Country Life Arts & Antiques review of Simon Casson’s solo exhibition ‘Floralia’ paintings at Long & Ryle.
Fertile works: Roman traditions are being revived in Simon Casson’s glorious ‘Floralia’ paintings.
Carla Passino Arts & Antiques Country Life October 29 2025 issue.
It was 173BC and Rome wasn’t doing well. Hail, rain and wind had devastated plants and crops, and the city’s senators thought it might be a good idea to pay tribute to the goddess Flora, just in case-so they revived a festival that had begun in similar circumstances some 65year earlier, but had fallen into oblivion: the Ludi Florales. A little more than a century on, Cicero, as aedile, would organise the festivities, Julius Caesar would mark them in his calendar, but dour Cato the Younger would shun them. After all, the Floralia encompassed not only farces and circus games, but also plenty of debauchery: prostitutes elected this as their own festival, theatres staged explicit ‘mimes’ and female performers danced naked ‘playing all manners of lascivious tricks,’ as the Revd Thomas Wilson thundered in An Archaeological Dictionary in 1793.
Wine flowed abundant, crowds were showered in grains and beans and deer and hares were let loose into the arena, before being hunted to propitiate fertility. When the Roman Empire declined, so did the rites – but they remained alive in the imagination of artists, from Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, with The Triumph of Flora (1743-44), to Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (who, in the 1894 Spring, replaced nudity with a flower-wreathed celebration of female beauty). Now, painter Simon Casson-who cites François Boucher, Joel Peter Witkin and Peter Greenaway among his influences and paints lush pictures full of mythological references and contemporary symbols – has returned to the theme. Harking back to the true nature of the Roman rites, his womer are half-naked, surrounded by a cornucopia of beans, deer and hares that hint at fertility but the skulls at their feet are a reminder of their ephemeral nature of pleasure – and life. Casson’s ‘Floralia’ paintings are on show in a solo exhibition at Long & Ryle, London SW until January 9th (www.longandryle.com).
Carla Passino 2025
Historian and Writer for Country Life, Apollo, The Field and Decanter as well as International titles including Forbes and the Washington Post. Further information on Carla Passino can be found HERE
