Cecidit flos: sul senso dei fiori appassiti

Isaiah 40: 6-8 contains the figure of the flower of the field, doomed to wither at the blowing of the divine breath. An immense exegetical tradition ensues, which comments on the ephemerality of any human distinction. This tradition intertwines, then, from the late Middle Ages on, with an equally abundant classical tradition, in Greek first, then in Latin, wherein the severed flower refers to the brutality of either war or love. Both traditions, the biblical and the classical one, merge in numerous literary texts, which multiply especially in early modernity. Drawing profusely from these textual series, the article seeks to seize in them some trends, in the frame of a semiotics of cultures, reading the figure of the flower through the methodology of generative semiotics.