A 'broken' tulip and an unbroken world

The tulips in my garden are just starting to come out, and I think what I have here is a ‘broken’ tulip. There are others near it that have come out in their usual deep purple, but this bulb has those characteristic, feathery streaks of white that indicate the activity of potyvirus on the plant’s development. Broken tulips were first identified in Leiden in the sixteenth century, where the flame-like patterns were considered beautiful and desirable. These days, striped and streaked tulips aren’t particularly fashionable: too bright; too garish. The famous ‘tulip fever’ of the early modern period, when tulips were bought and sold for astronomical sums until their financial bubble suddenly burst, is often characterised as a farce: an absurd display of greed and conspicuous consumption resting on that laughably small object, a tulip bulb.

But a glance at the tulips immortalised by Dutch Old Masters ought to make us pause.

This image, a detail from Jan Davidsz de Heem’s painting ‘Vase of Flowers’ (in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), shows beautiful broken tulips alongside many other delicate, short-lasting flowers. Their petals are so finely frilled they seem almost to disappear; the butterflies that cling to them seem barely to have alighted. The effect is far more wistful than any display of conspicuous consumption ought to be, and with good reason. Not knowing that the streaked petals of broken tulips were caused by viral damage to the plant, seventeenth-century botanists interpreted them as a form of metamorphosis: a transformation akin to the emergence of a butterfly from its chrysalis. Since the metamorphosis of the butterfly was a symbol of the Resurrection, it’s easy to see why broken tulips became so prized, even revered. Weakened, broken tulips typically die after flowering, so this transformation (or, as it was called, ‘rectification’) of their colours was seen as a sacrificial outpouring of beauty; a final display before death.

This symbolism gives a more spiritual dimension to the seventeenth-century fascination with tulips. Botanists were keen to understand, to find the patterns in nature. In England, Nehemiah Grew read his treatise A Discourse on the Colours of Plants to the newly-formed Royal Society, speculating that the ‘Tinctures of the Soyl’ might be responsible for these ‘strange varieties’ of tulips and other striped flowers. His major work, the Anatomy of Plants, identifies repeated patterns of resemblance between the anatomical forms of plants and those of animals. It is illustrated with diagrams whose beautiful, delicate and intricate lines recall the delicacy of the streaks on broken tulips. Grew was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and at Leiden University. At Pembroke there is a commemorative window to him that reproduces these diagrams in stained glass, where they glowing with translucent colour, like the light seen through a tulip petal.

The broken tulip offers, in microcosm, a perfect image of the intimate, reciprocal relationship between art and science, the pursuit of beauty and the pursuit of knowledge, in seventeenth-century Europe. Resonating through Grew’s work is a deeply-held conviction that nothing is random: nature is full of patterns; full of meaning. In my garden, a broken tulip is a quirk, and a short-lived one at that: its petals are already beginning to droop. But in the midst of the tulip fever of the seventeenth century, it could be a glimpse of the divine - a symbol of Resurrection and an indication of the creating hand that replicated patterns in animals and plants. Now that we know those streaked petals are the result of a virus, ‘broken’ tulips carry connotations of disease and decay; then, they were evidence of an unbroken chain of meaning inscribed in nature.