Roman sculpture of Flora, goddess of spring and flowers

Ancient Art

Flora: Goddess, Mother, and Whore

Within the confines of the Telfair Museum of Art there is a plaster cast of an ancient Roman statue of the goddess Flora. The original version of the statue stands in the Vatican and dates back to the year 14 C.E. The statue is of a heavy-limbed middle-aged woman, with her hair carefully arranged like a Roman matron. Her hair is bound, rather than loose flowing, like a married rather than a young and virginal woman. The medium size of the statue is neither intimidating in its stature nor precious in its scale. It is evidently large enough to be effective for public display, but not so small as to resemble the small, private scale deity sculptures designed perhaps for the context of Roman home worship.

Flora wears a transparent-like garment that emphasizes and conceals the nudity of her figure in its artful drapes and beckons the gazer in a friendly and alluring way. Her palm turned open, as if making an offering. She wears a garland of flowers in her hair, as is typical of all statues of the goddess Flora ("Flora," Roman Religion and Mythology: Lexicon, 1999) She strikes the viewer as both sensual, yet also motherly, traditional and womanly. She is nude and provocative in the way she extends her grasping hand to the gazer, but not intimidating in her beauty.

This statue of Flora embodies Roman contradictory attitudes towards female fertility and sexuality -- on one hand, sexuality was desirable for familial propagation, but on the other hand female liberality in the sexual sphere was something Roman society wished to contain -- it wished women to be both sexual and fertile, yet new and fresh as the spring and virginal was well. The physical openness and apparent sexual accessibility in the statue's physical configuration combined with its girlish flowers may reflects the fact that Flora was the goddess of flowers, fertility, and the new spring, and also the goddess of prostitutes.

According to the Roman Lexicon, Flora was the goddess that made the foliage bloom and "later she became protector of the spring and everything that blooms, including flowers." ("Flora," Roman Religion and Mythology: Lexicon, 1999) Originally, she and another female deity, known as Pomona, shared dual springtime functions -- Flora was of the flowers, Pomona was the goddess of fruit that could be picked from trees. Pomona "kept a garden from which she excluded would-be suitors. The Etruscan god Vertumnus (perhaps "Changer" or "Turner") turned himself into an old woman who advised Pomona to marry Vertumnus. When he resumed his usual form as a young male god, she accepted him." ("Flora and Pomona," Ancient Roman Mythology, 2004)

But gradually, Flora became the better known and more celebrated of the two, paired deities, and subsumed some of Pomona's traditional 'fruit-oriented' celebratory, functions. Interestingly enough, Flora also had an attached myth that had a theme of female fertility being an enclosed garden that must be impinged upon for fruition and fertility to occur. It is said that Zephyrus, the West Wind gave Flora a garden filled with flowers and tended by the Seasons and Graces. (("Flora and Pomona," Ancient Roman Mythology, 2004)

Flora, like most Roman deities, has a counterpart Greek mythology, namely that of the Greek Chloris. But Chloris was mainly known as the relatively minor wife of the West Wind Zephyr (the more important of the pair). Flora became much more important than the West Wind in Rome and was not Zephyr's wife but his consort. (Ancient Roman Mythology, 2004)

The statue may have been constructed for Flora's "own festival, the Floralia, which was overseen by a special priest, the Flamen Floralis." ("Flora," Roman Religion and Mythology: Lexicon, 1999) Why a priest but not a priestess for this female goddess, one might wonder? The seriousness of the sphere of life, namely that of agricultural female fertility that Flora presided over may reflect this.

According to the Roman historian Pliny, in his Natural History, in 238 BC, at the direction of an oracle in the sibylline books, a temple was built to honor Flora, an ancient goddess of flowers and blossoming plants. (Pliny, XVIII.286) the temple was dedicated on April 28 and the Floralia instituted to solicit her protection for the city.

Although the Floralia originated as a "moving festival," after a period with bad crops when according to Ovid, "the blossoms again that year suffered from winds, hail, and rain" (Ovid, Fasti, V.329ff), the festival Ludi Florales started to be held every year, the first in 173 BCE. "It was later fixed on April 27th. After Caesar's reform of the calendar, it was April 28th. The purpose of the festival was to ensure the crops blossomed well." ("Flora," Roman Religion and Mythology: Lexicon, 1999)

Flora thus is fertile, like a mother, for she is the goddess of fertility. But she is also the goddess of a fertility that must be impinged upon and broken down, like her consort impinged upon her gardens. So according to Ovid, this festival was celebrated annually with games with sexually explicit farces and mimes. The prostitutes of Rome, performed naked in the theater and, deer and hares, both animal symbols of fertility, were let loose in honor of the goddess as protector of gardens and fields. Hence the nudity of Flora's statue. Then, as well, ordinary Roman matrons wore colorful clothing in the streets, rather than their usual festival white. (Ovid, Fasti, IV.946, V.189-190, 331ff.).

Unlike a fertile wife and mother, the statue of Flora stands naked and open before the viewer for she is not a virgin. She is there to encourage women to enter into the inevitable rite of springtime sowing and 'mating,' to ensure a good harvest. The statue depicts a fertile matron who is also, paradoxically, indiscriminate in her bounty and naked approach to the viewer.