Why do we keep drawing roses?
- La mia Maglietta
- 28 mag
- Tempo di lettura: 2 min
There are symbols that continually return.
Even when times change, the clothes, the images we save.
Roses are one such symbol.
We find them in ancient paintings, in old school tattoos, on love letters, in time-worn vintage fabrics, in embroidery, on book covers, in fashion.
We continue to draw them not because they are simply beautiful (although they are very much so) but because they manage to convey very human emotions: desire, transformation, delicacy, suffering, femininity, nostalgia.
Roses are never just decorative.
They are almost always emotional.
Roses in Paintings: When Flowers Become Language
In the Renaissance, flowers were hidden symbols.
Each element told a story: purity, love, rebirth, passage.
In Sandro Botticelli's Primavera, roses become the symbol of the changing season, of fertility, of life returning.
These are not background details but parts of the work's narrative.
Even in Impressionist paintings, roses cease to be perfect and become alive: soft, intimate, almost everyday.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir often paints them as something close to the body and the home.
Flowers to keep on the table, to watch as they slowly wither.
Perhaps this is what we continue to love about painted flowers: their fragility that reminds us of our own.
Henri Fantin-Latour paints roses as if they were something silent and fragile, almost suspended in time.
In Roses in a Vase the flowers are not perfect or decorative in the classical sense: they seem truly alive.
Some roses are just opening, others are already wilting slightly, almost as if to indicate the seasons of human life.
The vase is simple, almost secondary like the context of our lives.
The entire balance of the painting focuses on the materiality of the flowers: the transparency of the petals, the deep shadows between one rose and another, that feeling of domestic quiet typical of 19th-century French still lifes.
Roses and the body
Over time, the roses emerged from the paintings and began to inhabit the body.
In old-school tattoos, they become permanent symbols of love, desire, memory, and protection. Thorns coexist with delicacy.
And it is precisely this contradiction that makes them still contemporary.
Roses never speak of perfection but of something that is truly alive, like thorns that prick, hurt, but without them roses would not be so special.
They also continually return in fashion: printed, embroidered, worn, hand-drawn.
Sometimes romantic, sometimes melancholic, sometimes almost rebellious.
Why the roses keep coming back to us
Perhaps because they are one of the few symbols capable of remaining delicate without becoming weak.
A rose can speak of love, but also of identity, of transformation, of slow growth, telling the story of something that changes.
And that's where my May tee was born.
Two roses grow separately on the shoulders. They grow, seek each other, grow closer.
Their thin stems meet on the back in a small red embroidered stitch: essential, almost invisible.
The moment when what was distant is recognized.
Because sometimes blossoming isn't about becoming something else.
It's finally coming back to yourself.