Born in Antwerp, Jan Brueghel The Young represents the third generation of artists of his family. He arrived in Milan in 1622 where he will have an exceptional patron: the Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the same of his father, Brueghel The Old, and Caravaggio. Jan worked in Genoa, Rome, Malta and Antwerp and collaborated with artists of the caliber of Pieter Paul Rubens.
The still lives by Brueghel The Young are characterized by richness of details and compositive beauty, such as the bunch of flowers exposed in the exhibition “The Basket of Caravaggio. Secrets and riddles of the still life”. The composition includes a large variety of flowers, such as the “Forget Me Not” flower, the Centifolia Rose, the carnation and the tulip in different steps of flowering.
The word “tulip” derives from the Turkish “tullband” and means “turban” referring to the shape of the flower and to the Turkish origin; the big popularity arrived around 1500 during the Kingdom of Suleiman the Magnificent, while in 1593 the tulip growing was introduced with a great success in Netherland where the spring cool climate and the humid soil, but without too much water, were particularly favorable.
Because of the high prices, the father’s workshop inherited by Jan Brueghel The Young faced economic problems and the artist had to be adapt himself to less wealthy customers that preferred works of lower quality. Ironically, he also painted a work related to an economic crisis of a larger scale, that was an allegory about the financial bubble of tulip.
In Holland, a growing nation because of its central role in the trades with East Indies, in the middle class a contest broke out in order to grab the rarest tulips, striped or flaming; they became a luxury product as well as a status symbol.
Exotic names or those of Dutch admirals were attributed to tulips; the variety called “The Viceroy” was worth as much as 15 years of work of an artisan (about 4150 florins).
Some tulips were exchanged for livestock and even houses or lands and the bulb of the “Semper Augustus” variety reached the record price of 6000 florins in Haarlem, compared to 1650 florins for Rembrandt’s masterpiece “The Night Watch”.
In 1636, tulips were traded on the stock exchanges and speculation reached worrying levels until the following year when, due to a plague epidemic, an auction went unanswered, causing panic and sales and the financial ruin of hundreds of Dutch businessmen, pictorially represented by Brueghel as monkeys in luxury clothes, as prey to their own excessive expectations.
The debts incurred were considered uncollectible, like those from gambling.
Even in Oliver Stone’s film “Wall Street” the protagonist talks about the tulip bubble as the cause of the 2008 crisis.
In the book “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green Augustus, the protagonist (played by Michael Douglas) gives tulips to his beloved, but gets sick and dies like the flower variety “Semper Augustus”, which became extinct due to the potyvirus, which was responsible for the characteristic streaking of tulips, but also of the shrinkage and death of the bulb itself.
In 2017, the fast rise in the price of Bitcoins was compared to the tulip bubble by numerous economists, journalists, politicians and important investors.
