Barefoot young women and children adorned with flower crowns and playing musical instruments lead a procession through a city built of marble. Splashes of color, like the scarlet poppies and yellow daffodils, draw the eye across the canvas to explore the vibrant details of an ancient Roman festival, as meticulously reimagined by Dutch artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Spectators leaning over from the rooftops cheer and wave, while more reserved figures acknowledge the procession from the royal box under the central arch. The gold standard in front of them, raised on blue poles and decorated with purple garlands, bears a Latin inscription dedicated to Priapus, the god of nature, gardens, and fertility.
It is unclear exactly which festival Alma-Tadema meant to depict, but the many references from ancient Rome all indicate a springtime celebration of fertility and abundance, perhaps most resembling Floralia, honoring Flora, goddess of flowers. British May Day traditions were also rooted in the Floralia festival and were revived during the 1800s to celebrate spring and nature in the face of rapid industrialization. On May 1, children decked themselves and their village with flowers, danced, and crowned a May Queen. Such celebrations and this painting’s imagery connected contemporary British society to ancient Rome, an empire and aesthetic that the British empire saw as its predecessor and aspired to.
Alma-Tadema was an avid scholar of antiquity and kept an extensive library of photographs of ancient Italian architecture and sculpture. However archaeologically precise his paintings may seem, he took great liberties by fancifully combining motifs and decoration from different time periods and places. For example, the partly covered arch on the left bears the inscription from the Arch of Trajan in Benevento, Italy completed around A.D. 114–118, and directly underneath it, the circular spandrel relief borrows the river god figure from the Arch of Constantine in Rome, completed two hundred years later.
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