FioriSalone in Milan, the flower-week with colours&perfumes

The promotion started in these days intends to involve operators but also all the people who love Milan. Those who feel they have a thought to devote can express themselves by decorating with flowers everywhere: balconies, windows, courtyards, terraces, entrances, shops, bars, restaurants, businesses, offices, desks, bicycles, and why not… a white camellia to put as buttonhole on jacket.

It will be a week of colours&perfumes that will involve the City of Milan and will be an opportunity to be captivated by the beauty and emotions that only flowers can express. All with #iomonstrofioriamilano 
"Giving a bouquet of flowers to your loved one is also not a bad idea. Right?"

HERE ARE 2 SIMPLE THINGS YOU CAN DO:
1) Display some flowers and invite your friends to do the same.
2) Share our posts on your social networks.

From 23 to 29 May it will be possible to buy Flowers and Books with a 20% discount at participating shops in Milan:
(Do you have a flower shop? A book shop? Do you deal with flowers and want to participate in the initiative for free?
Write to: fioresalone.it@gmail.com . Thank you!)

But May is also the month of the rose so why not pay homage to the great French painter and botanist Pierre-Joseph Redouté with Marika Lion's story published in the volume "Artist Flights".

ALSO CALLED THE “RAFFAEL OF FLOWERS”, REDOUTÉ IS THE MOST SEEKABLE WATERCOLOR ARTIST EVER.

His works are kept in museums, libraries, palaces and above all loved by collectors from all over the world, willing to spend any amount to get one of his works still available on the market.
Pierre-Joseph Redouté was born in 1759 in Saint-Hubert in the Ardennes into a poor family of decorators and it is precisely in this context that he manifests a great interest in painting and flowers, which he called "the stars of the earth". ”. As soon as he was a child he left his father's house and tried to earn a living by being an itinerant painter. At the age of twenty or so, he moved to his brother's in Paris, where he planned and drew scenarios with him.

But so used to living in the countryside, he couldn't help but spend his little free time in the royal garden sketching herbs and flowers. And it is precisely these drawings that attracted the attention of an influential person with a passion for botany: the judge of the Supreme Court Charles Louis L'Héritier de Brutelle, who taught him to select plants and then to draw them according to a scientific criterion.
Thus began a real professional collaboration, L'Héritier wrote the texts for the botany volumes and Redouté illustrated them.

It was L'Héritier himself who introduced Redouté to the curator of the parchment collection of the Royal Library, a certain Gérard van Spaendonck. From him he learned the technique of painting on parchment (stillborn calfskin made waterproof through a special treatment) and became so good as to be hired as a collaborator in the work on the collection.
Married at twenty-seven to Marie-Marthe Gobert, he had three children and in 1793 won the competition for the position of official painter of plants of the parchment collection at the court of Marie Antoinette.

He is loved by his colleagues for his attention to detail, to the point that he is often offered collaborations. With the Swiss botanist AP De Candolle he publishes Plantes grasses, where he uses for the first time the technique of screen engraving, i.e. engraving dots instead of lines on copper sheets, thus obtaining the finest shades of colour.

In 1799, Giuseppina Bonaparte filled the gardens and greenhouses of Malmaison with the rarest specimens of the Old and New Continent, almost two hundred species including roses, dahlias, eucalyptus, magnolias and rhododendrons, and called Redouté for their classification. ne, giving him the title of official painter of the "empress flowers". For her, helped by the botanist Étienne Pierre Ventenat, Redouté created the two-volume work Jardin de la Malmaison.
By now having become a great master of his art, Redouté dedicated himself to the monumental work in eight volumes, Les Liliacées, with 486 tables.

Napoleon Bonaparte, struck by the magnificence of this work, decided to have over eighty copies produced, which he sent to various places in the world, thus spreading the fame of Redouté. When Napoleon divorced his wife in 1809, the artist became a painting teacher of the Empress Maria Luisa, without however ever breaking his relationship with Giuseppina.
In this period he also begins to work on the one hundred and seventy illustrations of the book that will ensure his immortality, Les Roses. In seven years, together with the botanist Claude Antoine Thory, he completes the work by visiting parks around the world. Les Roses, in thirty booklets, was published for the first time in 1817.

Redouté, who works until his last day without glasses or magnifying glasses, receives a white lily from his daughter in June 1840; the artist is eighty years old and, retiring to his studio, places the lily next to his easel and begins to paint: for him it is the last chance. And when Napoleon, some time before, had asked him why he didn't immortalise great men instead of flowers, Redouté had replied that he wasn't cultured enough to succeed as a painter of historical facts.
Today, old illustrated botany books are once again objects of worship and collecting: the sinuosity of the curved leaf of a lily, the tendrils of the sweet pea, the lightness of the mimosa or the fleshy consistency of the stem of a tulip can sublimate the desire to delve into the secrets of nature and love the true stars of the earth.