"Flora, Goddess of Whores" bloomed in March 1637, Amsterdam, a late-bloom twin of “Flora, wife of Zephyr the Wind”. February 3rd 1637 was not unlike any other day, until that evening when no one in the tavern bid in response to the auctioneer’s offer. Silence fell to everyone’s horror. The reign of the Tulp seemed to have come to an end. She was the model for a pamphlet illustration by Pieter Nolpe. The caption read: Flora’s Fool’s Cap, or Scenes from the Remarkable Year 1637 when one Fool hatched another, the Idle Rich lost their wealth and the Wise lost their senses. She was Flora, the infamous courtesan whose “immoral” earnings that she left behind in her city of Rome was so great that grateful Romans deified her. Being the goddess of flowers and the guardian of prostitutes, in addition to abiding in the Wind only to later run away with Hercules, Flora was the synecdoche of the Tulps that frequented from hand to hand, mouth to mouth, tavern to tavern, many were loved even before they came to bloom. Flora, o pagan Goddess of Whores! A femme fatale in floral incarnation, thy artists resent thou for their ruin. Some demand that thou leave them entirely and return to thy country, through the very depictions in which thy beauty is immortalized; one in particular has a telling caption: Charge Against the Pagan and Turkish Tulip-Bulbs. Flora, thou became a Goddess in exile within a matter of days.
Image source: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-OB-77.710