CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/29/2019

Jean-Michel Othoniel's 'Secret Language of Flowers' details the hidden meanings of the various flowers in the Louvre

This detail of “The Entombment of Atala” (1808) by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson—with its tree-carved inscription translating roughly, "I passed like the flower... I dried like the grass of the field"—is reproduced from The Secret Language of Flowers: Notes on the Hidden Meanings of the Louvre’s Flowers, the follow-up to Jean-Michel Othoniel’s beloved and beautifully produced collection of flower-related imagery in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. “Trumpet vine, once called Indian Jasmine, was introduced to Europe in the seventeenth century,” Othoniel writes. “It originated in tropical regions. There, its red trumpets offer their sweet nectar to hummingbirds. In France, these flowers are the glory of Provençal gardens. In painting, they symbolize the exotic and the passionate; the sensual shape of their flowers evokes male erotic tension. Their winding creepers represent attachment to an infinite love, stronger than death.”