Flora and Zephyrus (from Set of Ovid's Metamorphoses) (1704–1731): Art, History and Details

Flora and Zephyrus (from Set of Ovid's Metamorphoses) (1704–1731) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Gobelins Manufactory (France, Paris, est. 1662).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In an abundant garden of trees and flowers, the goddess Flora sits beneath a vase of luscious flowers as her husband, the west wind Zephyrus, carried by a white cloud, reaches out to crown her with a floral chaplet. In this tapestry, Zephyrus’s wings resemble those of a butterfly or moth rather than a bird. The ravishing landscape echoes Flora and Zephyrus as springtime divinities. The parrot in the foreground is a colorful intermediary between the viewer and the gods represented in this tapestry.

Object facts

• Title: Flora and Zephyrus (from Set of Ovid's Metamorphoses)
• Date: 1704–1731
• Creator attribution: Gobelins Manufactory (France, Paris, est. 1662)
• Culture: France
• Type: Tapestry
• Technique: tapestry weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 324.5 x 295 cm (127 3/4 x 116 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1956.325.2

A detail from the museum

During the French Revolution, Gobelins tapestries were sometimes disassembled to harvest the gold threads.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Matthias Plum

Further reading listed by the museum

• Malloy, Katherine R. “Three Eighteenth-Century Gobelins Tapestries.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 44, no. 2 (1957): 24–27.
• Standen, Edith A. “Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’: A Gobelins Tapestry Series.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 23 (1988): 149–191.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.