.” These lines bewailing philistinism, published by Nicolas de Valnay in 1669, were written, rather surprisingly, in defense of the tulip. Valnay, contrôleur of Louis XIV’s household and a member of a loose group of curieux devoted to flowers, expressed surprise at the preference some felt for other curiosities, such as paintings, medals, or porcelains. Look at such things as long as you like, he wrote, but you will always be looking at the same thing. Not so with the wonderful annual variety of flowers, of which the tulip was the queen. The beauties of painting, moreover, are all in design, execution, and color; but “I challenge the entire Académie de Peinture to imagine flowers better than natural ones, to execute them in complete perfection, or ever to approach the colors of Flowers.” If you own a painting, you will always have only one, but bulbs have the advantage of multiplying themselves. The consequence of this (although Valnay did not put it this way) is social: you can give a rare flower to a friend and yet still keep the same thing, not a copy, for yourself. These arguments against painting, Valnay said, could also be made against medals, porcelains, and other fashionable rarities: “when reason is combined with taste, beautiful flowers will hold the first rank among the pleasures of sight.” 1
