Why are roses romantic?

You may think that roses have always symbolised courteous romance, but art history describes their smuttier private life. Consider the pouting red blooms in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Venus Verticordia’, which the art critic John Ruskin considered so obscene that he refused to continue his friendship with the painter. Ruskin admired the execution when he first saw ‘Venus Verticordia’ in Rossetti’s studio in 1865, but later reviled the crude suggestiveness. ‘I purposely used the word “wonderfully” painted about those flowers,’ he later wrote to Rossetti with deep concern. ‘They were wonderful to me, in their realism; awful – I can use no other word – in their coarseness.’

Ruskin’s anxiety reflected a common understanding of the red rose as a symbol of lust. The Victorian period witnessed a fad for floral symbolism, and multiple books were published to define the ‘language of flowers’. The red rose was deemed scandalously sensuous. The association persisted into the modern world.