Tulipomania - Mike Dash [82]
Most of these productions were ribald satires. With few exceptions their central character was the Roman goddess Flora, who had always been the most licentious of deities. According to her myth, Flora had been a notorious courtesan in the earliest days of Rome, who left so much of her immoral earnings to the city when she died that the grateful Romans deified her. She became both the goddess of flowers and the protector of prostitutes, and Dutch pamphleteers delighted in nothing more than drawing obvious parallels between the Roman whore and the valuable tulips that had been passed from hand to hand so rapidly at the very height of the mania. Flora, they reminded their readers, had made a practice of selling herself to the highest bidder, and her price had risen constantly until it was so steep no man could afford to keep her to himself for long. Though each of her lovers was richer and more generous than the last, she ruined them all with her demands for ever more lavish proofs of their devotion. Even after she ascended to the Latin pantheon and married the west wind, Zephyr, Flora had proved incapable of mending her ways. Before long she cuckolded her new husband by dallying with Hercules.
Faithless companion, grasping mistress: perfect metaphor. In the eyes of the pamphleteers, Holland’s bulb traders were just the latest in a long line of men who had abandoned themselves to the goddess of whores, only to be betrayed by her. Many of their publications alluded to the florists’ dire financial straits and bore titles such as Flora’s Sick-bed or the somewhat more explicit The Fall of the Great Garden-Whore, the Villain-Goddess Flora. Others contained the fictional complaints of traders who had found themselves in thrall to a false and pagan idol. In one broadside a weaver speaks angrily of how Flora seduced him. In another, revealingly titled Charge Against the Pagan and Turkish Tulip-Bulbs, Flora and the other earth-spirits decree that the tulip and all other herbs and plants should return to their original places in the scheme of creation, lest plagues of vermin and foul weather be let loose on the land. The overall tone is one of bitter antagonism toward a goddess who had promised everything, yet left those foolish enough to trust her with less than nothing.
At the same time that pamphleteers were pouring forth a torrent of sarcastic verse, the first of several memorable works of art, each rich in the details of the tulip trade, appeared, revealing more about the sort of ridicule the ruined florists must have endured after the crash. It was a painting by Pieter Nolpe (which was later turned into a copper engraving by an artist named Cornelis Danckerts) ponderously entitled Flora’s Fool’s Cap, or Scenes from the Remarkable Year 1637 when one Fool hatched another, the Idle Rich lost their wealth and the Wise lost their senses. Nolpe’s work shows bulb dealers gathering in a drinking house called At the Sign of the Foolish Bulbs, which is actually a gigantic jester’s cap. The sign outside the inn shows two men fighting. In the foreground men carrying baskets and pushing wheelbarrows full of bulbs are on their way to dump the now-worthless tulips upon a dungheap; three gardeners stand and watch, while just behind them Beelzebub, armed with a fishing rod, casts about for worthless tulip contracts. In his right hand the devil holds an hourglass that indicates that the sands of time have quite run out for the tulip trade. In the background of the picture stands a derelict house, and the goddess Flora can be seen riding past on a donkey, gesturing at the members of an angry crowd to keep their distance. She is, the text below the picture explains, being driven off “for her whorish immorality.”
Similarly pointed attacks on the excesses of the bulb trade continued