Titian painted the same model who appears as Flora in several other works from around this period, including Woman at the Mirror, Vanity and Salomé and Violante, as well as some of his Holy Conversations^[1]. What that recurring presence means for the picture's subject has never been settled. Some scholars read Flora as a portrait of a courtesan, her bared shoulder and offered flowers carrying an erotic charge; others see the same gesture as a symbol of nuptial love, flowers and a loosened mantle standing for marriage rather than transaction^[1]. The painting does not resolve the question itself, and that ambiguity is part of why it has held attention for five centuries.

One early twentieth-century critic offered a blunter reading of the picture's purpose. In studies such as Flora, he argued, Titian was chiefly interested in working out technical problems of colour, form and modelling, and took little trouble to make the sitter anything more than, in his words, a beautiful animal^[2]. That judgement sits at one end of a spectrum the same critic used to describe Titian's range as a painter of people: at the other extreme stood a work like The Man with the Glove, whose sitter carries so individual and possessing a personality that the portrait ranks among the great achievements of psychological interpretation^[2]. Flora, on this account, belongs to the earlier end of that spectrum, a picture in which physical beauty and painterly skill matter more than a captured inner life.

Flora's reputation spread well beyond anyone who could see the original canvas. Sixteenth-century etchings reproduced the image repeatedly, and those prints did much of the work of establishing its fame across Europe long before photography made such circulation routine^[1]. The painting's ownership history in the following century is not fully documented, passing through collections in Brussels and Vienna in a sequence that remains unclear, until it was sold by the Spanish ambassador in Amsterdam to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria^[1].