By Carl Hartman
c The Associated Press
 
WASHINGTON (AP) - Old masters didn't limit themselves to painting grave 
biblical scenes and laughing cavaliers. Some loved doing just fruit and 
flowers, birds and bees. 

As the earliest cherry blossoms bloom in Washington, the National Gallery of 
Art has put together a show emphasizing the work of unfamiliar but 
distinguished flower painters. One is Giovanna Garzoni, whom Gretchen 
Hirschauer, assistant curator of Italian paintings, called ``one of the most 
important female painters in Italian art history.'' 

Lucia Tongiorgi Tornasi of the University of Pisa, co-curator of the show, 
discovered four Garzoni paintings, nearly 400 years old and never exhibited 
before, in private Italian hands. 

At a news conference the curators compared Garzoni with her contemporary in 
the 1600s, Artemisia Gentileschi. Both worked at important European courts 
and won big reputations in their time, but have since been outshone by the 
male competition. 

Gentileschi is the subject of a current novel, a recent New York play and an 
exposition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She ``ran with a pretty tough 
crowd,'' said Hirschauer, while Garzoni ``lived a very simple but very 
refined life.'' 

Garzoni stuck to subjects thought appropriate for women: flowers, fruit and 
portraits. She livened her flower paintings with birds and insects - a beetle 
or a carpenter bee - or the reflection of her studio window in a glass vase. 

Gentileschi chose men's subjects: biblical and historical scenes. She 
depicted strong and aggressive women, like Susanna spurning the elders who 
spied on her bath, and Jewish heroine Judith cutting the throat of enemy 
general Holofernes. 

Opening Sunday, the show, called ``The Flowering of Florence,'' celebrates 
work patronized by the Medici family, who ruled that Italian city and its 
nearby territories for 300 years. Known for their support of the arts, the 
Medici also took an enthusiastic interest in botany, developing Italy's first 
big gardens around their 14 villas. Grand Duke Ferdinando I commissioned a 
Flemish artist, Giusto Utens, to do big semicircular paintings called 
lunettes of all 14. Some are in the show. 

The Medici spent a lot of money on their gardens and wanted painted records 
of them and related subjects. So in addition to the lunettes and Garzoni's 
demure still lifes, they had another artist, Bartolomeo Bembi, depict both a 
160-pound squash grown in the vicinity and another work detailing 115 
varieties of pears, each carefully labeled, in a single painting nearly eight 
feet wide. 

Curator Hirschauer believes many of the pear varieties no longer exist. 

``I can't imagine what a pear called `Goose Beak' tasted like,'' she mused. 

The exhibit will be open, admission free, through May 27. 

On the Web: 
National Gallery of Art: http://www.nga.gov.