Fig 2 Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre 1483-86

    We can also look at the botany in each painting. For instance, it was customary for painters to use real objects but to arrange them in a non-real fashion so as to convey a mood, feeling, or idea, such as in a still life.  Given these circumstances, it would not be expected that an artist would have painted an authentic ecosystem.  Rather, plants in  paintings are placed in their positions to suit the artist’s aesthetic.  One supposes also, that most artists were not particularly good naturalists. That said, it is noteworthy that there is a great difference between the two paintings in regard to the “realness” of the plants.  The Louvre artist evidently used real plants as models and tried to capture their “look” very meticulously. Note the curl of the leaves, even the slight irregularities and nicks in some of the leaf margins.  The extremely natural curvature and branching of the stalks behind and to the right of the Virgin’s left shoulder are also noteworthy.  The iris, probably Iris germanica, is in the foreground. The group looks like an assemblage from a Mediterranean climatic region; the compound leaves on the branches at the upper left, in particular, look like leathery, evergreen sclerophylls.

The National Gallery Fig. 1 plants are less well done.  One of the more realistic is the one at the lower left, meant to look like a liliaceous plant such as a narcissus with a corona, but note that while plants in this family always have six petals, some have been painted with only five.  In general, these plants look like fairly cheap plastic ones!  The leaves do look sclerophyllous and Mediterranean, but the lines behind Jesus’ right shoulder which might represent a tuft of grass, are particularly crude, the dark branches of a leafless bush at right-center not much better.

While most of the plants in either picture could not grow in a dark grotto, the vine at right center, in the Louvre painting might be an exception.  One would expect mostly mosses and brittle, glassy-stemmed herbs such as Pilea spp., Begoina spp., moisture-loving and shade-tolerant ferns, and few woody plants.  Also, the shallowness of the soil might preclude mature trees. Thus the Louvre sandstone could support a robust vegetation, whereas the National Gallery diabase could not.