Venetian art of the 16th century was certainly quite widely known in artistic circles in Amsterdam when Rembrandt and Drost were active. Several works are recorded in some of the leading collections of the day and the dissemination of prints meant that Italian art was studied with some ease and with great interest by northern artists. Venetian depictions of courtesans by masters such as Paris Bordone and Palma Vecchio (fig. 3), were a repeated source of inspiration, as both the Louvre Bathsheba and the Young Woman in a brocade gown in the Wallace Collection, London, would suggest.2 Drost’s Young Woman with Pearls in Dresden, particularly in its depiction of the puffed sleeve hanging over the balustrade, is a clear response to Titian’s Portrait of a Man, formerly thought to depict the poet Ariosto which is today in London’s National Gallery but which also belonged to López.3 That picture was certainly known to Rembrandt too, for his Self Portrait, also in the National Gallery, London, once more pays direct homage to Titian’s portrait.4
Drost's Bathsheba in the Louvre is signed and dated 1654, and so was painted very shortly before the artist's trip to Italy. It is of little surprise then that the present Flora should display a number of striking similarities to the Paris picture, and these extend well beyond the fact that both figures are shown bare-breasted. Both compositions are characterised by a circular movement which traces its motion through the arms. The figures are shown close to the picture plane and fill the pictorial space. The heads are tilted in the same alluring and seductive way. The expansive white sleeves glow in the warm light which allows the highlights of the hair to shimmer and emerge from the darkness behind the heads. Similar brushwork can be found in the ex-Rothschild Man with a plumed beret sold in these Rooms in 1997.5
The rediscovery of the present work allow us to re-evaluate Drost’s stylistic development in Italy, for his Italian oeuvre reveals a strong affinity for the Tenebrist style prevalent in Venice at the time. Indeed, his Italian paintings have at times been confused with the work of the German artist Johann Carl Loth, who was active in Venice and perhaps best exemplifies Venetian tenebrism. As Dr. Jonathan Bikker, author of the catalogue raisonné dedicated to Drost, notes, it had been assumed based on the extant paintings from the artist’s Italian sojourn that Drost had lost interest in the 16th century Venetian prototypes which had so informed his style while he was still in Amsterdam. However, the present Flora, which was almost certainly painted in Venice, directly contradicts that idea and confirms that Titian continued to be a crucial source of inspiration.
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