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Title: The floral symbolism of the great masters
Author: Elizabeth Haig
Release Date: April 1, 2023 [eBook #70433]
Language: English
Produced by: Charlie Howard and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FLORAL SYMBOLISM OF THE
GREAT MASTERS ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_. Boldface
text is enclosed in =equals signs.= Small-caps text is shown in
all-caps.
[Illustration:
_Lorenzo da Sanseverino_ _Photo Hanfstängl_
THE VIRGIN IN A STRAWBERRY-DECORATED MANTLE
Below are the Gourd and Apple, symbols of Resurrection and Death
(National Gallery)
_Frontispiece_]
]
THE
FLORAL SYMBOLISM OF
THE GREAT MASTERS
BY
ELIZABETH HAIG
[Illustration]
LONDON:
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD.
BROADWAY HOUSE, 68–74 CARTER LANE, E.C.
1913
[Illustration: _The Divine Heart (19th Century--German)_]
PREFACE
This little book has been written for the pleasure of those amateurs
who are more interested in the idea which inspires a picture than
in the picture’s workmanship. Naturally, the more accomplished the
artist, the more clearly and attractively is he able to set forth his
meaning; but with art criticism this book has nothing to do, and the
attributions are, for the most part, simply those of the official
catalogues of the respective galleries.
To explain completely even so small a branch of Christian symbolism as
that of flowers, an exhaustive knowledge is required of the development
of Christian theology, and of the varying force with which different
doctrines appealed at different times to the public mind. But still,
these notes may be of some interest to those who care to trace in the
work sanctioned by the Church and reverenced by the people the history
of Western idealism, and who are sometimes puzzled by the conventions
employed by the Masters to illustrate the Divine Mysteries.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. EMBLEMS AND SYMBOLS 9
II. THE FLOWER SYMBOLISTS 23
III. THE LILY 41
IV. THE IRIS 62
V. THE ROSE 71
VI. THE CARNATION 83
VII. GARLANDS OF ROSES 88
VIII. THE COLUMBINE 104
IX. THE OLIVE 112
X. THORNS 126
XI. THE PALM 134
XII. THE ACANTHUS 146
XIII. THE FLEUR-DE-LYS 148
XIV. THE LILY OF THE ANNUNCIATION 162
XV. THE LILY OF THE ANGEL GABRIEL 177
XVI. THE FLOWERS OF THE DIVINITY 191
XVII. THE FLOWERS OF THE VIRGIN 197
XVIII. THE LILY OF THE SAINTS 219
XIX. THE VINE 235
XX. THE FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 240
XXI. THE GOURD 257
XXII. THE POMEGRANATE 261
XXIII. THE STRAWBERRY 268
XXIV. FRUIT IN GARLANDS 272
PARADISE. GIOVANNI DI PAOLO 277
THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN. H. VAN EYCK 279
THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS. H. VAN DER GOES 281
LA PURISSIMA. MURILLO 283
THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY, VIRGIN. D. G. ROSSETTI 285
LIST OF AUTHORITIES 287
INDEX OF ARTISTS 289
INDEX OF FLOWERS 291
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE PAGE
I. THE VIRGIN IN A STRAWBERRY-DECORATED MANTLE (_Lorenzo
da San Severino_) _Frontispiece_
II. THE BADGE OF THE ORDER OF THE LILY OF NAVARRE 41
III. THE FLOWERS OF HEAVEN (_Mosaic of the 13th Century_) 41
IV. THE ‘ENCLOSED GARDEN’ OF THE VIRGIN (_Stefano da Zevio_) 100
V. GABRIEL, CROWNED WITH OLIVE, BRINGS THE MESSAGE OF
RECONCILIATION (_Martin Schöngauer_) 123
VI. THE CROWN OF THORNS (_Zurburan_) 128
VII. THE ACANTHUS OF PARADISE (_Mosaic of the 13th Century_) 146
VIII. THE ROSE OF DIVINE LOVE RISING FROM A PRECIOUS VESSEL
(_Pinturicchio_) 169
IX. THE ROYAL LILY SPRINGING FROM A HUMBLE VASE (_Pesello_) 169
X. THE COLUMBINE OF THE SEVEN GIFTS (_Jörg Breu_) 188
XI. SAINT BARBARA WITH THE ROYAL LILY (_The Master of
Flémalle_) 188
XII. THE FRUIT OF DAMNATION EXCHANGED FOR THE FRUIT OF
REDEMPTION (_Hugo van der Goes_) 245
XIII. THE FRUIT OF HEAVEN RELINQUISHED FOR THE APPLE OF
EDEN (_Memling_) 245
XIV. ADAM AND EVE DELIVERED FROM HELL (_Martin Schöngauer_) 248
XV. THE CHILD WITH THE POMEGRANATE SURROUNDED BY ANGELS
WITH LILIES AND ROSE-GARLANDS (_Botticelli_) 262
XVI. PARADISE (_Giovanni di Paolo_) 278
XVII. THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN (_Hubert van Eyck_) 280
XVIII. THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS (_Hugo van der Goes_) 282
XIX. THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION (_Murillo_) 284
XX. THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY, VIRGIN (_Dante Gabriel Rossetti_) 286
THE FLORAL SYMBOLISM OF THE GREAT MASTERS
I
EMBLEMS AND SYMBOLS[1]
Since the earliest days of Christianity the Church has made use of
emblems. The Early Church used them partly protectively to conceal
their faith from the pagans, and partly because it lacked artists
capable of worthily depicting the Godhead in human form. Even when the
days of persecution had passed, the Church, restrained by reverential
tradition, by poverty perhaps, and perhaps by the Eastern fear of the
‘graven image,’ continued to represent Christ as the True Vine and the
Apostles as sheep or as doves.
But at the beginning of the fourth century the Emperor Constantine
established Christianity as the religion of the state. New, and often
magnificent, churches were built in each town and the Emperor placed in
the hands of the ecclesiastics a large portion of the royal revenues.
In these grand new basilicas the simple decoration of the Catacombs
and tiny ancient chapels was not sufficient. The ample walls offered
a splendid field for the mosaicist and Byzantine taste demanded
elaborate pictorial effects. Representations of the Redeemer appeared
surrounded by the Apostles, the prophets and the four-and-twenty
elders of Revelation. Saints and martyrs were introduced, and later
we find imperial personages, Justinian surrounded by his guards and
Theodora followed by the ladies of her court. It became necessary to
distinguish the figures one from another and therefore symbolism was
largely introduced. The Deity was placed within the _mandorla_, symbol
of perfect blessedness. The prophets were awarded broken wheels to
denote their imperfect revelation, and the apostles books, to signify
their fuller knowledge. Haloes were carefully differentiated. Virgin
saints carried palms or laurel crowns, and martyrs had the instruments
of their martyrdom placed beside them. Some figures carried scrolls
on which were inscribed texts which gave the clue to their identity,
others simply had their names written above their heads, but both these
latter devices were useless to the ignorant.
At the Renaissance, when art had a fuller life and wider aims, it
was not sufficient to thus merely label the persons represented. The
traditions of Byzantine art once broken, the painter was free to set
upon the panel all the beauty that his mind could conceive and that his
hand could execute. He had no longer to paint a Christ or a Madonna
correct to a formula, but none the less he was bound to depict figures
which should be instantly recognizable as God incarnate and the meek
Mother of Christ. So from his freedom sprang the problem which has
occupied the religious painter ever since, the painting of a soul’s
quality, the making visible to the world of the beauty of holiness.
During the great century of art, achievement came. Raphael, Leonardo,
Michael Angelo, Perugino required and used no symbol to express the
majesty of Christ or the purity of the Virgin Mother. They had that
power to make visible the intangible which, in art, is genius. But
among the earlier artists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
he who was unable to show by the announcing angel’s attitude and
mien that his message was one of peace and goodwill, placed a branch
of olive in his hand, and he who despaired of adequately depicting
the immaculate purity of the Virgin, emphasized his point by setting
a pot of spotless lilies by her side. So was the intention of the
least-accomplished of artists made clear, even to the unlettered.
After the first effervescence of the Renaissance had died down, the
laws of sacred art became once more fixed, though never again (except
in Spain beneath the Inquisition) with the strictness of the Byzantine
school. Art as a teacher of religion required to be as conservative
as the Catholic Church with which it was allied, and the symbolism of
the fourteenth century has remained with few additions or modifications
to our own day. When devotional pictures multiplied, emblems passed
into what may be termed the heraldry of the Church. Though also used in
decoration, their primary use upon altar vessels and Church furniture
was to distinguish the object as sacred, or as the property of the
Church, in the same way as the royal arms or a private crest indicated
the ownership of secular things. They appeared on the banners used in
processions of the Church and on the badges and insignia of religious
orders, but were very seldom used in pictorial art. Indeed, it is in
the early Flemish school alone that pictures similar to the van Eycks’
‘Adoration of the Mystic Lamb’[2] or to their ‘Fountain of Life’[3] are
found, where angels, prophets, saints and patriarchs bow down before
the emblem, not the figure, of the Saviour.
During the first twelve centuries of Christianity the emblems and
symbols of the Church were drawn from many sources; those that were
introduced at the Renaissance were fruits and flowers. The Christ-Child
holds the apple, symbol of the Fall, or a pomegranate showing the
seeds, symbol of the Church. The lily typifies the spotless purity
of the Virgin. Saint Dorothea is crowned with roses; Saint Joseph
holds the flowering rod. There were, of course, other symbols used.
Allegorical figures held the sword of justice or the scales of
judgment; the mandorla, the halo, the orb of sovereignty and the
book of knowledge survived from the Byzantine school; but those
symbols which first appeared or came into fashion, as it were, at the
Renaissance were fruits and flowers.
It was not strange that it should be so. The new interest in the
literature of ancient Greece and Rome had revived the old classical
love of nature, of running brooks and leafy forests, and of all the
fresh unspoiled things which shoot up clean and fragrant from the
earth. Saint Francis with his ‘jesters of the Lord’ had gone singing
through the vineyards praising God for the light of the sun, for the
birds, for the grass. His song was taken up by the troubadours, who
also sang of the fair things of the fields, though their _leit motif_
was earthly, rather than heavenly, love.
The minnesingers of Germany sang of roses, spring-tide, love and
chivalry, and three of the sweetest-throated, Walther von der
Vogelweide, Godfried von Strassburg and Conrad von Würtzburg, each
before he died, composed a song in honour of the Virgin.
In Provence the Lady Clémence Isaure instituted the _Jeux Floraux_, and
for those who excelled in song there were three awards, a violet, an
eglantine and a marigold, all wrought in gold. Later a silver lily was
added as the prize for the best sonnet celebrating the perfections of
the Virgin. The rules of this Mayday tournament of song proclaimed that
‘these games are for the amusement of the people, for the honour of God
as the giver of good gifts of trees and flowers, and to praise Him,
because nature, which had been dead, now lives again.’
The world was now beginning to see the value of these ‘good gifts.’
Chaucer could find no higher emblem for the Virgin than a flower:
‘And thou that art the floure of Virgins all;’
while Dante, who, more than any other single writer, has influenced
sacred art, uses the same imagery:
‘Here is the Rose
Wherein the Word Divine was made incarnate,
And here the lilies, by whose order known
The way of life was followed.’
The Churchmen of the day caught the spirit of the Humanists, and there
sprang up a school of symbolists who concerned themselves largely with
plants, fruits and flowers. The writings of the early symbolists,
Origen, Saint Melitus, Bishop of Sardes, Saint Jerome, Saint Ambrose,
Walafrid Strabo and Raban Maur, Archbishop of Mayence, were re-studied
and their allusions to the plant world noted. Durandus, Bishop of
Mende, whose _Rationale_, published in 1295, is still considered the
supreme authority on the spiritual significance of Church architecture
and Church ornament, held flowers in general to be the emblems of
goodness. ‘They represent, like the trees, those good works which
have the virtues for roots.’ Growing things, he considered, could very
beautifully supplement the ritual of the Church, and he recommends that
‘on Palm Sunday the people should deck themselves with flowers, olive
branches and palms, the flowers to signify the virtues of the Holy
One, the olive branches His office as peace-bringer and the palms His
victory over Satan.’
There were those symbolists who, like Durandus of Mende and the
Cardinal Petrus of Capua, valued the symbol entirely as a means of
interpreting the doctrines of the Church. Their definition was that of
Hugues de Saint-Victor: ‘The symbol is the allegorical representation
of a Christian principle under a material form’; and they simply
searched for those objects which best suited their purpose. Then
there were those symbolists who, like Saint Hildegarde, Abbess of
Rupertsburg, mixed their symbolism strangely with herbalism and magic.
A plant of healing virtues was a good plant, attributed to the Virgin
or a saint, and typifying their virtues, and a harmful plant was evil,
beneath the patronage of the Devil, typifying and inducing envy,
hatred, or perhaps malice.
Lastly there were the mystic symbolists, and it is they who have had
most influence on pictorial art. There were those who, like Saint
Bernard of Clairvaux, could discern through the darkened glass of Old
Testament metaphor the divine facts of New Testament revelation, and
those who, like Saint Mectilda of Germany, were favoured by Heaven
with clear and detailed visions, in which Christ Himself deigned to
explain the complicated symbolism of His surroundings, His embroidered
robes and jewelled ornaments. And there were those mystics who were not
in holy orders, who did not claim direct communication with Heaven,
yet who have, nevertheless, by giving shape and colour to the vague
indications of Holy Writ as to the future state, and by materializing,
as it were, the illusive inner vision of things invisible, profoundly
influenced the religious sentiment, if not the theology, of the world.
Chief among them is the poet Dante, the friend of Giotto and the
spiritual father of both the poets and the artists of the Italian
Renaissance. In Germany his place was taken by Conrad von Würtzburg, a
poet of infinitely less genius but who equally influenced his native
art, at least as far as devotional representations of the Virgin Mary
were concerned. He was a minnesinger who consecrated the last effort of
a long life to praising the virtues of her whom he terms ‘The Empress
of Heaven.’ About the year 1286 he wrote ‘The Golden Forge,’ which he
describes as:
‘A golden song
Forged in the smithy of my heart
And beautifully inlaid
With the jewelled thoughts of my heart.’
It is an eulogy of the Virgin, close-packed with allegory, simile and
metaphor, which are borrowed for the greater part from the Fathers of
the Church, but some few are of his own finding.
His work was never to be compared with that of the great Italian, but
it very strongly influenced the hymnology and the pictorial expression
of the cult of the Virgin in both the Netherlands and Germany.
In England there was no great symbolist among the early poets.
They were plain tales of love and war that Chaucer told in ‘English
undefyled.’ But the Church in England produced some beautiful mystical
hymns, notably the one to the Virgin, written, perhaps, about 1350,
which begins:
‘Of a rose, a lovely rose,
Of a rose is al myn song.’
* * * * *
Religious pictures are of two types: the historical, which aims at
depicting a sacred scene exactly as it did occur; and the devotional,
which presents a divine or holy figure in the attitude and with the
surroundings best calculated to inflame the devotion of the worshipper.
To the first category belongs Rubens’ ‘Descent from the Cross.’[4] The
dead Figure, the sustained effort of the men who detach it from the
Cross, the grief-stricken women, are all depicted with perfect realism
and strict attention to historical detail. It merely depicts the scene
as it might have occurred, and no attempt is made to guide or suggest
the emotions of the beholder.
To the second category belong many of the early Crucifixions. The
figure of the Saviour is emaciated to a painful degree. On each side
of the Cross hover angels catching in a chalice the holy blood as it
falls. At the summit a nesting pelican tears its breast; at the foot
a skull is placed within a niche. Here a distinct emotional appeal
is made--to man’s pity, for the sufferings of the Christ; to his
gratitude, since the preciousness of the holy blood is so emphasized.
The pelican in its piety is the symbol of Christ’s devotion to His
Church, and the skull invites meditation upon the eternal death from
which He saved us.
In pictures of the devotional type the spiritual cause or effect of the
incident illustrated is usually indicated by symbols. The reason why
the Godhead sits as a child upon His Mother’s knee is indicated by the
apple which He holds in His hand. As the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
of Good and Evil it is the symbol of Adam’s fault, which, through His
incarnation, Christ repaired--and, thereby, to instructed Christians,
it foretells the tragedy of the Crucifixion. So, in an Annunciation,
the lily in the angel Gabriel’s hand indicates the quality by which
Mary found favour in God’s sight, and it foreshadows also the sinless
birth of the Saviour.
It should be clearly understood to which figure in a composition the
symbols used refer. When a personage of mortal birth, prophet, apostle,
martyr or saint, holds a symbol or attribute, it almost invariably
refers to his own history. Archangels usually hold their own attribute,
but the symbols or emblems which angels carry, or which are used
decoratively, placed against the sky or laid upon the ground, are
always to be referred to the principal figure in the scene represented.
The sword and lily in a ‘Last Judgment’ represent the omnipotence and
integrity of the Judge; the rose and lily in an ‘Assumption’ the love
and the purity of the Madonna; the palm in a martyrdom the triumph of
the martyr.
II
THE FLOWER SYMBOLISTS
Christian symbolists divided the plant world into three divisions--the
good, the bad, and those which, from want of definite characteristics,
were not worthy of notice. In their judgment they were guided by
several principles.
In the first place, and this was the most important method, they
searched the Scriptures for their warrant as to the good or evil
tendencies of any plant or flower. Those with whom the Divinity had
identified Himself took precedence of all others. Christ had said,
‘I am the True Vine,’ and the vine, since the earliest days of
Christianity, has had the place of highest honour in the decoration
of Christian churches as the emblem of Christ Himself. When the
difficulties were removed which prevented the Early Church from
representing Christ under His own form, the emblem was less seen, but
it has always remained a sacred plant, and designs based upon its form
still frequently decorate the altar and the sacred vessels.
Also those plants introduced as metaphors in the Song of Solomon,
‘the flower of the field,’ ‘the lily of the valleys,’ ‘the lily among
thorns,’ ‘the orchard of pomegranates,’ myrrh and camphire, spikenard,
saffron and cinnamon, trees of frankincense and ‘the chief spices,’
which refer to the ‘Beloved’ and the ‘Spouse,’ are all considered holy
plants, and by the Roman Catholic Church are assigned to the Virgin
Mary.
In the beautiful twenty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus, too,
Christian symbolists have recognized the Virgin Mary beneath the figure
of Wisdom, and hold as sanctified those growing things to which she is
likened.
‘I was exalted like a palm tree in Engeddi, and as a rose plant in
Jericho, as a fair olive tree in a pleasant field, and grew up as a
plane tree by the water.
‘As the turpentine tree I stretched out my branches, and my branches
are the branches of honour and grace.
‘As the vine brought I forth pleasant savour, and my flowers are the
fruit of honour and riches.’
In the second place, those flowers and plants which are beneficial to
man, as the wheat and the olive, were decided to be good, and those
that were hurtful to man, as the tare and the thistle, were evil. Here
herbalism and magic step very close to symbolism, for healing plants,
or those which were useful as a charm against the devil, were good;
those which were poisonous, or used for evil purpose, such as raising a
spirit, were bad. Thus the nettle, which, when used with due ceremony,
dissipates fear, becomes a symbol of courage, and myrrh, which is
an antidote to love-philtres and drives away voluptuous thoughts,
is held to be a plant of chastity. Of this particular species of
symbolism Albertus Magnus,[5] Master of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint
Hildegarde,[6] Abbess of Rupertsburg, were the principal exponents.
Also a plant’s habit of growth was taken as an indication of its
character. The cedar, with unbending head and grandly-spreading
branches, was considered, both by Saint Melitus and Petrus of Capua,
to typify pride, while the violet, wearing the colour of mourning, and
keeping timidly beneath its leaves, they chose as a symbol of humility.
Some symbols were of pagan origin, for the palm of victory and the
olive branch of peace were borrowed from the Romans, who had themselves
inherited them from older civilizations. Their significance was not
changed but simply limited and sanctified; the victory, for Christians,
was the victory over sin, and the peace, the peace of God.
These various methods of determining the value of different plants as
symbols did not always accord. M. Huysman, in _La Cathédrale_, a very
complete study in Christian symbolism, instances the sycamore: ‘Saint
Melitus proclaims that the sycamore stands for cupidity.... Raban Maur
and _L’anonyme de Clairvaux_ qualify it as the unbelieving Jew; Petrus
of Capua compares it to the Cross, Saint Eucher to wisdom.’
Even the sifting of the text of Scripture did not always lead to
identical conclusions. ‘I am the rose of Sharon’ (or ‘the flower of
the field’) ‘and the lily of the valleys,’ sings the lover of the
Canticles, who prefigures, according to Origen, Jesus Christ. But Saint
Bernard of Clairvaux found that the words veiled the personality of the
Virgin Mary, and other writers consider that they refer to the Church
of God upon earth.
There were, in fact, two schools of symbolists though they did not
differ greatly. There were those who wrote before the eleventh century
and whose influence is traced in the mosaics of Rome, Ravenna and
the Baptistery of Florence, and those later ones whose authority was
accepted by the painters of the Italian Renaissance and through them
spread throughout the Christian world. Durandus, standing midway
between the two schools of symbolism, held chiefly to the more ancient,
though he also recognized the newer, usage.
But after the twelfth century the painters of Siena alone kept to the
ancient meaning of the symbols; Florence and the later schools broke
away entirely.
As far as flower-symbols were concerned the chief difference was in the
use of the lily, which from being the flower indicative of heavenly
bliss became the especial flower of the Virgin, typifying her purity.
Also the rose, the flower of martyrdom, became the symbol of divine
love, and the palm tree and the acanthus dropped out of devotional
representations altogether.
In the main, after the twelfth century, symbolists were agreed. There
were certain fruits and flowers about which there never had been any
doubt. The vine had been the emblem of Jesus Christ from the beginning
of Christian theology. The white lily, as a symbol of chastity, came
perhaps from the Hebrews, but all Christian writers were agreed as to
its fitness as a symbol of purity and as an emblem or attribute of the
Virgin Mary. The violet was the symbol of humility, and therefore, say
Petrus of Capua and Saint Mectilda, the emblem of Christ when on earth.
Saint Mectilda and Bishop Durandus, for the same reason, consider it
the emblem of confessors.
The rose was long in disgrace as the flower of Venus. But even saints
could not exclude it from their lives, and gradually it crept into
Christian hagiology. Roses decorate some of the most poetical of the
histories in the _Legenda Aurea_, which was compiled by Jacobus de
Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, during the last half of the thirteenth
century, and there are roses in plenty in the pictures of the fifteenth
century. Their meaning, at first sight, is not so clearly defined as
is that of some other flowers. Raban Maur and _L’anonyme de Clairvaux_
had used them as the type of charity; Durandus had explained them, red
and white, as emblems of martyrs and virgins. Walafrid Strabo also
considered them the symbols of martyrdom, but in the Golden Legend and
in the pictures of the Renaissance, when plucked and falling, or when
sent from Heaven, they are symbols of divine love; when they are woven
into wreaths they symbolize heavenly joy.
The symbolism of the lesser flowers is not so clear, but the water
lily and the saffron as well as the rose were held by Raban Maur to be
symbols of charity; verdure, according to Durandus, was the emblem of
beginners in the faith; the heath, hyssop, convolvulus and violet all
represent humility; the lettuce temperance; the elder, zeal; and the
thyme, activity. Of these, however, with the exception of the violet,
Christian art has taken little note.
There are certain flowers which appear repeatedly in pictures which
represent the garden of Heaven; they grow in the ‘Enclosed Garden’
of the Madonna, and surround the Infant Christ when He is laid upon
the ground to receive adoration. They are the rose and the lily, and
also the violet, the pink and the strawberry, the last with fruit and
flowers together. The symbolists are unanimous in ascribing humility
to the violet; the pink or carnation, which is usually introduced when
there are no roses, is, like the rose, the flower of divine love; the
strawberry with fruit and flower represents the good works of the
righteous, or the fruits of the spirit.
To these are sometimes added the clover and the columbine. According
to the legend, Saint Patrick was the first to use the trefoil as an
illustration of the Trinity in Unity, and the shamrock or clover is
the emblem of the Holy Trinity. The little doves which make up the
flower of the columbine wonderfully resemble the little doves which in
early art, particularly in the French miniatures of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, represent the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. It
is true that in the columbine the little doves number five, not seven,
but the Flemish artists, always extremely careful in their symbolism,
rectified this by painting the plant with seven blooms upon it. It
should only be used as the attribute of God the Son.
Towards the end of the fifteenth century a tiny niche was made for
the daisy in Christian iconography. It is found almost exclusively
in ‘Adorations,’ where it replaces the _lilium candidum_. It was
felt that, suitable as the tall austere lily might be to express the
Virgin’s purity or the celibacy of the monastic saints, the little
wide-eyed daisy was a prettier, sweeter symbol of the perfect innocence
of the Divine Child.
The jasmine is not strictly a holy flower and has been neglected by
the writers on symbolism, but it appears repeatedly in religious art.
Its star-shaped blossom seems to be the symbol of divine hope or of
heavenly felicity, and it is found with roses and lilies beside the
Madonna. It forms the crowns of angels, of saints, and of the Madonna
herself. When it is the attribute of the Infant Christ it recalls the
Heaven from which He came.
The English and Flemish miniaturists add to these the pansy, which is
the old herb Trinity,[7] bearing the same meaning as the clover.
In the Netherlands and Germany the lily of the valley was also used,
with meek purity as its significance.
All these flowers, on account of some accident of shape, colour or
habit of growth, were considered holy flowers, while others, such as
the buttercup, the narcissus, the forget-me-not, were rejected as
meaningless. Fruit in general represents good works, or the fruits of
the Spirit, faith, hope and peace, and is accounted good; the vine is
the emblem of Christ Himself, but the fruit, usually taken to be the
apple, which grew on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, is an
accursed thing.
There are flowers, too, which are the flowers of evil. The poppy
is the emblem of sloth and also dedicated to Venus; the tulip is
beloved of necromancers; the black hellebore and the mandrake are
used by witches in their spells, though, strangely enough, Conrad von
Würtzburg compares the Virgin Mary to the ‘healing mandrake root.’ Also
the nettle is the symbol of envy, the hellebore of scandal, and the
cyclamen of voluptuousness, for, according to Theophrastus, it was used
in the composition of love philtres.
As to thorns and briars, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Anselm are
agreed that thorn branches signify the minor sins, and briars (or
thistles) those major ones ‘_quæ pungunt conscientiam propriam_,’ etc.
Above all the buckthorn is blamed, for of its branches, says Rohault de
Fleury, was formed the Crown of Thorns.
In art, however, the flowers of evil scarcely appear. The rose is still
sometimes the flower of Venus and symbolizes the pomps and vanities of
the world, and there are the thorns of sin and death. Some of the early
Flemish and German artists painted certain bitter herbs, notably the
dandelion, in scenes from the Passion, but Christian iconography has
concerned itself chiefly with those plants and flowers which, with the
approval of theologians, represent the attributes of the Divinity, of
the Virgin Mary and of angels, saints and prophets.
It may be noticed that while the sacred flowers are not unfrequently
introduced into profane scenes, the non-sacred flowers, for instance
the daffodils and foxgloves of the hunting scenes on old Flemish
tapestry, are never introduced as symbols, and rarely as details, in
devotional subjects.
The same symbolism holds good within the whole Western Church, and
those Reformed Churches which have rejected painted and carved images
have preserved a good many of the older symbols in the details of
church decoration. The most important symbols of Christianity,
the Lamb, the Dove, the Cross, the Glory, the Halo, remain always
unchanged. It is the lesser, and more especially the flower symbols,
which vary in different countries and different schools of painting.
Italy being the headquarters of the Church, and also the centre from
which pictorial art spread over Europe, most symbols are of Latin
origin; but they were modified and often amplified by inherited
tradition, climate and the general trend of the national religious
sentiment. So in Italian art, after its re-birth, we find a love of
simple lines, of refined types, of flowers, and a striving at first
unconscious, then definite, after classical ideals, while the Northern
nations, less happy in their traditions, never quite conquered their
love of barbaric splendour; a rose wrought in pure gold was to them
more truly a symbol of divine love than a fresh rose of the field.
The most important factor in the modification of flower symbolism was
climate. As the primary use of a symbol was to instruct the unlearned,
the symbol which was to interpret the hidden mystery must be a familiar
object. A rare or exotic plant would rather have complicated than
simplified the teaching. So we find the pomegranate and the olive in
Italian pictures, but not in those of the Netherlands; the columbine
and the lily of the valley in German, but not in Spanish art.
But it was not climate alone that determined the use or disuse of any
particular plant as a symbol. If the fleur-de-lys, founded upon the
iris form, had not been borne by the House of Burgundy, which protected
the early Flemish school, it is possible that the iris might not have
appeared in the early Flemish pictures as a flower of the Virgin,
and certainly had there not been a continual interchange of Flemish
merchandise, which included painted panels, for Spanish gold, the
iris would not have taken its place as the characteristic flower of a
Spanish ‘Immaculate Conception.’
Also, had there not been ceaseless warfare and everlasting hatred
between Florence and Siena, it is possible that Siena would have
adopted the lily as an attribute of Mary in an Annunciation instead
of using invariably the olive branch. But the lily was the badge of
Florence and the cities were desperately jealous of each other, both in
painting and in politics, and this seems to be the real reason of the
conservatism of Sienese art.
On the whole the symbolism of the Netherlands is the most careful
and just, and each flower was painted also with such exquisite
minuteness that there is no possibility of mistaking the variety.
Italian symbolism was always apt to be superficial, and after the
fifteenth century often became confused with decoration. Also the
Italians painted flowers carelessly, and the lesser kinds, those in the
foreground of an Adoration, for instance, are frequently impossible to
identify. In Germany symbolism is at times extravagant and far-fetched
though always interesting. In Spain it is poor and almost entirely
borrowed. A modern writer[8] observes of Spanish art that it is
material, brutal, Roman, having, from its geographical position,
escaped the idealism of Greek or the mysticism of Celtic influences;
and the same cause may also explain the prosaicness of its symbolism.
The English love of flowers, very noticeable in early verse, found
pictorial expression chiefly in the work of the miniaturists and in the
‘flower work’ details of architecture. The miniatures executed by monks
usually pay attention to the symbolical value of each blossom, but the
carved stone flowers common in both French and English Gothic churches
were more often simply those which the fancy of the architect or the
stone-cutter dictated and only represent vaguely ‘good works springing
from the root of virtues.’
The happiest blooming time of these symbolical flowers was the
fifteenth century. In the fourteenth century artists, still timid of
innovations, had limited themselves to the lily and the rose. But with
increasing skill they made a wider choice, though always under the
eye and with the assistance of those learned in such matters, for the
majority of sacred pictures were commissioned directly by the Church or
were ordered as a gift to be presented to some religious community.
There were occasionally independent spirits who, in some favourite
blossom, so far unnoticed, found beauty and symbolic fitness. Thus Sano
di Pietro of Siena constantly paints the bright blue cornflower (which
in Italy shares its name of _fiordaliso_ with the iris, the lily and
the heraldic fleur-de-lys) upon the heads of both angels and saints,
meaning, perhaps, by the blue stars, to indicate that these beings
were denizens of the heavenly spaces. However, as a rule, artists
were conservative and glad to use the recognized symbols as a means of
emphasizing and elucidating the sacred subject which they depicted.
But even before the end of the fifteenth century flowers began
to be used for their own sake and not for their hidden meaning.
Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Dürer painted just what flower or weed
they chose, simply for its form or colour. In the sixteenth century
flowers were often used merely as decoration, and later, with the
exception of the rose, the lily, the olive branch and the palm, they
lost all meaning. Carlo Maratta in the seventeenth century painted a
figure of the Virgin[9] encircled by a heavy wreath of every sort of
flower--daffodils, gentians, anemones, tulips, edelweiss, roses and
lilies, all mixed together.
In England, about the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a
revival of interest in mystical and symbolical art. The Preraphaelite
Brotherhood was formed in 1848, whose object was to bring back to
modern art the sincerity and earnestness of those painters who had
preceded Raphael. The originator of the movement, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, adopted in his early work not only the simplicity of type and
the exceedingly careful finish of the primitives, but borrowed also
their system of symbolism. His followers, however, and in particular
Holman Hunt, broke away from the old traditions of religious art,
painting allegorical subjects suggested by Christ’s parables and
sayings rather than the scenes of His birth and Passion on which the
dogmas of the Church were founded, and with the traditional subjects
they left aside also the traditional symbols.
The greatest of modern English mystical painters, George Frederick
Watts, uses flowers as details, and apparently as symbols. But their
exact meanings are obscure and apparently not those attributed to them
by the great masters of past centuries.
[Illustration: THE BADGE OF THE ORDER OF THE LILY OF NAVARRE]
[Illustration:
_Photo Alinari_
THE FLOWERS OF HEAVEN
Mosaic of the 13th century
(Baptistry, Florence)]
III
THE LILY
Gioacchino di Fiore, the mystical theologian who founded the community
of ‘The Flower,’ and who is held by some to be the spiritual father
of Saint Francis, writing in the last decade of the twelfth century,
divided the life of humanity into three periods. In the first, during
the reign of the Father, men lived under the rule of the law; in the
second, reigned over by the Son, men live beneath the rule of grace; in
the third the Spirit shall reign and men shall live in the plenitude
of love. The first saw the shining of the stars; the second sees the
whitening of the dawn; the third will behold the glory of the day. The
first produced nettles; the second gives roses; the third will be the
age of lilies.
Thus as daylight to dawn or starlight, and as love to grace and fear,
were lilies to every other flower or weed, and since the twelfth
century, in Christian art, lilies have had precedence of every other
growing thing.
The earliest use of the lily by the artists of the Christian Church was
to indicate the delights of Paradise. Raban Maur, Archbishop of Mayence
in 847, writes of lilies as the symbols of celestial beatitude, and
that is apparently what they represent in the mosaics of Rome, Ravenna
and the Baptistery of Florence, where they spring from the ground in
the scenes which represent Heaven.
But by the tenth century the Church had commenced to adopt the
pre-Christian employment of the lily as the symbol of purity, and the
rose gradually took the lily’s place as the flower of heavenly bliss.
The lily of sacred art is the _lilium candidum_, sometimes called the
Madonna lily, or the lily of Saint Catharine. It is said to be a native
of the Levant, but appears to have spread with Roman civilization
throughout Europe. The suggestion of abstract purity is arresting and
direct. The stalk is straight and upright, the leaves narrow, plain,
almost austere. At the top of the long stalk the flowers cluster, each
chalice-shaped, and sending to the sky a perfume which is singularly
sweet and piercing. Their form is simple but noble, and they are above
all remarkable for the immaculate and luminous whiteness of their firm
petals.
After the twelfth century the lily is always used as the symbol of
purity in its perfection, and is most usually associated with the
Virgin Mary and with saints of the monastic orders. More rarely it is
used as an attribute of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. In a large
picture[10] representing the Trinity in Glory, by an unknown Neapolitan
painter of the seventeenth century, God the Father holds a stalk of
lilies in his left hand, above which hovers the mystic Dove. Since
Christian iconography gives no attributes to God the Father except the
orb and crown of omnipotence, the lily must be taken as the attribute
of the Holy Ghost; and in a rare subject, The Adoration of the Holy
Ghost,[11] ascribed by Behrenson to the _Amico di Sandro_, the two
angels with swinging censers and lovely floating draperies, who adore
the hovering Dove, carry each a lily. The Dove in conjunction with
the lily is also found upon the great central doors of Saint Peter
in Rome. They are of bronze, and were executed between 1439 and 1445
by Antonio Filarete. There are two panels with elaborate borders and
much interesting detail. On one is Saint Peter with the keys and on
the other Saint Paul. Saint Paul is of the traditional type, bald and
bearded, and holds in his right hand a drawn sword. By his side is a
large vase of lilies, and on the highest flower, its beak touching the
sword’s hilt, is the Dove, encircled by a halo. The lilies and the Dove
are introduced apparently to correct the impression of violence given
by the uplifted sword, the instrument of the Apostle’s martyrdom, and
together representing the Holy Spirit, they recall Saint Paul’s own
phrase, ‘the sword of the Spirit.’
As an attribute of God the Son, lilies are used in those pictures known
as Adorations, where the divine Child is laid upon the ground and the
Mother kneels before Him in worship; and in those pictures where she
holds Him, no longer a very young infant, on a ledge or pedestal before
her. In these pictures all the symbolism refers to the Child, and if He
lie among roses and lilies they signify respectively divine love and
perfect sinlessness. If angels hold vases of lilies on either side,
these lilies recall that He was born of a Virgin.
The first Adorations were painted by the Florentine masters of the
fifteenth century. In an early example by Filippo Lippi[12] the flowers
are small and the species scarcely to be determined. Neri di Bicci[13]
painted roses and lilies, and Luca della Robbia[14] has placed the
Child beneath a freely-growing clump of tall lilies. The Virgin kneels
before Him, while heavenly hands hold above her head a crown ornamented
with the royal fleur-de-lys. Botticelli[15] appears to have been the
first to have substituted the daisy for the lily, and to the daisy he
added the violet of humility, and the strawberry, which symbolized the
fruits of the spirit. These flowers were constantly repeated in this
connection, a comparatively late example of their use being in the
Adoration of Perugino, now in Munich.
These same flowers are found in the North, but as Northern artists
preferred incidents definitely recounted by the Scriptures to more
imaginative devotional subjects, they were transferred to Nativities or
Adorations by the Shepherds.
In Siena during the fourteenth century, and in the school of Giotto,
the lily, usually a single lily-cup, is sometimes placed in the hands
of the Infant Christ. Here it is not the symbol of purity, but in
accordance with the older symbolism it is the flower of Paradise.
Siena was extremely conservative, and for its artists the Holy Child
was still the royal Child of the Byzantine school, richly clothed,
His right hand raised in blessing or holding the orb of sovereignty.
Sometimes He holds a scroll, announcing His high mission, with the
words ‘Ego sum lux mundi’ or ‘Ego sum via veritas et vita.’ More
stress is laid upon His divinity than upon His humanity, and there
is absolutely nothing to hint at or forecast His passion. He appears
simply as the bringer of peace and blessing, and in His hand is still
the flower of Paradise, the same lily which grows beside His throne in
the mosaics.
Gradually, however, a fruit replaced the flower in the Christ-Child’s
hand. At first the fruit, following an artistic tradition as old as the
fourth century, was also a promise of heavenly bliss, it was a fruit
from the heavenly gardens; but it was soon identified as the fruit of
the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, since He, as the Second Adam,
had come to repair the fault of the first.
Meanwhile in Florence, during the fifteenth century, the lily, already
the flower of the virgin saints, was attributed more especially to the
Virgin Mary as the symbol of spotless purity, and it became accepted
throughout Christendom with this significance.
Therefore, on the rare occasions after the fourteenth century when the
lily is placed in the hand of the Infant Christ it is the symbol of
purity, of His perfect sinlessness. In the Enthroned Madonna of Luca
Signorelli[16] He holds a large stalk of _lilium candidum_. In the
great majority of representations of the Madonna with the Child in
her arms only the symbol in the Child’s own hand refers to Him; other
symbols refer to Mary. But in this picture, to the jewelled cross of
the Baptist is attached a scroll with the legend, ‘_Ecce Agnus Dei_,’
and all the symbols are the attributes of the Saviour. Besides the
lily, which denotes perfect sinlessness, there are two transparent
vases in which are jasmine, violets and roses. The jasmine’s starry
blooms recall the Heaven which He has left, the violet is a symbol of
His humility, and the rose of His divine love. In the wreath behind
the throne is jasmine again, with pendant trails of white convolvulus,
which is also an emblem of humility.[17]
Occasionally the Infant Christ is represented offering a branch of
lilies to a Saint,[18] and then the lily represents the gift of
chastity, which He bestows.
It is only in modern times that Christ, grown to manhood, has been
represented with a lily in His hand. An instance is the fresco
illustrating the parable of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins, painted
in 1864, by Lord Leighton, P.R.A., for Lindhurst Church. The virgins
stand on either side of the Celestial Bridegroom, who holds in His
left hand the lily which emphasizes the mystical character of the
divine nuptials.
It may be noticed in this connection that modern, and more particularly
Protestant, ecclesiastical art takes its subjects largely from the
parables of Christ, a usage unknown to the Roman Catholic Church during
the period when the great masters of art were in her service.
Northern mediæval art, that is, the art of the Flemish and German
schools, introduced the lily into representations of the Last Judgment,
placing the sword and stalk of lilies, ray-wise, behind the head of
the judging Christ. In the very early representations of this subject
Christ is depicted with a two-edged sword issuing from His mouth, in
illustration of the text of the Revelation of Saint John:
‘And out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword.’
And again:
‘Which sword proceeded out of his mouth.’
But pictorially it was ugly and theologically it was harsh, suggesting
wrath rather than mercy as the determining impulse at the final doom.
Then men remembered the promise to the righteous:
‘The wilderness and the solitary places shall be glad for them; and the
desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.’[19]
And in a copy of the _Biblia Pauperum_[20] of the fifteenth century
we find a branch of roses so placed as to balance the sword, both set
diagonally like rays, one on each side of the head of Christ. The rose
was placed on Christ’s right hand above the forgiven souls, and clearly
typified divine love and mercy; the sword on the left was above the
damned, and typified divine condemnation.
But almost immediately the rose was replaced by the lily. The lily
was, in the fifteenth century, the one distinctly sacred flower. Its
lance-like habit of growth made it a most symmetrical pendant to the
sword, and possibly, too, the Church of the North, stern both in
religious sentiment and in its pictorial expression, preferred the
lily, which typified the integrity of the judging God, to the rose,
symbol of His mercy.
The Netherlands adopted the symbol. It appears in Memling’s most
impressive Last Judgment,[21] and in the Last Judgment of Lucas van
Leyden.[22] The same device was used by Albert Dürer[23] and many of
the less known German masters; but Rubens, in his magnificent picture
now in Munich, has replaced the lily by a sceptre.
The lily, used in this connection, is not found in Italian art, for
though the Netherlands, Germany and England adopted the symbolism of
Italy, Italy, though admiring greatly the technical excellence of the
Flemish, rarely assimilated the Northern conventions for the expression
of the intangible.
But the lily is usually reserved for virgin saints and martyrs, and
more particularly for her whom Chaucer names
‘Floure of Virgins all’
--that is, the Virgin Mary.
The Venerable Bede, writing in the early part of the eighth century,
declares ‘the great white lily’ to be a fit emblem of the resurrection
of the Virgin; the pure white petals signifying her body; the golden
anthers her soul within, shining with celestial light.
According to Petrus Cantius, cantor of the Cathedral School of Paris
in the early part of the thirteenth century, the lily represented the
daughter of Joachim herself, by reason of its whiteness, its aroma,
delectable above all others, its curative virtues, and finally because
it springs from uncultivated soil as the Virgin was the issue of Jewish
parents.
As to its curative virtues, it may be added that an anonymous English
monk, writing in the thirteenth century, prescribes the lily as a
sovereign remedy for burns; and for the reason that ‘it is a figure of
the Madonna, who also cures burns, that is, the vices or burns of the
soul.’[24]
But though theologians occasionally used the lily as a symbol of
virginity, before the eleventh century we do not find it associated
with the Mother of Christ pictorially, either as her emblem or her
attribute. There are no lilies in the Catacombs, and those in the
early mosaics are decorative, or symbols of the joy of Heaven. The
miniaturists occasionally used the flower as the attribute of virgin
martyrs, but not in representations of the Virgin.
It was by a Spanish king that the lily was first definitely, and in a
manner pictorially, associated with the Mother of Christ--as her own
flower. In the eleventh century Spaniards and Moors were each fighting
for their faith, and the Moslems instituted military orders called
_rábitos_, the members of which were vowed to perpetual warfare against
the ‘infidel.’
The Christian knights were not to be outdone, and in 1043 Garcias
of Navarre founded an order of chivalry vowed to the service of the
Virgin, which he named ‘the Order of the Lily of Navarre.’
Edmondson[25] writes: ‘The Order of “Our Lady of the Lily,” or “of
Navarre,” was instituted in the city of Nagera by Garcias, the sixth
King of Navarre, in the year 1043, on the occasion of a miraculous
image of the Virgin Mary issuing forth of a lily, and holding the
Infant Jesus in her arms, being then discovered in that city. This
order was composed of thirty knights, chosen out of the principal
ancient families in Navarre, Biscay and old Castile. Each of these
knights wore on his breast a lily embroidered in silver, and, on all
festivals and holy days, he wore about his neck a collar composed of
a double chain of gold interlaced with Gothic capital letters M; and
pendent thereunto an oval medal, whereon was enamelled, on a white
ground, a lily of gold springing out of a mount, supporting a Gothic
capital letter M, ducally crowned.’[26]
Thus the lily became the gage of the Virgin borne by her knights. She
was now gradually moving from the subordinate though glorious station
as Mother of the Incarnate Word to a position of her own as Queen of
Heaven. Saint Ferdinand, possibly unwilling to confront the Moslem with
the Christ whom they themselves revered as a prophet, bore upon his
saddle-bow the ivory _Virgen de las Batallas_,[27] and perhaps what
specially endeared her to the people of Spain was the knowledge that in
the fealty they paid her the infidel could have neither part nor lot.
The chosen knight of the Immaculate Virgin was, of course, _Santiago_,
Saint James, the patron saint of Spain, but every Spanish cavalier
acknowledged himself the servitor of the Lady of the Lily.
Rather more than fifty years after the founding of the Order of the
Lily of Navarre the poet-saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, was preaching
his famous series of Homilies on the Song of Solomon. The sermons were
eighty in number, each based on the text of the Canticles, and each
celebrating the perfections of the Virgin. Differing from Origen, he
found the Virgin Mary, not the Christ, to be the speaker of the words:
‘I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.’ Differing again
from the Church father, he further identified ‘the lily among thorns,’
she who is addressed as ‘my sister, my spouse,’ with the Virgin and not
with the Church of God upon Earth.
Saint Bernard was the most popular preacher of his time; his sermons
became known throughout the Christian world, and to his influence may
be traced the high position which the Mother of Christ now holds in
the Roman Catholic Church. But, so far, the lily had not appeared in
pictorial art in connection with the Virgin.
In the twelfth century, however, we find ecclesiastical seals which
bear the figure of the Virgin holding by the left hand (or right, as
it would appear on the impress) the Child, and in her right a branch
of lilies. Two of these seals, that of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln
and that of Thornholm Priory in Lincolnshire, are now in the British
Museum. It seems to have been the fashion in the eleventh, twelfth and
thirteenth centuries to engrave the owner’s figure on a seal with a
flower in the hand. On the seal of Capet Henri I he is shown with a
sceptre in one hand and a fleur-de-lys in the other, and the figures
on the seals of the Queens of France have a flower in either hand.
Therefore it was only natural, when cutting the Virgin’s figure on a
seal, that the craftsman should give her a flower too, and the Virgin’s
own flower, the lily.
The conservatism of churchmen and the traditions of Byzantine art
still kept lilies at the threshold of the Church till the Renaissance
came. It came like the spring, uncertainly at first, with puffs and
gusts and relapses, but every day the atmosphere grew more genial,
more life-giving, till at last every branch of human thought was alive
and growing. The old early Christian fear of beauty as a devil’s lure
was dying fast, and as scholars and artists studied with new interest
the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome, the old pagan joy of perfect
form in art as in literature revived once more. A representation of
the climax of the Christian tragedy could only be an awful thing, but
childhood and womanhood had the right to beauty. The old Byzantine
panels of the Child-Christ and His Mother were little more than a
formula; the lines and colour were not beautiful, though understood
to represent a thing of beauty. Now artists and people required that
she who, on the word of Scripture, was ‘the fairest among women,’[28]
should be adequately presented, and the Church gave consent. But it was
understood that the loveliness of the Virgin should be strictly the
beauty of holiness, for Saint Ambrose had affirmed[29] that, in the
Mother of God, corporeal beauty had been, as it were, the reflection
of the beauty of the soul, and the early artists, hampered by lack
of technical skill and confused by monkish ideals of asceticism, too
often rendered their Madonnas emaciated and bloodless, even languid and
fretful in expression, mistaking the outward signs of a subdued flesh
for those of a perfected spirit.
It was at this time that Saint Dominic came to Italy with his fiery
zeal, his devotion to the Virgin and his Spanish traditions of the
flower of Our Lady. For him, the quality which raised her so far above
all other women was her spotlessness; she was ‘_sin pecado_,’ ‘_Maria
Purissima_.’ Her other phases, as Mother of the Sorrowful, Refuge
of Sinners, or Consoler of the Afflicted, were to him of secondary
importance.
Already through the preaching of Saint Francis Italian intellect had
been rendered capable of appreciating the beauty of simplicity. Each
artist knew that the true beauty of the Queen of Heaven was not to be
expressed by jewels or wonderfully-wrought raiment, and as the words
of Saint Dominic passed from mouth to mouth, the people of Italy came
to understand that the most precious virtue of Christ’s Mother was her
purity, symbolized very fitly by the lily. The symbol, beautiful in
itself, and so suggestive of the quality it represented, impressed the
imagination clearly, and presently there was a bloom of pictured lilies.
The mosaicist Cavallini,[30] Duccio di Buoninsegna,[31] Giotto,[32]
Simone Martini,[33] and Orcagna[34] led the way, and the Christian
artists of the world have followed. The earliest lilies flowered in
Rome; but Siena, Umbria, Florence, Venice, and later the Netherlands
and Germany, all soon had their votaries of the mystic flower. The
French ivory workers of the fourteenth century, influenced doubtless
by the tradition of the seal-cutters, frequently placed flowers in the
hand of the Madonna. These little ivory statuettes are usually very
sweet in type and often exquisite in workmanship. The Child is held
on the left arm, and the right hand holds a large single lily cup, a
pear-like fruit, or, more generally, a natural stalk of lilies with
leaves and flowers. Always when placed beside the Virgin, or in her
hand, the lily is the symbol of her purity, and a lily standing alone,
as does the beautiful stem in _pietra-dura_ work, which decorates the
little oratory of ‘Our Lady of the Annunciation’ in the Church of
the Santissima Annunziata of Florence, is the emblem of the Madonna
herself, the ‘Lilium inter Spinas.’
Modern Biblical commentators are agreed that the ‘lily of the valleys’
of the Song of Solomon is not the white lily of Europe but the scarlet
anemone. The _lilium candidum_ appears never to have grown in Syria. In
the late spring and early summer, however, the anemones grow thickly
in every grassy patch around Jerusalem and throughout Palestine. That
the flower mentioned is red seems indicated by the comparison between
it and the lips of the ‘Beloved,’ and the anemone, which responds so
readily to the sun, throwing back its scarlet petals and baring its
heart to the warmth, might well stand for the passionate lover of the
Canticles.
But the fathers of the Church held the flower to be a _lilium_, and for
the Church and for sacred art it was and remains the _lilium candidum_.
[Illustration: _From French MS. of 14th Century_]
IV
THE IRIS
The only rival to the _lilium candidum_ as the lily of the Virgin
is the iris. Strictly speaking, it is not a lily at all, for the
_Iridacea_ and the _Liliacea_ are distinct botanical orders. But in
Germany it is known as the sword-lily, from its sword-shaped leaves; in
France it has always been identified with the ‘fleur-de-lys’; in Spain
it is a ‘lirio’--a lily--and Shakespeare writes:
‘... And lilies of all kinds
The Flower-de-luce being one.’
Its first appearance as a religious symbol is in the work of the early
Flemish masters, where it both accompanies and replaces the white lily
as the flower of the Virgin. Roger van der Weyden[35] paints both
flowers in a vase before the Virgin, and the iris alone in another
picture[36] of Mary with the Holy Child. In his ‘Annunciation’[37] the
vase holds only white lilies. There is iris growing among the roses in
Jan van Eyck’s ‘Virgin of the Fountain,’[38] but in his Annunciations
there is only the white lily. Memling, however, places an iris half
hidden below the lilies in one Annunciation,[39] while in a ‘Madonna
with the Child’[40] there is also a single iris, though in this case
the iris rises above the lilies.
The Master of Flémalle in his fine ‘Saint Barbara’[41] places an iris
in a vase beside the saint, where the white lily of a virgin martyr
might have been expected.
The symbolism of the iris and the lily at first sight appears to be
identical, and the substitution of the iris for the _lilium_ seems
to be the result of some confusion between ‘lys’ and ‘fleur-de-lys,’
accentuated by the likeness between the iris and the lilies of the
French royal standard with which the people of the Netherlands were
familiar, since they were emblazoned on the shield of the Dukes of
Burgundy.
In the mosaics of Ravenna, where the lily is used to indicate the
delights of Heaven, it is drawn in silhouette, showing three petals,
and very closely resembles the ‘fleur-de-lys’ of heraldry. The same
convention born of the extreme difficulty of giving modelled form in
utter whiteness, particularly in a medium unfitted to express fine
gradations of shade, is found in woven work, tooled leather, and
embroidery, and the common likeness of the imperfectly-rendered _lilium
candidum_ and the iris to the sacred lily of the French and English
royal standards, is sufficient to account for any indecision as to
which was precisely the Virgin’s lily. It is conceivable, too, that
the artists of the Netherlands, when they painted a Madonna for their
churches, set her in the midst of the iris which grew so thickly round
their doors rather than limit her patronage to the white lily, which
was still exotic and confined to some few convent gardens. For the iris
made their Lady more entirely their own--and so she would appeal more
strongly to the emotions of the simple.
But in the Netherlands, in the fifteenth century, symbolism was usually
very precise, and there does seem to be a slight difference in the
use of the two lilies. The _lilium candidum_ is used exclusively
as the symbol of virginal purity, more particularly in relation to
the fact that the Virgin Mary was a mother, but the iris, the royal
lily, appears to be the emblem or attribute of the incarnate Godhead.
Though Saint Bernard of Clairvaux had attributed the metaphor, ‘I am
... the lily of the valleys,’ to the Virgin, Origen, the older and,
in the North, weightier authority, held Christ to be the lily. In
the ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’[42] of Hugo van der Goes, where the
symbolism all refers to the Child, there is no white lily, but the
orange lily and the purple and white iris. In the Annunciation of
Memling, the single iris below the lilies may be the emblem of the
Prince of David’s house who was to be born of virginal innocence--and
it may have the same meaning where it rises above the lilies in the
picture where the royal Child sits upon His mother’s knee. It may also
indicate royal birth in the ‘Saint Barbara’ of the Prado. She was
the daughter of a King, but in this painting has no crown or other
attribute of royalty. It is noticeable, too, that had there been a
white lily in the vase it would have been difficult to distinguish
this Saint Barbara from a figure of the Virgin.
The idea of royalty in connection with the iris received support from
the constant recurrence of the ‘fleur-de-lys,’ accepted as an iris
(though some contend that the form, as a symbol of royalty, came
originally from Egypt and was founded on the lotus), on royal crowns
and sceptres. Memling and his school used such crowns as the symbol of
divine majesty, placing them upon the heads of God the Father,[43] of
God the Son,[44] and also on the head of the Virgin Mary.[45]
Dante also appears to use the ‘fleur-de-lys’ or ‘fiordaliso’ as a
symbol of honour:
‘... Beneath the sky
So beautiful, came four-and-twenty elders (signori)
By two and two, with flower-de-luces crown’d.’[46]
Some commentators, taking the four-and-twenty personages as the
four-and-twenty canonical books of the Old Testament, consider the
crowns of flowers to be symbolical of the purity of the doctrine found
within the books, holding a ‘fiordaliso’ to equal the white lily as a
symbol, but it is possible that the poet meant the formal fleur-de-lys
upon a golden crown or the fresh iris blooms which would also form a
crown of honour.
The iris is sometimes used symbolically in Italy, and there is in the
Church of S. Spirito in Florence an ‘Annunciation’ now usually ascribed
to Pesello. Between Mary and the angel stands a vase from which spring
three purple iris. This vase, on either side of which the figures
bend, is not merely a variation of the vase of white lilies indicating
the virginity of Mary which is seen in so many early Annunciations,
but it is the same symbol developed and enriched, till it represents
the dogma of the immaculate birth of Christ. The vase, in many cases
transparent, typifies Mary, and the upspringing flower is the emblem of
the incarnate Godhead.[47]
Ghirlandaio places the iris, violet and daisy, each growing up strongly
and freshly from the bare ground of the stableyard, in his ‘Adoration
of the Shepherds,’[48] and in a picture of the sixteenth century by
Palmezzano of Forlì,[49] the Child, seated on His Mother’s knee, holds
a stem of iris as a sceptre; but, on the whole, the iris was little
painted in Italy.
In art which is purely German the iris is very rarely used, though
Albert Dürer painted a ‘Madonna of the Sword-lily,’[50] but in Spain
it holds an important place. Spanish art is poor in symbolism,
though it recognized early and prized highly the white lilies of
the Annunciation. Except, perhaps, for the flame-tipped dart of
divine love, there seems to be no symbol of truly Spanish origin,
and those used by Spanish artists were mostly taken from the art of
the Netherlands. Flemish art was profoundly admired in Spain, and
the Spanish were well acquainted with it, for there was naturally
much intercourse between the two countries in the days before the
Netherlands established their independence. Also Jan van Eyck visited
Portugal and Spain in the train of his patron, Philip the Good of
Burgundy, and from the Hispano-Mauresque types in some of the later
work of the Master of Flémalle there is reason to think that he, too,
had been in the peninsula.
The symbol of the Flemish painters which particularly appealed to the
Spanish was the iris, which grew small and wild upon their own hills,
and with a freer, heavier growth in the palace gardens, whose admirable
water-works had been planned and executed by the despised Moors. They
adopted the iris as the royal lily of the Virgin, the attribute of the
Queen of Heaven, as the _lilium candidum_ was the attribute of the Maid
of Nazareth. The iris, therefore, was deemed particularly suitable as
a detail in that most favourite Spanish devotional representation of
the Virgin, an ‘Immaculate Conception.’ The Virgin, represented as the
woman ‘clothed with the sun and the moon beneath her feet,’ is usually
attended by child angels who carry roses, lilies, palm and olive. The
purple iris is generally added, and sometimes the white lily is omitted
and the iris only given. The Spaniards, therefore, attached the same
idea of royalty to the iris as did the Flemings, but transferred the
attributes from the royal Son to the crowned Mother, for in Spain it is
not found as the attribute or the emblem of the Infant Christ.
Later, the whole Catholic Church seems to have accepted both the iris
and the lily, and the mosaic altar-frontals of St Peter’s in Rome bear
a design in which the rose, the lily and the iris are united.
V
THE ROSE
Roses, among the Romans, were the symbol of victory, of triumphant
love, of the pride and pomp of life, and were by long association as
pagan as the lily is sacred. The Madonna lily (_lilium candidum_) was
the flower of the Virgin and of the virgin saints; the rose was the
flower of Venus.
‘And on hire hed, full semmly for to see
A rose gerlond fressh and wel smelling.’[51]
In the ‘Triumph of Venus,’ by Cosimo Tura,[52] the goddess, who is in
truth a modest-looking lady, fully draped and firmly girdled, wears
a crown of roses, red and white. Beneath her cockle-shell is another
picture,[53] the sea is ‘sucking in one by one the falling roses, each
severe in outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a
little as Botticelli’s roses always are.’[54]
But the Church grudged Venus the flower. Roses, said Wilfred Strabo,
were the flower of martyrdom. ‘_Rosæ martyres, rubore sanguinis_,’
wrote Saint Melitus, Bishop of Sardes, in the second century, and
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux found the rose to be a fitting symbol of
the Passion of our Lord. But though the rose was red to the colour of
blood, and fenced around with cruellest thorns, it had been so long
associated with the joys of life that the world refused to recognize
it as the flower of death. Only as the sign of the triumphant entry of
the departed soul to Heaven was the symbol acceptable. Roses sprang
from the blood of those who fell for their faith at Roncevaux (as
indeed they sprang from the spilt blood of Adonis), but they were also
the sign of victory over the pagan, and when the Virgin Mary was laid
within her tomb it was in rejoicing that ‘straightway there surrounded
her flowers of roses which are the blessed company of martyrs.’[55]
But the Church, always wise in matters æsthetic, did not insist upon
the tragic significance of the rose. It was allowed to be still the
symbol of love, but of divine love, and it is as the symbol of the love
of God that it now decorates our churches in carvings of wood or stone,
in the silver work of church ornaments and on embroidered vestments and
altar frontals.
The rose has never been especially associated with the person of
Christ. Origen, who held that the text which we render, ‘I am the rose
of Sharon,’ was a self-description of our Lord, read the verse, ‘I am
the flower of the field,’ so giving the Church no clear image. When in
art an emblem was required to represent our Lord, the ancient catacomb
devices of the lamb and the vine were employed. Any reference to Him
under the metaphor of a flower was rare and usually vague, as the
charming ‘gold flower’ of the Blickling Homilies. ‘Then the Queen of
all the maidens gave birth to the true Creator and Consoler of mankind,
when the gold-flower came unto this world and received a human body
from S. Mary, the spotless Virgin.’
Or again as a fruit rising from the mystical rose:
‘Now spring up flouris fra the rute
Revert you upward naturally
In honour of the blissit frute
That raiss up fro the rose Mary.’[56]
There are some mediæval Latin hymns for the Nativity in which Christ is
referred to as the rose springing from the lily. The simile, however,
was by no means applied to Him exclusively, for in a Visitation hymn
of the same period He is alluded to as the lily hidden in the rose.
But though the rose is not often the emblem of Jesus Christ, both in
literature and art it is used as the symbol of His love.
Saint Mectilda, in the discourse on the three perfumes of divine love,
tells us that ‘the first of these perfumes is the rose-water distilled
in the still of charity from the most beautiful of all roses, the heart
of our Lord,’[57] and repeatedly in ecclesiastical art, roses falling
or fallen from Heaven, signify divine love. The lovely angels in
Signorelli’s ‘Paradise’[58] carry roses in their looped draperies and
scatter them down upon the redeemed souls beneath, and in Botticelli’s
‘Coronation of the Virgin’[59] the air is also full of roses, symbols
of the love of God. And symbols of divine love are also the falling
roses in that vision of Saint Francis which was so often painted by
Spanish artists and called by them ‘La Portincula.’[60] The saint,
kneeling in his cell one winter’s night, was much troubled by the
memory of a fair woman. To overcome the temptation he went out and
threw himself among the briars of the wilderness. He was rewarded by a
vision of the Saviour, seated in glory, with the Virgin by His side,
and as a token that his penitences were accepted the thorns bloomed
with roses. In most renderings of the legend the mystical roses fall in
a shower around him, and in Murillo’s fine picture[61] the _putti_ are
energetically pelting the saint with blossoms. It was a subject painted
_con amore_ by the Spaniards, for--Assumptions apart--the traditions
of art in Spain were distinctly gloomy and they seized where they could
an excuse for colour. Even Zurburan succumbed to the roses.[62]
The roses which strew the floor of Heaven in a famous diptych[63] by
an unknown English painter are also symbols of divine love. The panels
show Richard II, who is presented to the Virgin by Saint John the
Baptist, Saint Edmund and Saint Edward the Confessor. The roses round
the Virgin’s feet are pink and yellow, and heavier, handsomer flowers
than those which are found in Italian pictures of the same period. For
the rest, this Heaven is especially remarkable for the politeness of
the blue-winged, blue-robed angels, who each, in compliment to their
royal visitor, wear his badge--a white hart couchant, collared and
chained or--upon the shoulder.
Red roses, said Saint Bernard, were symbolical of the Passion of our
Lord, but neither in Church observances nor in art have they been
generally adopted with that meaning. There is, however, a picture of
the Christ-Child in Cadiz. He holds the crown of thorns, and at His
feet are the globe and the apple. All around, filling the background,
are blood-red roses, symbol of the Passion which was to come.
This forecast of pain in the Spanish renderings of the Saviour’s
infancy is even more marked in a picture by Zurburan,[64] where in play
He plaits a crown of rose thorns, the flowers lying beside Him and at
His feet.
Divine love and divine passion, intermingled, may be what the roses
indicate in many ‘Adorations’ of great beauty where the scene is laid
in a rose-garden. In the ‘Adoration’ of Neri di Bicci[65] the Holy
Child lies surrounded by lilies and red and pale roses. The lilies
signify His sinlessness and the roses apparently His love and passion.
The little Saint John stands behind with a scroll on which is inscribed
‘_ECCE AGNUS DEI_.’
There is a lovely picture[66] now ascribed to Botticini, where
angels playfully sprinkle rose petals over the Infant Christ in a
rose-trellised garden. ‘They worship here always alone, though there
is no gate to the garden; the angels have relinquished high Heaven for
these delights; for the scent of these roses which they pluck, and the
Child has relinquished Heaven for these roses, and the thorns which
he shall gather from them ... the season of their thorns is never
over, and whilst it is the time of roses in this picture, there is the
forecast of their thorns in it.’[67]
In the _Speculum Humanæ Salvationis_, a MS. of the fourteenth
century,[68] the Holy Dove is depicted upon a rose. From the bosom of a
seated figure, which represents David or Jesse, a rose tree issues. At
the summit of the tree there is a five-petalled rose, in the centre of
which, as in a nest, sits a dove, which represents the Holy Ghost.
The design is founded upon the text of Isaiah which has been
paraphrased by Pope:
‘From Jesse’s root behold a branch arise,
Whose sacred flower with fragrance fills the skies;
Th’ ætherial Spirit o’er its leaves shall move
And on its top descends the sacred Dove.’
The rose represents Christ, the perfect flower of the human race,
sprung from the root of Jesse, and the dove descends upon it as the
Holy Ghost descended upon our Lord at His baptism in Jordan.
Saint Bernard, differing from Origen, identified the Virgin Mary with
the flower of the field and also with the abstraction described as
‘Wisdom’ in Ecclesiasticus, ‘exalted like a palm tree in Engeddi and as
a rose plant in Jericho.’
‘_Rosa Mystica, ora pro nobis!_’
prays the Church.
‘Here is the Rose
Wherein the Word Divine was made Incarnate,’
wrote Dante.
An English hymn composed about the year 1300 has the lines:
‘Lavedy (Lady), flower of alle thing
_Rosa sine spina_
Thu bere Jhesu, hevene king
_Gratia devina_.’
And nearly two centuries later William Dunbar wrote:
‘Hevins distil your balmy showris:
For now is risen the bricht day-stir
Fro the rose Mary, flour of flowris.’
Therefore, in the decoration of churches dedicated to the Madonna,
the rose frequently occurs. It does not supersede the lily, which
was the flower especially consecrated to her, but it is found beside
it. The Church of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome is ornamented along the
aisles, above the side chapels, with a series of panels, gold on white,
which show the floral emblems of the Virgin. The rose, the lily, the
olive, the laurel and the vine alternate down the whole length of the
church. The beautiful little chapel behind the shrine of the Santissima
Annunziata, in the Church of the Annunziata in Florence, was decorated
in the seventeenth century with inlaid and raised _pietra-dura_ work.
Each of the five onyx panels which form the walls has upon it an emblem
of the Virgin--the sun, the moon, the _Stella maris_, the lily, and,
most lovely of them all, the branch of roses below the words ‘Rosa
Mystica.’ This rose is red, and, strangely enough, the red rose, rather
than the white, was chosen to represent the Virgin. Wrote Guido Orlandi
in 1292:
‘If thou hadst said, my friend, of Mary,
Loving and full of grace;
Thou art a red rose planted in the garden;
Thou wouldst have written fittingly.’
In the _Sarum Book of Hours_, by Philippe Pigouchet,[69] published in
1501, the huge rose held by the Virgin definitely illustrates her title
of ‘Rosa Mystica,’ but those pictures of the early Florentine school,
in which she holds a small red or white rose, show her as the ‘_Madonna
del Fiore_,’ for as ‘Our Lady of the Flower’ she had been installed
patroness of the city of Florence. It would have seemed natural, since
the lily was upon the shield of Florence, to have placed a lily, her
own flower, in the Madonna’s hand. But the city of Florence had passed
through troubled times just before the revival of her art, and the
silver lily on her shield had been replaced by one of crimson.
‘Had through dissension been with vermeil dyed.’[70]
Rather than paint her with the crimson lily, Florentine artists gave
her the rose, and she holds a white leafless rose in the dainty little
picture by Fra Angelico which is now in the Vatican.[71]
There was an odd fancy about the beginning of the eighteenth century
to represent the Virgin Mary as _La Divina Pastora_ feeding her sheep
with roses. The original picture with this title was by Alfonso
da Tobar.[72] He found imitators both in Spain and France, and in
Southern Spain the popularity of the subject still persists. There is
a plastic group, nearly life-size, in the Church of S. Catalina in
Cadiz. The Virgin is dressed _à la Watteau_ with a beribboned crook
and a rose-wreathed hat. She feeds with roses and lilies the sheep and
lambs gambolling round her knees; an almond tree flowers above, and
the Christ-Child, dressed as a small shepherd boy, stands in front.
It is all pink and white, gay and dainty, in a corner of the austere
whitewashed convent chapel which has Murillo’s beautiful ‘Marriage of
Saint Catharine’ above the altar. A similar group, but more dignified
in type and less frivolous in detail, is in the Church of the Holy
Trinity at Cordova. They are strange artificial flowers of that gloomy
growth, Spanish Art.
VI
THE CARNATION
In early German devotional poems the _nelken_, the pink, carnation or
gillyflower, is occasionally used as the simile of the Virgin. Conrad
von Würtzburg writes:
‘Thou art a fragrant gillyflower sprig.’
But it has been given no definite and individual status as a symbol.
Very frequently, however, in ecclesiastical art, more particularly
that of Venice and Northern Italy, it is found where the rose might be
expected. It is placed with the lily in a vase beside the Virgin, with
the violet before the Infant Christ, and with the wild strawberries
among the grass of Paradise.
In Germany the carnation is seen falling from above with heavenly
roses, and occasionally, even, in spite of the written legend, it
replaces the roses in Saint Dorothea’s wreath.
It would appear, therefore, that the symbolism of the carnation is
identical with that of the rose, and when, for any reason, the artist
did not care to paint the rose, he substituted the carnation.
Each year thousands of carnation blossoms are brought to the Lateran
Church in Rome on the feast-day of Saint John, and the people bring
carnations, not roses, because by midsummer’s day the blooming time of
Roman roses is almost past. A scarcity of roses would seem one reason
at least in the Venetian pictures of the fifteenth century why the
carnation replaces the rose. Earth, even sufficient to grow a rose
bush, was scarce in the sea-washed city, but carnations then, as now,
must have grown in pots on every balcony. So the Venetians painted
their own familiar flower rather than draw the rose, as Carpaccio did
his camels, from descriptions furnished by observant travellers.
In the Netherlands and Germany artists probably preferred the
carnation to the rose. It is more precise in shape, neater in its
habit of growth, richer in colour than the rose, and therefore
more in the spirit of Northern art, which liked to express definite
and closely-reasoned symbolism with distinct bright colours and
sharply-realized form. In the South, the artists, more concerned with
the depicting of the soul than with the outer shell of things, more
poetical and also more vague and less accurate in their symbolism, were
better pleased with the more elusive charms of the loosely-petalled
rose.
In an ‘Adoration’ by Botticelli[73] the Holy Child lies among violets,
daisies and wild strawberries, and the background is filled with
freely-growing roses, drawn apparently from memory, not life. The roses
signify the divine love which impelled the Saviour of the world to be
born as a human Child. In the same subject by Hugo van der Goes[74]
three carefully-painted carnations are placed in a crystal vase, and
are symbols of the divine love of the Holy Trinity by which God the
Son became incarnate, the crystal vase in Northern art typifying the
Immaculate Conception.
But in the Sienese and Florentine schools also the carnation is
sometimes found, and very rarely in the same picture as the rose.[75]
Therefore it would seem conclusive that when the painter of the Church
did not care to use the rose because, probably, of its association
with Venus and scenes profane, he was free, if he chose, to use the
carnation as its substitute.
Strangely enough, the most famous carnations in the history of art,
those two which have given the name of ‘The Master with the Carnations’
to the anonymous Swiss painter of the fifteenth century, seem to have
no symbolical significance. The picture[76] shows Saint John the
Baptist preaching to King Herod from the text: ‘It is not lawful for
thee to have thy brother’s wife.’ The King is in his chair of state
and the ladies of his court are seated upon cushions on the tesselated
pavement before the pulpit. Directly below the pulpit lie the two
pinks; one is white and one red. Possibly, since roses, according to
Saint Melitus,[77] Walafrid Strabo[78] and Saint Mectilda,[79] are
the symbols of martyrdom, the carnation may foreshadow the approaching
death of the preacher, but they are more probably simply a detail to
give verisimilitude to the composition, as is the dog that worries a
bone in the ‘Dance of Salome’ by the same master.
VII
GARLANDS OF ROSES
‘Let us crown ourselves with rose-buds,’[80] cried the revellers in the
Book of Wisdom, and at Roman feasts host and guests alike wore roses on
their hair or in garlands round their necks.
So in the heavenly mansions, where life is a perpetual feast, unfading
roses crown the elect. Wreaths of roses are the symbol of heavenly joy
and are worn alike by angels and by the human souls who have entered
bliss.
An early Christian prisoner dreamt that he was already in Heaven:
‘Towards us ran one of the twin children who, three days before,
had been decapitated with their mother. A wreath of vermilion roses
encircled his neck and in his right hand he held a green and fresh
palm.’[81]
Beneath Byzantine influence the rosy wreaths turned to crowns of
jewels, and in the period between Constantine and Justinian crowns
were considered strictly necessary for the guests at the heavenly
feasts. But when the King of Heaven Himself was present all reverently
uncrowned, and it is with their crowns in their hands that the twelve
apostles stand, and the four-and-twenty elders in the mosaics of Rome
and Ravenna. In the Neapolitan mosaics in the Chapel of Santa Restituta
eight figures, apparently of martyrs, hold large crowns resembling
a victor’s wreath, and the graceful virgin saints on the wall of S.
Apollinare Nuova each carries her wreath.
The tall, grand angels of the mosaics have neither wreaths nor
garlands. They have gained no crown because no strife has ever troubled
their serenity. They stand tall and straight, haloed, with spear-like
wands in their hands.
After the twelfth century, however, the apostles and martyrs no longer
carry the crown of victory, but it is the angels who wear wreaths,
usually wreaths of roses, which are the symbol of heavenly joy. And,
alas! what a lowering in type there was from the grand, dignified
beings who guard the throne of Mary, on the wall of S. Apollinare
Nuova, to the childish, peeping, rose-crowned little attendants which
crowd behind her chair in pictures of the Sienese, Umbrian and early
Florentine schools. The archangels still keep some dignity, but the
sweet little doll-like creatures, rose-crowned and golden-winged, of
Fra Angelico seem an inadequate representation of the hosts of Heaven.
But a magnificent strong-limbed angel of the Byzantine type would have
overshadowed the slight, transparent-fleshed Madonna whose physique
showed traces of the asceticism which went towards the making of a
saint. So the angels, denied grand and vigorous frames, were decked
with dainty robes and crowns of roses. Paul Bourget writes:
‘Ce double et contradictoire Idéal, celui d’une extase monastique
conquise dans le martyre des sens et celui d’une beauté qui parle
au sens, semble avoir co-existé dans le Pérugin et dans les
peintres qui l’ont précédé ou accompagné, particulièrement dans
Benedetto Bonfigli, dans Eusebio da San Giorgio, dans Giannicola
Manni et quelques autres dont la Pinacothèque de Pérouse enferme
les œuvres. Ce rêve complexe a son symbole dans les anges de
Bonfigli, couronnés de roses, comme les impies dont parle
l’Ecriture “Couronnons-nous de roses avant qu’elles ne soient
flétries,” comme les convives aussi des banquets paiens “Respirons
les roses tant qu’elles ressemblent à tes joues. Embrassons tes
joues tant qu’elles ressemblent à tes roses.” Mais ces pauvres
anges aux cheveux fleuris tiennent dans leurs mains les instruments
de la Passion du Sauveur, et une pitié douloureuse noie de rouge
leurs douces prunelles où roulent de grosses larmes.’[82]
But blissful souls as well as angels wear roses. In the Paradise of
Simone Martini,[83] Saint Peter with his key has opened the gate of
Heaven and two angels standing by crown with roses each soul as it
enters.
And more particularly those souls are crowned who in their earthly
life could rejoice in their faith even when overwhelmed with troubles.
Symbol of holy joy is the crown of roses which Saint Cecilia wears. Her
legend, like other legends of the Early Church, is both more poetic and
more allegorical than those which originated in later times.
Saint Cecilia lived in virginity with her husband Valerian, who,
through love of her, became a Christian and was baptized.
‘And returning home he found Cecilia in her chamber conversing with a
glittering angel ... and he held in his hand two crowns of roses and
lilies, and he gave one of them to Cecilia and the other to Valerian.
‘And on the morrow, when Tibertius came to salute his sister-in-law
Cecilia, he perceived an excellent odour of lilies and roses, and asked
her, wondering, whence she had untimely roses in the winter season.’
(That is, whence came her holy joy during the season of persecution.)
‘And Valerian answered that God had sent them crowns of roses and
lilies but that he could not see them till his eyes were opened and his
body purified’ (by baptism).
Then follows the account of the conversion of Tibertius and the deaths
of all three martyrs.
The ‘Second Nonne’ told the legend of the saint very prettily to the
Canterbury pilgrims:
‘Thou with thy gerlond wrought of rose and lilie
Thee, mene I, maid and martir Seint Cecilie.’
And her story appears to have been popular, though strangely enough she
has never ranked in popularity with Saint Margaret, Saint Catharine
of Alexandria, or Saint Barbara, notwithstanding that her story is
certainly better authenticated than theirs, the historical details of
her martyrdom having been proved beyond dispute. But she is essentially
a Roman saint, her body lying in Trastevere on practically the spot
where she suffered martyrdom under Marcus Aurelius, and with the
strange jealousy of Italian cities she was almost ignored by Siena,
Florence and Venice till Raphael, Roman in all his sympathies, painted
the fine picture now in Bologna. In this picture, where she appears as
the patroness of Music, she has no roses, but Luini[84] dresses her
head charmingly with white roses and anemones.
More fortunate than Saint Cecilia, Saint Dorothea is beloved in almost
all Christian countries, for coming from Cappadocia there could be
neither vauntings nor heart-burnings on her account in the Christian
cities of Europe. She too wears the roses of her legend.
‘Send me then some roses from the Paradise of your Christ,’ scoffed
the noble youth, Theophilus, as she passed to execution. At the moment
of death an angel appeared with three roses and three apples. ‘Take
them to Theophilus,’ said the saint, and Theophilus, believing, died a
martyr.[85]
Saint Dorothea is usually painted with both apples and roses, symbols
of the good works of a Christian life and of the holy joy even in the
hour of death, which, reported to Theophilus, astonished and finally
converted him. She is very popular both in the Low Countries and in
Germany. There is a charming triptych at Palermo, the best picture
Sicily possesses, attributed usually to Mabuse. On one wing Saint
Dorothea is depicted seated on the ground with her lap full of red and
white roses, a quaint, compact little figure, not a slender Italian
maiden, supported by angelic visions, already half in Heaven, but of
the sturdy Flemish type, who, having with clear brain calculated the
cost, sets herself with stoicism to endure the pain which would be
rewarded by the martyr’s crown of unfading roses.
Curiously enough, the Virgin’s crown is usually of gold and precious
stones, though in one of Velasquez’s rare religious pictures, ‘The
Coronation of the Virgin,’[86] God the Father places upon her head a
wreath of red and white rose blooms. In the best period of Italian art
the Virgin wears no crown except at a ‘Coronation,’ when most often it
is of gold. In Germany the crowns are large and heavily jewelled, and
in the Netherlands a jewelled fillet was very generally placed upon her
hair. A notable and beautiful exception to these fillet-like coronets
is the magnificent symbolical crown of jewels and fresh flowers which
she wears as Queen of Heaven in Hubert van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the
Lamb.’[87] It was only in late art, that is, after the sixteenth
century, that representations of Mary with the Child in her arms, as
Queen of Heaven, or as ‘La Purissima,’ became common. Previously she
had been painted as a human mother with the sorrows of her motherhood
still upon her. As the mother, the greatest of whose seven sorrows has
not yet come, she would not yet carry the rose crown which symbolized
joy, even though it were heavenly joy, and by the time religious
sentiment demanded representations of Christ’s mother, risen to glory,
all sorrow past, the Church had decided to depict her as the woman
‘clothed with the sun and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’
Akin to the wreaths of roses worn by angels and saints are the hedges
and rose-trellises of Paradise.
Dante pictures Heaven as one great and marvellous rose-bloom:
‘How wide the leaves
Extended to the utmost, of this rose;[88]
...... which in bright expansiveness
Lays forth its gradual blooming, redolent
Of praises to the never wintering sun.’[89]
But the artists of the Church have usually depicted Heaven not as
a rose but as a rose-garden; and as a second and more perfect Eden
rather than as the Holy City, the stupendous piece of jeweller’s work
described in the Revelation of Saint John. A few Flemish and German
artists have attempted to realize the jasper wall, the ‘pure gold like
unto clear glass,’ and the ‘foundations garnished with all manner of
precious stones,’ but for the majority of artists on both sides of the
Alps Heaven was a paradise, a garden. The prophet Esdras describes it
in detail:
‘Twelve trees laden with divers fruits,
‘And as many fountains flowing with milk and honey, and seven mighty
mountains, whereupon there grow roses and lilies.’[90]
The Byzantine _Guide to Painting_[91] directs that Paradise be depicted
as ‘surrounded by a wall of crystal and pure gold, adorned with trees
filled with bright birds,’ so combining both visions of the home of the
blessed.
But Western art usually paints Heaven simply as a garden with twelve or
six fruit trees, little fertile mounts, and grass thick with flowers,
among which lilies and roses predominate.
The celestial meadow of Hubert van Eyck[92] has grouped trees as in
a park and bushes covered with roses, and there are roses on bushes
and trellises, crowns of roses and roses woven into swinging garlands
in that most alluring of all painted paradises set by Benozzo Gozzoli
upon the walls of the Palazzo Riccardi.[93] ‘Roses and pomegranates,
their leaves drawn to the last rib and vein, twine themselves in fair
and perfect order about delicate trellises; broad stone-pines and tall
cypresses overshadow them; bright birds hover here and there in the
serene sky; and groups of angels glide and float through the glades of
an entangled forest.’[94]
It is a paradise after the own heart of a Medici, in which no monotony,
no boredom need be apprehended, full of gay and witty folk and the most
gorgeous angels that were ever seen.
The roses of Paradise must not be confused with the rose hedge
or trellis so often placed behind the Virgin by the early German
schools. These hedges indicate the ‘Hortus Conclusus’ and identify
the Virgin with the bride of the Canticles by recalling the verse, ‘A
garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse.’ This enclosure is sometimes
fenced merely by a row of flowers, sometimes by a fortress-wall, and
is often an elaborate garden. An early instance by a master of the
Middle Rhine,[95] dating from about 1420, gives eighteen recognizable
species of flowers and ten varieties of birds. The Madonna sits reading
beneath a tree. One saint gathers cherries and another draws water
from a fountain. Saint George, Saint Michael and a young man chat
beneath a tree, and a pretty young saint with flowers in her hair
teaches the little Christ to play the psaltery. Other gardens contain
no flowers but the various objects used as similes of the Virgin--the
Tower of Ivory, the Closed Door, the Sealed Fountain, etc. Very often
there is merely a trellis with roses climbing up it, and the flowers
which express the virtues of Mary, the lily, violet and strawberry,
grow at her feet. The thorns on the roses are carefully drawn, even
accentuated, illustrating the verse, ‘As a lily among thorns, so is my
love among the daughters;’[96] but in spite of the thorns the general
significance of these roses also is joy and delight.
In the Netherlands, where theologians occupied themselves less with
this second chapter of the Song of Solomon, Madonnas set _en plein air_
are scarcely found. The van Eycks and Memling inaugurated the fashion
of arranging their devotional groups in chapel-like niches, or in
the aisle of some large church. Any garden there is seen in glimpses
between pillars or through windows, and has no mystical meaning.
[Illustration:
_Stefano da Zevio_ _Photo Anderson_
THE ‘ENCLOSED GARDEN’ OF THE VIRGIN
(Royal Museum, Verona)]
In the work of Botticelli and his school we again see enclosed gardens
of roses, but these are rather gardens of adoration, for in the centre
the Virgin kneels before the divine Infant. As in all Adorations the
symbolism refers to the Child, and these roses symbolize the Divine
Love which sent Him to this earth, and are not the attributes of Mary
or an indication of the joy in Heaven. A true _hortus conclusus_
of Italian origin is that of Stefano da Zevio or da Verona.[97]
The Virgin, with the Child upon her knee, sits upon the ground in a
carefully walled in garden, of which the only other human occupant is
Saint Catharine, who strings a crown of roses. The garden is full of
birds and bird-like angels, and in one corner is the ‘sealed fountain’
of the Canticles.
As a general rule, roses massed together, in garlands, in baskets, or
thickly growing, are the symbols of heavenly joys, and single roses
are the symbols of divine love. But there is one single rose which is
also the symbol of joy--it is the golden rose which is the gift of the
Popes. Durandus writes: ‘So also on the Sunday, Lœtare Jerusalem, the
Roman Pontiff beareth a mitre, beautified with the orfrey, on account
of the joy which the golden rose signifieth, but on account of the time
being one of sadness, he weareth black vestments.[98]
‘St Leon is seen upon the _châsse_ of Charlemagne[99] with the golden
rose in his right hand. The golden rose being the image of Heaven,
according to the Liturgy, it became, in the hands of the Pope, the
equivalent of a benediction. One remarks that, in the epoch of which
we speak, the very poetical rite of the golden rose, most ancient in
the Church, had just acquired a new celebrity. The sending of the
symbolical flower had replaced, in the Roman court, that of the keys
of confession, and Innocent III had just consecrated a discourse to
explain its mysterious signification.’[100]
The sending of the golden rose was a very old custom, dating at least
from the time of Gregory the Great. The rose was solemnly blessed
by the Pope on the fourth Sunday in Lent and sent by him to some
sovereign, church or community. Urban V first made the ceremony annual
about 1366.
This rose, symbol of the Church’s blessing, was often a thing of beauty
and fine workmanship. Stefano del Cambio describes that one which was
sent in his time to Florence.
‘On Easter Sunday morning, the 2nd of April 1419, Pope Martin V,
after having performed Mass, gave the golden rose to our magnificent
Signoria, in remembrance of the honours paid him by the Florentine
people.... Our Signoria then returned to their palace with all the
court of Cardinals and Prelates and the afore-said rose bush, which
was a golden branch with leaves of fine gold. On it were nine roses,
and a little bud on top of the nine, which contained spices, myrrh and
balsam.’[101]
Sometimes the ‘rose’ was a whole rose bush about two feet high and
covered with leaves and flowers. Two such bushes, one thornless, the
gift of Pope Alexander VII, and the other, with long sharp thorns,
though curved harmlessly downward, presented by Pius II, are still
treasured by grateful Siena.
VIII
THE COLUMBINE
We read in Isaiah: ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of
Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots; and the Spirit of the
Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the
Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of
the Lord.’[102]
‘These words were addressed to the Messiah. The Divine Child was
therefore clothed with the Spirit of God, whose faculties are seven in
number, for He possesses as His peculiar gifts, wisdom, understanding,
counsel, strength, knowledge, piety and fear.
‘This subject has frequently been portrayed by Christian artists. A
tree springs from the bowels, the breast or the mouth of Jesse. The
symbolic trunk spreads to the left and right, throwing forth branches
bearing the Kings of Judah, the ancestors of Christ; at the top,
seated on a throne, or the chalice of a gigantic flower, is the Son of
God. Surrounding the Saviour, and forming as it were an oval aureole,
seven doves are ranged one above the other, three on the left, three
on the right, and one at the top.... These doves, which are of snowy
whiteness, like the Holy Ghost, and adorned like him with a cruciform
nimbus, are simply living manifestations of the seven gifts of the
Spirit. The Holy Ghost is drawn under the form of a dove; each of
the seven energies distinguishing Him is also figured under the same
type.’[103]
These little doves surrounding the figure of Christ, as a man or as
an infant, occur very frequently in the French miniatures of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and are found upon the windows in
the cathedrals of S. Denis, Chartres, Amiens and Beauvais, and in many
other French churches.
It was an essentially French development of Christian symbolism,
and it is in Flemish art, which drew its inspiration from the French
Renaissance, that we first find, not the little white doves, but
the columbine flower. The columbine grows wild in most countries of
Europe and is usually dark blue in colour. Each of its five petals is
so shaped that it is really very like a little long-necked dove. The
little doves are only five in number, but the Flemish painters take
each flower, not each petal, as the symbol, and give seven blooms upon
each plant. There are six, and the edge of the seventh is just showing,
in the mystical crown worn by Hubert van Eyck’s ‘Queen of Heaven.’[104]
Strictly speaking, however, Mary has no right to these symbols of
the gifts of the Spirit, for it was to the expected Messiah that the
divine gifts were promised. The columbine is more correctly used by
Hugo van der Goes, who in his ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’[105] places
a columbine, with seven flowers upon it, in a vase before the Infant
Saviour.
The seven gifts of the Spirit are according to Isaiah:
SAPIENTIA
INTELLECTUS
CONSILIUM
FORTITUDO
SCIENTIA
PIETAS
TIMOR.
And according to the Apocalypse:
VIRTUS
DIVINITAS (in the Vulgate)
SAPIENTIA
FORTITUDO
HONOR
GLORIA
BENEDICIO.
But, at the Renaissance, Faith, Hope and Charity were taken as the
theological virtues, and to them were added the four moral virtues
exalted in pagan times above all others, namely, Prudence, Justice,
Temperance and Strength.[106]
In a picture by Jörg Breu of the Virgin with the Child and two
saints,[107] a vase of columbine, the only flowers introduced, is
placed in the foreground just below the Child, who stands on His
Mother’s knee.
Beside the vase is a sort of casket, out of which seven little cupid
angels take seven scrolls. On the respective scrolls are inscribed:
FIDES, SPES, CHARITAS, JUSTICIA, PRUDENCIA, FORTES. The seventh is
blank, reserved, perhaps, for TEMPERANCE. A crowned saint, seated
beside the Virgin, holds upon her knee a scroll on which is written
‘AVE REGINA,’ and above the Virgin’s head hover two _putti_ with a
heavy crown. It is therefore to the Mother, rather than to the Child,
that devotion is directed, and the seven Gifts are to be taken as her
attribute.
In 1475 the ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ by Hugo van der Goes was
brought to Florence by Tommaso Portinari, for the Chapel of the
Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Its technique excited the greatest
interest among the artists of Italy, and the vase of columbine in the
foreground may have first drawn their attention to this symbol. Cosimo
Rosselli, perhaps the last of the Florentine symbolists, painted it
among the daisies, strawberries and jasmine-shaped flower in the
‘Madonna with the Child and SS. Peter and James,’[108] commissioned
in 1492. After the fifteenth century it is fairly frequent in Italian
art. Two of the most charming of the Madonna pictures now in the Brera,
‘The Virgin and Child with the Lamb,’ by Sodoma, and ‘The Virgin of the
Rose-hedge,’ by Luini, both introduce the columbine. But the Italian
artists use it vaguely, as the flower of the dove, the flower in
some degree sacred to the Holy Ghost, and lost sight of the original
connection with the seven Gifts of the Spirit. Luini, who is careless
with his symbolism, though painting flowers exquisitely, uses the
columbine also as an accessory in the famous portrait known as ‘La
Colombina,’[109] but here, of course, it is simply a graceful flower in
the hand of a fine woman.
It is most unusual to find any flower used symbolically in scenes
representing the Passion of our Lord. Should plants or shrubs be there,
it is merely as an indication that the place of Crucifixion was beyond
the walls, and that the place of burial was a garden. They have no
special meanings as symbols. An exception is the ‘Entombment’[110] of
Hans Schüchlin of Ulm. From a rock in the foreground springs a plant
of columbine with three drooping flowers. On a smaller plant at the
side are four more blossoms, making up the mystic seven. There are only
these columbines and a little short grass. On the step of the tomb lies
the crown of thorns which has fallen from the head of the dead Saviour
as the disciples lower His body to the grave.
The seven blooms of the columbine appear again in the Thomas-altar[111]
by the master of the Bartholomew-altar, who painted during the first
twenty years of the sixteenth century. It is a disagreeable picture,
the types poor and the action of the doubting Thomas, as he thrusts
his hand into the Saviour’s wound, distinctly brutal. But all round
the feet of the risen Saviour lie flowers scattered on the broad stone
step. There are again the seven heads of the columbine, snapped off
short and showing scarcely any stalk; there are the violets of humility
and the daisy, often seen with the violet as the symbol of perfect
innocence in Adorations of the Infant Christ, but rare when He is
represented as a grown man. There is also the strawberry flower but not
the fruit.
After the sixteenth century the columbine seems to have dropped from
Christian symbolism, and in modern religious art it has no place.
IX
THE OLIVE
‘Strew thrice nine olive boughs
On either hand; and offer up thy prayer,’[112]
counselled the Greeks when conscious that the deities were offended.
The olive was the gift of Pallas. The tale ran that in the reign of
Cecrops both Poseidon and Athena contended for the possession of
Athens. The gods resolved that whichever of them produced the gift
most useful to mortals should have possession of the land. Poseidon
struck the ground with his trident and straightway a horse appeared.
But Athena planted the olive and the gods thereupon decreed that the
olive was more useful to man than the horse, and gave the city to the
goddess, from whom it was called Athenæ.[113]
But the symbolism of the olive, founded upon its healing qualities and
its oil’s well-known property of calming roughened water, was not only
Grecian: it was wide-spread, and the Romans used it politically as well
as religiously. Their heralds carried olive on an embassy of peace, and
the custom lingered in Italy through the Middle Ages; Dante describing
how the multitude ‘Flock round the herald sent with olive branch.’
In Christian art the olive also invariably represents peace or
reconciliation, and it is first found in the Catacombs, where there
is a curious painting of the mystic fish which swims towards the
Cross with a sprig of olive in its mouth. The fish, by the well-known
anagram, represents Christ, who, through the Cross, brings peace on
earth.
A dove with an olive twig in its beak is also found upon early
Christian tombs. And then, as Tertullian says, ‘it is a symbol of peace
even older than Christianity itself’[114]--the herald of the peace of
God from the very beginning. Sometimes the word itself, ‘Pax,’[115] is
added, thereby marking the sense beyond all possibility of dispute;
viz., that it is meant to assert of the soul of the deceased that it
has departed in the peace of God and of his Church.[116]
Tertullian refers, of course, to the dove sent forth by Noah which
returned across the waters, and ‘Lo! in her mouth was an olive leaf
plucked off,’ sign that the wrath of God was appeased. The dove,
bearing the twig of olive, executed in coloured marbles, occurs
repeatedly in the decoration of Saint Peter’s. Here the dove represents
the Church bearing the Gospel message of peace to the world. The same
emblem is found in the decoration of St John Lateran, and Pope Innocent
X. incorporated it with his coat of arms.
The olive naturally appears as an attribute in allegorical figures
of Peace. One of the earliest and most famous of these figures is in
Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s great fresco entitled ‘Good Government.’[117] The
golden-haired Peace, who wears a white robe, is crowned with olive, and
carries an olive branch in her hand. She has a beauty of her own, but
compared with the more virile figures in the composition, Fortitude,
Prudence, Temperance and Justice, she is a little heavy and inert, a
little wanting in interest, as the citizens perhaps would have found
their daily life were they condemned to days of peace.
In small, fierce Siena the olive was a very favourite symbol and found
more frequently than any other. One of the most curious characteristics
of religious art is the inexactitude with which it reflects a people’s
mood, for the ideal upon the wall above the altar is often just
precisely that to which they do not strive. When the Medici were in
power and Florentine social life was at its worldliest, simplicity and
purity, almost austerity, were demanded of the artist, and the lily
was the favourite symbol. Murillo painted Madonnas to the Church’s
order, sweet and forgiving, kind to indulgence, almost voluptuous, at a
moment when not only the devotions of Jews and heretics but the private
life of every citizen of Seville was under stern control. And in
Seville, with inquisitorial fires blazing, the Virgin had as attribute
the rose of love and charity. So the turbulent Sienese, who, when no
enemy knocked at the gates, fought with one another, loved a still and
peaceful art. It was conservative, for they cared for no novelty, no
variety of subject, pose or action. And their favourite symbol was the
olive branch of peace. The angel Gabriel almost invariably carries
olive,[118] Saint John the Evangelist[119] and Saint Ansano,[120] their
own saint, both hold branches of it, and it crowns the blonde curls of
many a little angel.
In representations of the first and third persons of the Holy Trinity
the olive branch is very rare. Upon some ancient crucifixes, however,
where a hand holding a wreath represents the Eternal Father, the
wreath, though usually of laurel, in some instances is formed of
olive. In the Crucifix of the tenth century, known as the Crucifix of
Lothair,[121] the wreath is distinctly of olive, but since it encircles
the Holy Dove the olive is perhaps equally the attribute of the Holy
Ghost. In the Crucifix upon the Manual of Prayer of Charles the
Bald,[122] the wreath is of laurel and there is no dove.
Mabillon speaks of a group of the Trinity in human form, sculptured
by order of Abelard at the Paraclete. In it the Father wore a closed
crown, the Son a crown of thorns, and the Holy Ghost a crown of olive.
The group has long since disappeared, and there seems no other instance
of the Holy Ghost in human form being represented with the olive. A
dove bearing an olive twig could not be an emblem of the Holy Ghost
unless the bird’s head were encircled with a halo.
But Christian art uses the ancient symbol of peace repeatedly when
illustrating Christ’s life upon earth. First we find the angel Gabriel
bringing to the Virgin a branch of olive as token that his message is
of peace. Sometimes he is also crowned with olive. He comes crowned
with peace, and the branch in his hand foreshadows the reconciliation
between God and man which is to come by the Child whose advent he
announces.
The olive branch took precedence of the lily as the symbol carried by
the announcing angel. Originated probably by Simone Martini, one of its
earliest instances is in his Annunciation now in the Uffizi. In the
Florentine school the simple stick carried by the herald angel evolved,
as we have seen, through the fleur-de-lys to the stem of lilies. In
Siena it was the meaning of the wand, rather than the wand itself,
which was developed. The wand simply marked that Gabriel was a herald;
that it was a message of peace and goodwill which he brought was shown
by the grey-green leaves of the olive. As a symbol it was by no means
of Simone Martini’s own finding, for it was a very usual political
symbol of the day, but he seems to have been the first to have placed
it in the angel Gabriel’s hand, and the school of painting in Siena
whole-heartedly and faithfully adopted his device. The general trend
of Sienese symbolism was to direct devotion to the incarnate Godhead
rather than to Mary of Nazareth, and it is of Him, as the bringer of
peace on earth, that the branch of olive tells, as elsewhere the white
lily proclaims the virginity of the coming motherhood.
Then again, on that night when the angels sang of peace on earth and
goodwill towards men--
... ‘the meek-eyed Peace,
She crown’d with Olive green, came softly sliding
Down through the turning sphear.’[123]
In one of the most naïve and fascinating of all Botticelli’s
pictures[124] the angels crowned with olive hold up branches of it
against the golden sky. Other angels, half distraught with joy, run
with waving olive-sprays to greet the astonished shepherds.
The same subject is much more soberly treated by Sano di Pietro.[125]
One angel, flying through the twilight, brings a twig of olive to the
shepherd who is sleeping on the hillside.
There are many symbolical fruits placed in the hand of the Infant
Christ. Botticelli paints a pomegranate, Mabuse a quince, Memling an
apple, Il Moretto a pear, and each represents the individual artist’s
conviction as to what really was the unnamed fruit of the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil which grew in the midst of Eden. The placing
of the olive, symbol of reconciliation, where it might be confused
with the fatal fruit which made that reconciliation so imperative was
carefully avoided, and we rarely find the olive branch in the hand
of the Child when seated on His mother’s knee. And there was still
another reason. He had Himself said: ‘I come not to bring peace upon
earth, but the sword,’ therefore the earlier and more literal artists
refused Him the symbol of peace, even as divine peace. There are,
however, instances of the Christ-Child with the olive branch, of which
the most important is the ‘Holy Family’ by Mantegna.[126] The Christ,
a beautiful and dignified childish figure of three or four years old,
stands on a sort of pedestal with the little Saint John. He holds a
branch of olive in His right hand, upright like a sceptre, and in the
other is the crystal orb which symbolizes sovereignty. Saint Joseph
stands behind and the Virgin lays a rosebud at her Son’s feet.
The Bringer of Divine Peace was an aspect of the incarnate Son of God
on which Mantegna laid emphasis. In the ‘Holy Family,’ now in Dresden,
painted about the same period, the little Saint John holds a branch of
olive (from which two tiny side-sprays grow naturally in the form of a
cross) as an attribute of the Holy Child.
The olive branches of the ‘Entry into Jerusalem,’ like the olives of
Gethsemane, were only accidentally allegorical. The villagers of the
Mount of Olives cut down branches (presumably olive branches) ‘and
strewed them in the way.’ With palm branches they would salute any
popular leader, and it is scarcely to be believed that they definitely
selected the olive and palm with the full understanding of the
symbolism which the Christian Church attaches to them.
‘The olive branches signify his office as peace-bringer and the palms
his victory over Satan.’[127]
There is in the Catacombs a figure of the Virgin Mary praying between
two olive trees. Her name is inscribed above her head. She is standing
with raised hands in the early attitude of prayer, and these olive
trees apparently symbolize ‘the peace of God which passeth all
understanding.’ But after the twelfth century the Church had identified
the personality of the Virgin with the figure of Wisdom eulogized in
Ecclesiasticus, and the olives which are sometimes found beside her
refer to the verse which compares her to
‘A fair olive tree in a pleasant field.’[128]
Botticelli painted a beautiful ‘Madonna of the Olives’ for the Church
of S. Spirito. Vasari writes of it: ‘In S. Spirito in Florence he
has painted a picture for the Chapel of the Bardi which is carefully
executed and well finished, where there are some olives and palms
painted with great love.’[129] In another picture by Botticelli[130]
angels hold above the Virgin’s head a lightly-framed crown of gold
which is decorated with fresh sprays of lily, palm and olive.
The most popular of modern Italian representations of the Virgin and
Child is very justly that painted by Niccolò Barabino[131] and entitled
‘_Quasi Oliva Speciosa in Campis_.’ Large branches of olive, painted
also ‘with great love,’ are placed about the feet of the sweet-faced
Mother, who peeps through her heavy white veil, and they almost hide
the fruit of temptation which lies on the ground beneath.
[Illustration:
_Martin Schöngauer_
GABRIEL CROWNED WITH OLIVE BRINGS THE MESSAGE OF RECONCILIATION
(Print Room, Alte Pinakothek, Munich)]
One of the _putti_ which fly round the feet of the Madonna in a Spanish
‘Immaculate Conception’ usually carries a branch of olive, and that,
too, bears the same meaning. As an olive tree in a pleasant field she
brings peace and consolation to mankind. She is the ‘Mater Consolatrix.’
Sodoma painted a stately figure of Saint Victor,[132] with sword and
palm, and the little rose-crowned child-angel who supports his shield
holds above it a branch of olive, symbol of the peace which to a
Christian warrior should be the end of victory.
The same idea dominates the ‘Judith’[133] of Botticelli. The slayer
of her country’s enemy returns thoughtfully home, satisfied but not
exultant. In her right hand is her sword, carried low; upright, in her
left, a branch of olive. Though her deed was bloody, she had brought
peace to the land.
Flemish art neglects the olive, and except in the drawings of Martin
Schöngauer,[134] whose grave gentle Gabriels wear olive crowns, it is
seldom seen in Germany. The reason is easy to guess. The olive tree
not growing in the North, the painters would be at a loss to find a
branch from which to draw, and the people, unacquainted with the leaf,
would scarcely recognize its hidden message of peace. In France it is
seen less rarely. On the sculptured portal of the Cathedral of Amiens
there is a curious rendering of the parable of the Wise and the Foolish
Virgins. A withered olive tree, without fruit or leaves, grows by the
side of the foolish maidens, and a healthy olive tree, laden with fruit
and ready with abundance of oil, is beside those maidens who were wise.
But on the whole the olive is an Italian, and more particularly a
Sienese, symbol, though Botticelli also loved the silvery leaves. In
his magnificent ‘Pallas taming the Centaur,’[135] painted for Lorenzo
de’ Medici, to commemorate his diplomatic victory over the King of
Naples and the League in 1480, olive encircles the head of the lovely
goddess and is wreathed about her dress. The surface meaning of the
picture is that, by the arts of peace taught them by the beneficent
goddess, men were enabled to overcome the savagery of nature, typified
by the centaur. But it also shows, allegorically, how the wise
statesmanship of Lorenzo (with whose badge, rings interlaced, the gown
of Pallas is ‘semé’) guided the war-loving League, here figured as the
centaur, into the ways of Peace.
X
THORNS
Thorns and thorn branches signify in general grief and tribulation,
the word tribulation itself being derived from a Latin root signifying
thistles or briars. But, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, thorn
bushes signify the minor sins, and growing briars or brambles those
greater ones, ‘quæ pungunt conscientiam propriam,’ etc.
He is supported in his opinion by Saint Anselm, and both saints explain
in this sense the words of Saint Paul, who wrote to the Hebrews:
‘That which beareth thorns and briars is rejected and is nigh unto
cursing, whose end is to be burned.’
The crown of thorns with which jesting soldiers crowned the Christ
was in itself an emblem, or at least a parody, of an emperor’s festal
rose-crown. According to _The History of the Crown of Thorns of the
Holy One_,[136] the first crown with which Jesus Christ was crowned was
made of white-thorn and was removed before the Crucifixion and replaced
by a second _de juncis marinis_.
But in the great majority of scenes from the Passion the crown is
merely formed of large thorns without any attempt to realize any
particular natural growth. In Germany, where Entombments and Pietàs
were more often painted than in other countries, the crown is
frequently green, in allusion, it is suggested, to the words: ‘If these
things be done in the green wood, what shall be done in the dry?’
In these pictures the crown of thorns, if not still upon the Saviour’s
head, is usually placed very prominently in the foreground, marking to
some extent the divinity of the dead Christ, for, since life had fled,
there could be no halo.
In Northern art the crown of thorns remains always unchanged, the
symbol of Christ’s sufferings, but in at least one Italian Pietà,[137]
the dry prickles round the dead Christ’s brow have bloomed with
delicate white briar-roses--an exquisite figure of Love’s triumph over
Pain.
Sometimes, in pathetic forecast, the Child Christ has the crown of
thorns hung on His tiny wrist[138] or plays with it as with a toy, and
in a very charming picture,[139] with less poignant and more pleasing
symbolism, a waiting child-angel stands by with a wreath of the blue
sea-holly.
In Spain the Christian faith was stern. Faith and suffering were more
closely allied than faith and joy. They had no ‘jesters of the Lord,’
and their saints glorified God by self-inflicted pain rather than
by acts of mercy. So their Christ in childhood was not a smiling,
unconscious _bambino_, but a sad-faced child who wounds Himself with
the rose-twigs which He twists into a crown. The rose-thorn tears His
flesh but the roses lie beside Him and round His feet, for His griefs
and sufferings were the outcome of His divine love. Both Zurburan[140]
and Alonzo Cano[141] painted fine pictures on this theme.
[Illustration:
_Zurburan_ _Photo Anderson_
THE CROWN OF THORNS
(Museo Provinciale, Seville)]
There is a ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ by Hans Burgkmair,[142] painted
in 1507, where beneath a cross-surmounted imperial crown Christ wears
the Crown of Thorns. In several of the French fifteenth-century
miniatures of the Trinity in Glory, God the Son still wears the Crown
of Thorns, but this combination of the two crowns is rare. It was,
however, in reverent remembrance of the thorn-crowned King of the Jews
that the Crusader, Godfrey de Bouillon, twisted a thorn-branch round
his coronet when he was crowned King of Jerusalem. His bronze statue,
wearing this double crown, stands with those of the other Christian
kings guarding the tomb of Maximilian in Innsbruck Cathedral.
Among modern symbolists, Holman Hunt has used thorns with finest
effect. In his ‘Light of the World’ the Saviour wears again the double
crown, the thorns which symbolize His sufferings intertwisted with the
golden crown of His divinity. He stands with the lantern, which is
the light of His Gospel, before the closed door of the human heart, a
door all overgrown and blocked by the weeds and briars which are the
symbols of sin and things evil. There is the poisonous hemlock, the ivy
which kills the tree that it embraces, thorns denoting the lesser sins,
and the brambles which are the emblems of the greater ones. According
to Raban Maur the bramble is also an emblem of the riches which destroy
the soul.
In several modern pictures of ‘The Good Shepherd’ Christ is depicted
as rescuing a lamb caught by its wool in the briars of the wilderness.
The lamb, of course, is the emblem of an erring soul, and the briars
represent those sins which hold it back from answering the Shepherd’s
call.
In connection with the saints, the Crown of Thorns is not used
symbolically, except when placed upon the head of Saint Catharine of
Siena,[143] to indicate her austerities. According to the legend,
Christ in a vision offered her a crown of roses or a crown of thorns
and she chose the thorns. When it is carried by Saint Louis of France
it is to recall the fact that it was he who brought to France, as her
most precious relic, the Holy Crown itself.
The tonsure was originally instituted to keep fresh in the memory the
Saviour’s Crown of Thorns. And in the ‘Paradise’ of Fra Angelico[144]
the monks are crowned with roses. Thus the emblem reverted to the
original symbol. The Crown of Thorns was the parody of the rose-crown,
symbol of rejoicing; the tonsure the reverent imitation of the thorny
wreath, and angels at the entrance of Paradise change the tonsure for a
wreath of roses.
In early German art the Virgin is often found seated in a garden of
which each flower has its significance. Behind and around her there
is usually a sort of trellis or bower covered with roses. The roses
have very pronounced thorns, and the thorns are accentuated to recall
that Mary is the lily and the bride of the Canticles, the ‘Lily among
thorns.’ In an Assumption of Seghers[145] one of the attendant _putti_
flies towards her with a single lily enclosed in branches covered with
long-spiked thorns.
On the other hand, when the rose is the direct emblem, not the
attribute of the Madonna, it has no thorns, for then it illustrates
her title, ‘_rosa sine spina_.’
The Roman Breviary likens the Virgin to the burning thorn bush in
which Jehovah revealed Himself to Moses and the simile was cited
by Bishop Proclus in a Mary-sermon preached in the fifth century.
Though enwrapped in the all-consuming flame of divine love, she yet
remains unharmed. It is only in German art that this simile has been
pictorially translated. German artists were familiar with the idea
through Conrad von Würtzburg’s apostrophe to the Virgin:
‘In the thorn bush on the bare field
Moses, the hero of God
Saw in a glow of bright fire
The birth of our Saviour foreshadowed.
In the blast of the flame
It remained unaltered
As if neither leaf nor twig
Perceived the death-giving blaze.
In this we may recognize
The full magnificence of thy maidenhood.’[146]
And we find this burning Thorn Bush with the Ivory Tower, the Sealed
Fountain, the Fleece of Gideon and other emblems of the Virgin, in
the fifteenth-century renderings of the _Hortus Inclusus_ and in the
background of the essentially German allegory of the Incarnation, known
as the ‘Hunting of the Unicorn.’ There are some fine embroideries and
tapestries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Bavarian
National Museum,[147] in which the burning thorn bush, with the other
symbols of the Virgin’s purity, are worked with most careful detail.
The burning bush, not particularly a thorn bush, but the ‘bush’ of our
Authorized Version, is now the chosen emblem of the Church of Scotland.
There were neither thorns nor thistles in Eden. It was not till the day
when Adam fell that God laid a curse upon the ground: ‘Thorns also and
thistles shall it bring forth to thee.’ Therefore thorns and thistles
are in general the symbols of sin and death. A little German woodcut
expresses eternal death with gruesome completeness: a skull, with the
apple of damnation between its bare jaws, has round its brow a wreath
of twisted thorns.
XI
THE PALM
The Romans took palms for their symbol of Victory. There is a
sarcophagus in the Vatican on which is carved a Roman conqueror with
captive barbarians kneeling before him, and the winged Victory who
crowns him with laurel holds a palm in her left hand.
Simon Maccabees, after he had taken the Tower of Jerusalem, entered it
‘with thanksgiving, and branches of palm trees and with harps.’[148]
And the seers of Scripture saw palms in heaven: ‘A great multitude,
which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds and people, and
tongues, stood before the throne and before the Lamb clothed with white
robes, and palms in their hands.’[149] ‘These be they that have put off
the mortal clothing and put on the immortal, and have confessed the
name of God; now are they crowned and receive palms.’[150]
Palms were therefore the meed of martyrdom, the symbol of the martyrs’
victory over death.
‘... The angel said
God liketh thy request,
And bothe with the palme of martirdome,
Ye shallen come unto His blissful rest.’[151]
During the first three centuries of Christianity Christian art
concerned itself almost exclusively with the events recounted in the
Old and New Testaments and the Apocryphal Gospels. ‘But during the
fourth century artists began to represent the acts of the martyrs, at
the bidding of Saint Basil, who called to his aid illustrious painters
of athletic combats, to paint with resplendent colours the martyr
Barlaam, the crowned athlete, whom he found himself unable adequately
to describe.... A fresco came to light in 1887, under the Church of SS.
Giovanni e Paolo on the Celian Hill, which shows three Christians being
put to death beneath the rule of Julian the Apostate, kneeling with
eyes bound and hands tied behind their backs. This may be considered as
the first representation of a martyrdom....’[152]
Sixtus III (432–440), as is shown by the inscription which is read
above the principal door of Santa Maria Maggiore, had had the
instruments of their martyrdom painted only beneath the feet of the
martyrs.
‘Ecce tui testes uteri sibi proemia portant
Sub pedibusque jacet passio cuique sua.
Ferrum, flamma, ferae, fluvius, sævumque venenum
Tot tamen has mortes una corona manet.’[153]
Thus in the fourth century there were representations of martyrdoms,
and in the fifth century single figures of the martyrs more or less
idealized, but they apparently carried the crown of victory, ‘the
crown of their high calling,’ not the palm. But though the crown was
generally used, the palm of the primitive Christian Church was not
forgotten, for, as Cassiodorus, writing at the beginning of the sixth
century, points out, it was palms which, in the eyes of the people,
indicated those strong athletes who were victorious, and advocates
their use as a religious symbol.
Palms at this period seem to have been used as an emblem of the public
games themselves. On the consular diptyches, the double tablets of
ivory which a consul had carved to commemorate his entry into office,
it was customary to put palms beneath the figure of the consul, among
the bags of money and other objects that were supposed to represent the
benefits which would accrue to the populace beneath his rule.
It was probably this secular use of the palm which excluded it from
the symbolism of the Church during the early centuries, for it is palm
trees not palm branches which are found in the early mosaics, notably
those of S. Apollinare Nuova in Ravenna, where palm trees alternate
with the figures round the frieze, and palm trees, according to St
Ambrose, were not the symbol of victory but the emblem of the righteous
man, ‘for its roots are upon the earth but its head is lifted towards
the heavens.’
But by the thirteenth century the public games had dropped from Italian
social life, and religious art reverted once more to the palm branch
of the catacombs as the symbol of a martyr’s triumph over death.
Durandus, writing about the year 1286, unites the different renderings
of the palm’s significance. He says: ‘Martyrs are painted with the
instruments of their torture and sometimes with palms, which signify
victory, according to that saying:
‘“The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree; as a palm tree
flourishes, so his memory shall be preserved.”’[154]
After the Renaissance martyrs were very generally depicted with palms,
either in place of, or in addition to, the instruments of their
martyrdom. They varied in size and shape, from the tiny closed palm
no longer than a human hand, used by Cimabue,[155] to the magnificent
pedestal of palm branches on which Carpaccio has set his ‘Saint Ursula
in Glory.’[156] Saint Christopher, the giant saint, in consideration
of his size, was always allowed a whole palm tree as his staff, but a
whole palm tree, or the tiniest scrap of its foliage, carried exactly
the same meaning.
The palm is also given occasionally to several saints who have not
suffered a violent death, but have been conspicuous for their victory
over pain and temptation; for instance, Saint Francis, Saint Catharine
of Siena and Saint Clare.
Even in the Catacombs two palms are sometimes placed crossways, not on
the tombs of martyrs only, but on other Christian tombs, to signify the
victory of the cross. For life as a declared Christian in the early
days of the faith was sufficiently difficult and perilous, even if it
did not end in death at the hands of the executioner. In the same way
the pilgrim who had overcome difficulties and encountered possible
death on a journey of piety to the holy sepulchre was permitted to
take the name of palmer when he ‘brings home his staff enwreathed with
palm.’[157]
Meanwhile palms never fell into disuse as a secular symbol. When they
appear on the seals and coins of emperors and kings they indicate
entirely worldly power and authority, and it is not in recognition
of sainthood that the winged genius presents Henri IV with palm and
wreath of laurel in the fine allegorical picture of his ‘Entry into
Paris after the Battle of Ivry.’[158]
In a hymn of Saint Augustine, Jesus Christ is designated the ‘Palma
bellatorum,’ but, perhaps by reason of its pagan origin, and also
because it has never been exclusively a religious symbol, Christ as
the conqueror of sin and death is seldom depicted with the palm of
victory. In a few devotional Crucifixions palms are placed crossways
above the Saviour’s head, and very rarely it is seen in the hand of the
newly-risen Christ. He almost invariably carries instead the banner
of the Resurrection with a scarlet cross upon a white ground. In one
of the rare representations[159] where He holds a palm He holds also
the banner in His other hand, and it is striking how the adding of the
lesser symbol to the greater, an error the early masters carefully
avoided, detracts from the dignity of the figure.
In the four canonical gospels, palms as a symbol are only mentioned
once, the occasion being the entry of Jesus Christ ‘riding lowly upon
an ass’ into Jerusalem before the feast of the Passover.
‘They ... took branches of palm trees and went forth to meet Him, and
cried Hosanna!’
It was a respect paid to a reigning sovereign and would support the
accusation of the Jews that He sought to make Himself a king.
The entry into Jerusalem is not an incident in the life of Christ which
is used for devotional contemplation, though it occurred usually in
the series of scenes from the life of Christ which were frequent in
pre-Renaissance art, executed in carved wood, ivory and marble; and in
the hands of the villagers of the Mount of Olives the palms signified,
of course, simply triumph, for they had not yet gained the full
Christian meaning of victory through the Cross.
In representations of the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, the palms
are merely a historical detail, but it is a true symbol, in defiance
of the probable fact, when the Saviour Himself is represented carrying
the palm, as in the _Biblia Pauperum_ of 1440.[160] It is then purely a
symbol of His triumph over sin and death.
In this same edition of the _Biblia Pauperum_ the palm is also,
strangely enough, placed in the hand of Christ in the Ecce Homo; the
‘reed in His right hand’ set there in mockery, changed to the victor’s
palm.
Occasionally the palm is given to the angel Gabriel when he comes
from Heaven to announce the Saviour’s approaching birth. ‘Ave’ is his
salutation to the Virgin, and in Roman fashion, as in salutation to a
queen, he kneels with a lifted palm.
Spinello Aretino paints Gabriel with the palm. In his Annunciation at
Arezzo[161] the angel is first seen above, flying with the palm from
before God’s throne. Below he kneels, the palm in his hand, before the
Virgin. Ambrogio Lorenzetti[162] and others follow the same tradition,
but the palm was soon superseded in Siena by the olive and elsewhere by
the lily, which was adopted by painters of all nations as the flower of
the Annunciation.
The _Legenda Aurea_ of Jacobus de Voragine gives an account of the
death and burial of the Virgin. The legend is said to be an invention
of the Gnostics, and there is reason to believe of Lencius in the
second century.[163]
Shortly before the Virgin’s death the angel Gabriel again appeared to
her, and ‘he gave her a branch of palm from Paradise which he commanded
should be borne before her bier.’
This branch of palm was clearly the symbol of victory over sin,
since she had passed a full lifetime in perfect sinlessness and her
surpassing sorrows had entitled her to the reward of martyrdom.
The Legend continues:
‘And the palm shone which he had left behind with great clearness;
it was green like a natural branch and its leaves shimmered like the
morning star.’ The palm, therefore, is distinguished from the palms
of the martyrs by being encircled with stars. A Sienese artist paints
seven,[164] the sacred number, corresponding with the Virgin’s sorrows;
other artists give twelve, foreshadowing that there should be upon her
head ‘a crown of twelve stars.’
Usually, in Italian pictures of the death or ‘Dormition’ of the Virgin,
an angel, or Saint John the Evangelist, appears at her bedside
carrying the palm. Northern art was almost entirely uninfluenced by the
details given by Jacobus de Voragine of the Virgin’s death and burial,
and though in Germany ‘The Death of the Virgin’ is a very favourite
subject, the palm is never introduced. Saint John frequently, however,
holds a lighted taper, and some form of the starry palm tradition may
have drifted northwards, for the master of the Sterzing Altar[165]
paints a cluster of star-shaped flowers in the hand of Saint John, who
bends over the inanimate form of the Virgin.
Her body was carried by divine command to the valley of Jehoshaphat,
‘and John bare the palm branch in front of it.’
This scene, too, belongs to Italian art, and usually makes a beautiful
processional group. Saint John, with the privilege of a son, walks
before the bier. Duccio di Buoninsegna[166] paints him with the closed
narrow palm of a martyr. In the charming little long-shaped picture by
Fra Angelico[167] the palm has its fan-shaped leaves spread wide and
it shines as if it were of gold.
In the ‘Immaculate Conception’ of the Spanish school one of the
attendant _putti_ usually carries a palm. This may be the palm of
victory over sin and death, or, following another authority, it may be
a symbol of the Immaculate Conception, since it bears fruit at the same
moment at which it flowers.[168]
According to Dr Anselm Salzer, O.S.B., ‘The palm, when referring to
Mary, is a figure of her victory over the world and its temptations, of
her everlasting virtue, of her sovereignty in heaven, of the protection
that she offers to mankind, of her triumphant motherhood and of the
beauty of her soul.’[169]
XII
THE ACANTHUS
One plant, the acanthus, which was very much used by pre-Renaissance
artists, seems to have dropped later from the flora of symbolism.
[Illustration:
_Photo Alinari_
THE ACANTHUS OF PARADISE
Mosaic of 13th century
(S. Clemente, Rome)]
Paradise was embowered, according to Saint Paulino da Nola, in
_floriferi caeleste nemus paradisi_, and curving branches of acanthus
indicate Heaven in the mosaics of the Baptistery of Ravenna and in
the apse of St John Lateran. The Trees of Jesse and the Trees of Life
in early art are also founded on the acanthus with various symbolical
details niched in the branches. It surrounds the ‘Coronation’ and fills
the space above the heads of the saints in the large central mosaic
of S. Maria Maggiore[170] and of the fine mosaic in S. Clemente.[171]
Venturi writes of the latter:
‘From the plant, whence rises the Cross, spring two green boughs which
wreath over all the abside, enclosing with their spirals birds,
flowers and saints to give the idea of the garden of felicity. In such
a way, in the _Dugento_, at the distance of so many centuries, the
verses of St Paulino da Nola are illustrated once more.’
But after the thirteenth century acanthus plants of vast proportions
were no longer used to symbolize the gardens of Heaven. Heaven became a
natural park-like place with fruit trees and flower-grown grass, except
for its inhabitants, differing little from any princely garden. The
plant was still used as the motive of much decoration, ecclesiastical
and secular, but it was no longer seen in connection with devotional
subjects as the representative plant of Heaven.
XIII
THE FLEUR-DE-LYS
Among the symbolical flowers of art, the golden fleurs-de-lys of France
hold a high position. They were the arms of the King of France, ‘the
eldest son of the Church’; they were borne by Saint Louis, the royal
saint, and are typical of Christian royalty. Till the reign of Henry
VIII they appeared upon the royal banner of England. Their origin,
however, in spite of latter-day legends, was non-Christian, nor are
they distinctively lilies. The learned M. de Beaumont, who has made a
special study of the origins of the fleur-de-lys, or fleur-de-lis, as
he prefers to spell it, has thus summed up his researches:
1. Armorial bearings did not commence in France till after the first
Crusade.
2. It was in imitation of the Arabs and Persians that chivalry,
tourneys and coats of arms were adopted in Europe and France.
3. This flower, which we name the fleur-de-lis, is the symbol of
fecundity and royalty in ancient Egypt; it is also the sacred plant
and tree of life, adopted with the same symbolical significance by the
Assyrians and Persians, from whom it passed to Byzantium, to arrive at
last in the Teutonic countries bordering on the East. It came at the
same time to the Venetians, and the Lombards, the Spaniards and the
French, and this significant form ornamented sceptres and crowns, the
attributes of royalty.
4. When the laws of heraldry were at last established in France, after
the Crusades, this symbol became the arms of the Kings of France, who
entitled themselves _rois par excellence_. Later, the origin being
forgotten and lost, the Celtic root of the word _li_ was ignored by
the heralds. They regarded this symbolical ornament as the _lilium_
or garden lily, in itself a symbol of the Virgin, which for the most
Christian Kings of France must have been a powerful motive for its
adoption. Perhaps even a religious scruple may have been the cause
of this transformation of the heathen into the Christian symbol. It
was not till then that the heraldic writers, the greater part of whom
belonged to the Church, forced themselves to recognize in the heraldic
fleur-de-lys the form of the lilium, even though, in place of being
_or_ upon _azur_ and having three petals, it ought in that case to have
five petals and appear in _argent_.[172]
The monkish heralds found a very elaborate symbolism in the royal
shield of France. The lilies were of gold, not silver, because in
heraldry gold signifies the four kingly virtues, nobility, goodwill,
charity and magnanimity.
They are three in number because this number is complete as is the Holy
Trinity.... Also, the centre one signifies the Christian faith, that on
the right the clergy, that on the left the army. There was no end to
the hidden meanings.
‘_Enfin_,’ concludes Carlo Degrassalio of Carcassonne, ‘_ces trois
fleurs-de-lis d’or sont sur un écu d’azur, parceque, de même que Dieu,
le roi des rois, la puissance des puissances, a en quelque sorte pour
écu le bleu firmament, resplendissant d’astres d’or; de même le roi
de France, fils aîné de l’Eglise, porte pour la plus grande gloire du
Christ, l’écu le plus noble, écu sur lequel les lis d’or brillent comme
les astres sur un ciel serein._’[173]
Tradition says that the first appearance of the fleur-de-lys upon this
earth was at the baptism of King Clovis. King Clovis was married to
Clotilda, a Christian Princess of Burgundy, and her prayers having
obtained the victory for France at a critical moment, he in gratitude
became a Christian also. On the occasion of his baptism by Saint Rémi
an angel presented him with three heavenly lilies.
In the Bedford Missal,[174] presented to Henry VI when he was crowned
King of France, the legend is illustrated in miniature. The angel is
shown receiving the three lilies in Heaven. He descends to earth and
carries them to Saint Rémi, who reverently receives them in a napkin
and gives them to Queen Clotilda. Lower down in the picture Clotilda
presents the emblazoned shield bearing the three fleurs-de-lys to
her husband. This legend might seem disproved by the decoration of
fleurs-de-lys, which was already upon the great brazen bowl now in the
Louvre, known as the Font of King Clovis, had not recent archæological
investigation discovered the origin of the bowl to be neither Frankish
nor Christian, and the fleurs-de-lys prove merely that the vessel was
designed for royal use.
The confusion of the fleur-de-lys with the lily of Heaven and the
flower of the Virgin gave it a semi-religious value, which excused
its intrusion into the decoration of churches and church furniture.
Sometimes it was used entirely heraldically, as the indication of
the giver of a gift. It is used heraldically upon the silver shrine
of Saint Simeon at Zara, the gift of Louis the Great and his wife,
Elizabeth, where the fleur-de-lys of the coat of arms is repeated
throughout the entire decoration. Heraldically, yet with some sense
of the right placing of the flower which emblemizes purity, were the
fleurs-de-lys embroidered with the word _amor_ upon the tiny shoes
of the _Virgin de los Reyes_. The figure, which is still in Seville
Cathedral, was a gift from Saint Louis of France to his brother saint,
Ferdinand of Spain.
The flower is again heraldic upon the magnificent tomb of Robert the
Wise,[175] the patron of Giotto and Simone Martini, where it decorates
the background with fine effect, though it is perhaps too insistently
repeated on crowns, sceptres, brooches and the floriation of crosses;
but the constantly-recurring fleurs-de-lys in the architecture of
the Cistercian Brotherhood appear quite definitely as the flower of
the Virgin. She was the patron of the order, and their famous saint,
Bernard of Clairvaux--‘her own faithful Bernard’--devoted his life
to praising the ‘lily of the valley.’ Her impress is upon the stone
of the Cistercian abbeys of England and of France, where repeatedly
we find the ‘carved work of open lilies.’ But the Cistercians had no
monopoly of the symbol. Almost naturally the stone work of French
Gothic architecture seems to bud and break into the formal flower.
In the great Church of Albi each upspringing slender shaft ends in a
_fleur_, alternating with shields along the screen. In the rood-loft of
St Florentin, in the town of that name, fleurs-de-lys form the centre
of elaborate tracery, and in the rood-loft of the Madeleine at Troyes a
very beautiful crowned fleur-de-lys fills the panels of the surmounting
balustrade.
In the panel[176] designed for the tomb of Edward VI by Torregiano, and
now forming part of the altar above Henry VII’s tomb, the rose and the
lily meet in a charming Renaissance decoration, and the link between
the heraldic and the symbolical seems to be supplied, for the personal
badges of the king, the Tudor rose and the fleur-de-lys, are woven
together in flowing lines, till, losing heraldic stiffness and personal
application, they become the Rose of Love and the Lily of Purity, a fit
decoration for the altar of God.
But it was not in France and England only that the fleur-de-lys
was used as a symbol of royalty. In a Greek miniature of the tenth
century[177] fleurs-de-lys are scattered over the mantle of King David,
and Didron mentions that he saw a fleur-de-lys ornamentation of the
thirteenth century in the Church of Hecatompyli. The miniature was, of
course, painted before the lilies had appeared on the royal banner of
France, and the decoration at Hecatompyli would be drawn from Eastern
sources.
The most noble use of the fleur-de-lys is to express the majesty
of God. Floriated crowns as a symbol of Divine majesty were common
in French, Flemish and German art, but are seldom seen in Italy.
Most usually it is God the Father only who is so distinguished. In
a French miniature of the end of the fourteenth century,[178] where
the three persons are represented under human form, God the Father
wears the floriated crown, the other persons the cruciform halo. In a
stained glass window, with the figure of God the Father holding the
Crucifix,[179] He wears a tiara of five tiers, each decorated with the
fleur-de-lys.
Memling and his school, painting for the Court of Burgundy, held to
the French traditions, and God the Father in the ‘Coronation’ on the
shrine of St Ursula, God the Son in the ‘Christ surrounded by Angels’
in Antwerp, and the Virgin on the wings (outer) of the ‘Last Judgment’
at Danzig, all wear crowns ornamented with fleurs-de-lys.
In German art there are fewer crowns bearing the fleur-de-lys, the
crowns of both the Deity and the Virgin having usually the arched
imperial form. But very frequently towards the end of the fifteenth
century the rays of light, which in Italian art make a cruciform
bar across the halo of the Saviour, in Germany take the form of
fleurs-de-lys. They are particularly noticeable in ‘The Virgin and
Saint Anne with the Child’ of Hans Fries,[180] and in a rather more
elaborate form in the work of Wolgemut.[181]
There are two saints who have always had the right to wear the royal
lilies of France.
They are Saint Louis of France, in his lifetime Louis IX, and his
grand-nephew Louis, Bishop of Toulouse.
King Louis, the saintly soldier who brought to France the Crown of
Thorns and, to enshrine it, built the Sainte Chapelle, died in Crusade
before the walls of Tunis in 1270. Twenty-seven years later he was
canonized, and Giotto painted his portrait in Santa Croce.
Mr Gardner comments on this fresco:
‘St Louis the King (one whom Dante does not seem to have held in
honour), a splendid figure, calm and noble, in one hand the sceptre
and in the other the Franciscan cord, his royal robe besprinkled with
the golden lily of France over the armour of the warrior of the Cross,
his face absorbed in celestial contemplation. He is the Christian
realization of the Platonic philosopher king; “St Louis,” says Walter
Pater, “precisely because his whole being was full of heavenly vision,
in self-banishment from it for a while, led and ruled the French people
so magnanimously alike in peace and war.” Opposite him is St Louis of
Toulouse, with the royal crown at his feet; below are St Elizabeth of
Hungary, with her lap full of flowers, and, opposite to her, St Clare,
of whom Dante’s Piccarda tells so sweetly in the _Paradiso_--that lady
on high whom, “perfected life and lofty merit doth enheaven.”’[182]
Saint Clare carries a lily.
In the Prado there is a Holy Trinity by C. Coello, where Saint Louis
is placed opposite to Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, who holds a basket
of roses, and this grouping of the two royal saints is often found. St
Elizabeth was canonized before St Louis was born, but they are well
matched in piety, both of noble birth, both dying in the flower of
their age, and both devoted to their people’s welfare. There is a very
interesting figure of Saint Louis, intellectual, earnest and strong, in
the _Mariage Mystique_[183] of Jean Perréal.
Saint Louis of Toulouse was the grandson of Charles of Anjou, who was
suzerain of Florence for ten years. Perugia chose him as her patron
saint, and in Florence he was patron of the Parte Guelfa. He is easily
recognized by his mitre and the fleurs-de-lys upon his cope. There is
a statue of him by Donatello at Santa Croce, and pictures elsewhere by
Bonfigli, Simone Martini, Moretto and Cosimo Rosselli.
Perhaps the most sympathetic and individual portrait of him is that of
Bartolommeo Vivarini.[184] He carries book and crozier and his youthful
face is very sweet and earnest, though it has the set lips of the true
churchman. The cope is bordered with a large design of fleurs-de-lys.
Both these saints wear the fleur-de-lys to mark that they are members
of the Royal House of France. The purity which the lily symbolizes when
regarded as the flower of the Virgin is a secondary significance. Now
another holy one has joined them, who also, though of lowly birth, bore
the golden lilies. But for her they were the true lilies of maidenhood,
their form merely showing that the right to carry them on her banner
was the gift of a French king.
‘With a wreath woven by no mortal hand shall she (Jeanne d’Arc) at
Reims engarland happily the gardener of the Lily, named Charles,
son of Charles,’ prophesied Engélinde, the Hungarian seer, and at
the fulfilment Charles was not ungrateful. Since a woman cannot
heraldically bear arms, he granted to the brothers of the maid the
right to wear two of the royal lilies on their shield. The blazon was
_d’azur à la couronne royale d’or soutenue d’une épée d’argent croisée
et pommetée d’or en pal, cotoyée de deux fleurs-de-lis d’or_. They
were given at the same time (December 1429) the surname of _du lis_.
The sword has the blade ornamented with five fleurs-de-lys and is
apparently the famous one unearthed in the Church of St Catharine at
Fierbois, ‘decked with five flower-de-luces on each side.’[185] But
in the least doubtful of the many contemporary portraits of the Maid
(those in the collection of M. George Spetz) the fleurs-de-lys do not
appear. When questioned at her trial as to any supernatural power held
by her sword, she declared: ‘It was a rusty sword in the earth, with
five crosses on it, and I knew it through my voices.’[186]
The clergy of the Church of St Catharine, however, after finding the
sword by Jeanne’s directions, had had a scabbard made for it of crimson
velvet, embroidered with fleurs-de-lys in gold, and legend supported by
heraldry seems to have substituted the fleurs-de-lys of the scabbard
for the five crosses of the blade.
The device upon the banner was dictated to her by her patron saints,
Margaret and Catharine. It was of white linen, fringed with silk, and
embroidered with a figure of the Saviour holding a globe in His hands,
while an angel knelt on either side in adoration. _Jhesus Maria_ was
inscribed at the foot. A repetition of this banner recopied from age to
age is said to be preserved at Tours.
XIV
THE LILY OF THE ANNUNCIATION
There is one incident in the life of the Virgin Mary which is
particularly associated with lilies. It is the Annunciation.
The Annunciation was not often depicted before the twelfth
century, though there are instances of it on some early ivories,
on a sarcophagus at Ravenna of the fifth century, in the famous
sixth-century Syrian MS. of the Laurentian Library,[187] and among the
mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore.[188] During the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, while the veneration of the Virgin within the Catholic
Church steadily grew greater, the story of her life, as apart from
that of her Divine Son, appeared in sculpture and stained glass, but
still the Annunciation was a comparatively rare subject and simply
treated. Early in the fourteenth century, however, a whole flight of
announcing angels settled down over Italy, some drifting as far north
as Holland. We find them kneeling, standing, just alighting, often with
the wind of swift movement still in their garments and almost always on
the left hand of the picture, with the Virgin in the place of honour
on the right. The Annunciation, the announcing of the near approach
of ‘the dayspring from on high,’ which was to bring light and joy and
freedom to a world groping in the twilight of an imperfect revelation,
was an incident which particularly appealed to minds rejoicing in the
intellectual liberation of the Renaissance. It appealed, too, to the
joyous nature of the Florentines, who hated the sad and tragic aspects
of life, loving fresh and spring-like things and rather elaborate
simplicity. Pictures of the Annunciation multiplied, particularly
in Florence, which was just then evolving the school which was to
influence so powerfully the Western world’s pictorial conceptions of
the divine mysteries. And in the great majority of Annunciations we
find lilies, for in this incident of the Virgin’s life above all others
it was necessary to emphasize the purity which made the wonder of the
angel’s salutation.
The most characteristic treatment of the lily, as the lily of the
Annunciation, was to place it in a pot or vase. About the year 1291,
Cavallini, the mosaicist, was in Rome decorating the Church of S.
Maria in Trastevere, and beneath the great centre mosaic of the apse
he placed a series of scenes from the life of the Virgin. In the
Annunciation the Virgin is seated on a marble throne, which has broad,
table-like arms. On one arm there is a dish, apparently of fruit,
and on the other a vase filled with lilies. The vase may or may not
have been placed there definitely as a symbol, but as a detail--in
vulgar English phraseology--it caught on. We find it on the famous
carved candlestick of Gaeta,[189] worked by an unknown contemporary of
Niccola d’Apulia. It appears on an embroidered book-cover of English
work[190] attributed to the end of the thirteenth century, and is
cleverly squared out of the chequered background of a Netherlandish
music-book[191] of 1330.
The vase of lilies soon became a more or less elaborate detail in
numerous illuminations, carvings and paintings. The earliest of the
Flemish masters, Jan van Eyck,[192] Roger van der Weyden[193] and the
Master of Flémalle,[194] make use of it. It was particularly popular in
Florence.
The Florentines loved the Annunciation as a subject and were charmed by
the easy, graceful symbolism of the lilies. They were also, doubtless,
deeply gratified, as citizens and as churchmen, to identify the lily,
their city’s badge, as the flower of the Virgin.
In Spain, even before there was any native school of painting, the vase
of lilies passed from being a detail to be an almost essential factor
in every representation of the Annunciation, and early in the fifteenth
century we find it standing detached as the special and distinguishing
attribute of the Virgin. In the insignia of the Order of the Lily of
Aragon, founded in 1410 by Ferdinand, Duke of Pegnafiel, the chain
was composed of alternate griffins and pots of three lilies, and Ford
mentions that when the Regent Fernando recovered Antequera from the
Moors he gave the city for arms the badge of his military order, which
was _La Terraza_, ‘the vase,’ the pot of lilies of the Virgin.[195]
The symbol of the vase had come to the Netherlands and Germany while
they were still pictorially inarticulate; but when they at length found
means of expression, the Germans slowly, the Flemings in a splendid
burst with the van Eycks, it was their earliest and their favourite
symbol. Memling places it also beside his enthroned Madonnas, and
it is never omitted from an Annunciation except on the occasions,
comparatively rare in the North, when Gabriel holds a branch of lilies
in his hand instead of the herald’s wand. Then there is no vase, for
there is no necessity to repeat the symbol.
But in Italy itself the vase of lilies, though popular, was never
considered essential. No vase decorates the loggias where sit the
Virgins of Giotto,[196] Botticelli,[197] Melozzo da Forlì,[198] or
Leonardo da Vinci,[199] though Giotto introduces it with identical
symbolism in the Visitation. Indeed many of the most typical painters
of both the early and the high Renaissance, Taddeo di Bartolo,[200]
Spinello Aretino,[201] Fra Angelico,[202] Lorenzo di Credi[203] and
Raphael,[204] banish lilies entirely, both from the vase and from
the angel’s hand. Ghirlandaio places a vase beside the Virgin’s
reading-desk, but alters its significance by filling it with roses,
daisies and jasmine, the flowers of love, innocence and divine
hope.[205]
On the other hand, some of the Florentine artists who had a special
fondness for the flower, notably Fra Filippo Lippi,[206] and the
Della Robbias,[207] use both, so doubling the symbolism; but it was
more correct, where there was a vase of lilies, to show the angel
with folded hands or with a branch of olive, or, as in the beautiful
Annunciation of Jan van Eyck at St Petersburg, holding the herald’s
wand. In Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation at Berlin, where Gabriel carries a
magnificent bunch of lilies, there is no vase.
According to Northern tradition the true Annunciation lily should have
no stamens, but this was a refinement of symbolism largely ignored by
artists, who were discouraged probably by the insipid appearance of
the flower when deprived of its gold-dusted centre. In Italy it was
entirely neglected, but some painters of the sixteenth century have
placed a tiny flame in the centre of each lily-cup; a burning flame,
according to Vasari,[208] signifying eternal love.
There seems to have been sometimes a doubt in the minds of the Northern
artists as to which was really the Madonna’s flower, the _lilium
candidum_ or the iris, which so closely resembled in form the golden
lilies on the royal shields of France and England.
Memling, who had painted the fleur-de-lys heraldically for the
Duke of Burgundy,[209] seemed unable to decide, and in the vase of
the Annunciation,[210] as well as in the vase which stands beside
the enthroned Madonna,[211] he has placed an iris among the white
lilies. Or possibly, with a deeper symbolism, taking the iris as the
fleur-de-lys, the ancient symbol of royalty, which, with its three
united petals, recalls also the nature of the Holy Trinity, he
has striven to interpret florally the message of the angel, that God
incarnate would spring from a lily-like virginity. It may not be
without design that the iris in the Annunciation is overshadowed by
the lilies, while in the picture where the Holy Child sits upon His
Mother’s lap, the iris in the vase (in this case marked with the sacred
monogram) has sprung upwards beyond the white lilies.
[Illustration:
_Pinturicchio_ _Photo Alinari_
THE ROSE OF DIVINE LOVE RISING FROM A PRECIOUS VESSEL
(Borgia Apartment, Vatican)]
[Illustration:
_Pesello_ _Photo Alinari_
THE ROYAL LILY SPRINGING FROM A HUMBLE VASE
(S. Spirito, Florence)]
In the Church of S. Spirito in Florence there is an altar-piece of the
Annunciation which was at one time attributed to Botticelli and is now
usually ascribed to Pesello. The vase, placed midway between the two
figures, holds three purple irises. Perhaps the artist saw a symbol of
the Holy Trinity in the three royal lilies growing on one stalk (though
the Church held a belief in the incarnation of the Trinity in unity to
be heresy), in which case the colour, the purple of humility, would be
appropriate.
More difficult to explain is the symbolism of the vase of lilies in the
Annunciation upon the cover of a psalter, in fine English needlework
of the thirteenth century.[212] The book belonged to Anne, daughter of
Sir Simon Felbrigge, and if the date given, the end of the thirteenth
century, is correct, it is a very early instance of the Virgin’s vase
of lilies. The figures have much dignity and sweep of line, but the
lily, which is a fleur-de-lys in form, is red! Possibly in the garden
of the country convent where embroidery was worked no liliums grew. The
nun would therefore take the only lilies she knew, those of the royal
standard. For colour she would remember that they surpassed Solomon
in his glory. But, even so, the red lily argues an insensitiveness to
symbolic values scarcely to be found among the Latins.
The original symbolism of the vase of lilies was simple. It signified
the purity of the Maid of Nazareth, she of whom it was prophesied ‘A
Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son.’ She does not hold the flower in
her hand as do the virgin martyrs who preserved their purity through
storm and stress, but it grows naturally beside her and merely typifies
her girlhood. In the first half of the fifteenth century this seems
to have been the invariable intention. But in the later half of that
century the meaning was developed and amplified. Distinction was
made between the vase and the flower it contained. In France and in
Spain, where religious iconography is found in architectural detail
rather than in pictorial decoration, the favourite arrangement of the
Annunciation was to place the vase midway between the Virgin and the
angel, a composition which from its equal balance was most decorative.
The Virgin with drooping head and falling veil, Gabriel with curved
wings, both leaning forward towards the central vase of lilies, formed
an ideal filling for a lunette or the spandrels of an arch, and the
simplicity of the group made it particularly suitable for sculpture,
both in wood and stone. It is the central motive of many of the great
carved and gilded reredos in Spain and of the simpler stone altars
of France. The central vase of lilies had, however, a tendency to
become ever larger, till, from being a detail, it became the important
centre-point, and in some French Annunciations of the sixteenth century
the uninstructed heathen would merely see two figures worshipping,
apparently, a large vase of flowers.
In two Italian pictures, that of doubtful origin already mentioned
which is in S. Spirito, and the Annunciation of Pinturicchio in the
Vatican, where the large vase is placed exactly in the centre of the
composition, the flowers within the vase are not white lilies; they
are iris, the royal lily, in one case, and roses, the flower of divine
love, in the other. Therefore the flower-filled vase was no longer
strictly the symbol of the Virgin’s purity. A change, hinted at when
Memling placed the iris among the lilies, had come about, for the
flower which was the attribute of Jesus Christ was now rising from the
vase and distinction had been made between the vase and the flower
which it contained. Christ is the mystic flower springing from a lowly
vessel. He is the flower, Mary the vase. The royal purple lily or the
rose of love are, therefore, as appropriate a filling for the vase as
was the lily, and there is no incongruity in any attitude of homage
towards the vase on the part of the Virgin. But since the compound
emblem was the emblem of the Immaculate Conception, naturally it is
most often the lily of purity which fills the vase.
In the Annunciation of Albert Dürer’s ‘Smaller Passion’[213] the lily
growing in its humble earthen pot undeniably refers to the perfect
sinlessness of the soul which was yet to be born, for the flowers are
still each tightly folded in its bud, while in the culminating scene
of the series, where the Saviour sits in judgment, the lily, with each
calyx fully expanded, is shown with the sword of justice behind His
head.
Northern symbolism, always deeper and more complicated than that of
the South, required that the vase which contained the lilies should
be transparent, thus indicating the perfect purity of the body which
enshrined the soul of perfect innocence. ‘In so far that the glass
allows all surroundings to shine through without being itself harmed,
it has become the symbol of the Immaculate Conception. Therefore in
pictures of the Annunciation a blossoming lily stalk in a transparent
glass is placed at the feet of the Virgin.’[214]
The same idea is traced in the thirteenth-century Christmas carol:
‘As the sunbeam through the glass
Passeth but not staineth,
So the Virgin as she was,
Virgin still remaineth.’[215]
And somewhat akin is the mirror which occasionally appears, held by an
attendant _putto_ in a Spanish ‘Immaculate Conception.’
The transparent vase is not often seen in Italian Annunciations, for
it was usual in Italy to place the stalk of lilies, a complete symbol
in itself of virginity, in the angel’s hand, and there was no need to
double the symbolism; but the painters of the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, in pictures of Mary with the Child or in a Holy
Family, use the crystal vase frequently as an attribute of the Infant
Saviour, filling it with those flowers which express His virtues, the
violet of humility, the rose or carnation of divine love, the daisy of
innocence, or the jasmine of heavenly hope.[216]
The actual number of blooms upon the lily stalk has also its
significance. Some think they should be three in number, two fully
opened flowers and one in bud, forming what Rossetti terms the
‘Tripoint.’
‘I’ the centre is the Tripoint: perfect each
Except the second of its points, to teach
That Christ is not yet born.’
Several of the masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
painted the two flowers with the bud or three fully-opened blooms, but
more often, arguing possibly that this lily was the emblem of God the
Son when made Man, and not of the Holy Trinity, they painted simply
a natural lily plant with clustering buds and one or many blossoms,
taking the whole plant as the symbol.
Sometimes the vase holds three distinct stalks of lilies with a single
bloom on each, an arrangement which was suggested, it is said, by the
Dominican legend of the doubting Master.
A Master of the Dominicans, unable to believe in the stainlessness of
the Blessed Virgin, went to ask help of the saintly brother Egidius.
‘O Master of the Preachers,’ said Egidius, on meeting him, ‘Virgo ante
partum.’ He struck the ground with his staff and from the spot there
immediately sprang a lily. ‘O doubting Master,’ he said again, ‘Virgo
in partu.’ He struck the earth and again a lily sprang. He spoke a
third time, ‘O my brother, Virgo post partum,’ a third lily bloomed,
and the Master of the Dominicans doubted no more.
A detached vase holding three lily blooms occurs frequently as the
motive of an architectural decoration executed in low relief, one
beautiful example being above the door of the Badia Church of Florence.
But it is not confined to buildings of Dominican origin, and the
arrangement seems to owe its popularity more to its symmetry than to
any supporting legend. In pictures, where greater freedom of treatment
is desirable, the lilies are one, two, three or more--there is no rule.
XV
THE LILY OF THE ANGEL GABRIEL
In the majority of the Annunciations which were painted during the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the archangel Gabriel carries a
lily. In the earliest representations of the subject he has simply
a herald’s wand, which in later Byzantine art usually terminated in
a fleur-de-lys, the ancient symbol of royalty, or in a more or less
elaborate cross. More rarely he carries a scroll on which are inscribed
the words of his message.
In the early Sienese school he still holds the herald’s wand,[217] or
brings to the Virgin a branch of olive,[218] the symbol of peace and
goodwill. Once at least he holds a branch of laurel,[219] the meed of
those who excel, and sometimes the palm[220] of victory over sin.
In the famous Annunciation of Simone Martini,[221] Gabriel, who carries
a branch of olive, is also olive-crowned, and this seems to be the
proper symbolism of the subject. The messenger of God, crowned with
peace, brings the olive branch of reconciliation between God and man
to the Virgin, beside whom stands a vase filled with the lilies which
symbolize her purity. The dove hovers above.
It has not been decided which artist was the first to place the
stalk of lilies in the angel Gabriel’s hand, and first had come the
lovely symbol of the vase of lilies by the Virgin’s side. But in the
Annunciation, which forms part of Simone Martini’s polyptych in the
Museum of Antwerp, we find the herald’s wand just turning to a lily.
Professor A. Venturi, in his magnificent _History of Italian Art_,
describes it. The angel ‘holds a lily with a long stem, which is all
white. Thus the stick or sceptre of ivory, which we have already
seen in Duccio’s picture, has become partly stick, partly lily-stem.
With Duccio it is still the sceptre with three points, that Gabriel,
messenger of God, holds as sign of authority. But look how the three
points change themselves to lily-buds, and open the corolla, as the
archangel extends the candid flower towards the Virgin, who was saluted
by David and the Fathers as “The lily of the valleys.” The poetry of
Christian art thus overthrows mediæval materialism and lavishes flowers
on fair likenesses of Mary.’
In this Annunciation we find the three types of lilies used in art--the
lily growing freely and naturally in a vase beside the Virgin; the
stiff lily, half conventionalized in the angel’s hand; and the
fleurs-de-lys, wholly conventional, which ornament the arms of the
Virgin’s seat.
Simone Martini died in 1344, and by 1359, the date of its completion,
every Florentine artist must have seen the wonderful tabernacle raised
by Orcagna in Or San Michele, and every artist in Italy must have heard
descriptions of the shrine.
‘Che passa di bellezza, s’io ben recolo,
Tutti gli altri che son dentro del secolo.’[222]
On a panel of the Tabernacle there is an Annunciation which was the
most beautiful representation of the subject so far given to the
world, and the kneeling angel with the sweeping wings carries in his
left hand a heavy stalk of _lilium candidum_.
It is interesting to trace the evolution of the straight smooth
stick which the angel held in the earliest representations of the
Annunciation into the natural branch of lilies carried by the typical
Announcing Angel of Christian art. First we find upon the wand the
three-pointed fleur-de-lys, which from the days of the Assyrians
had ornamented the royal sceptre. The heavenly herald bore a wand
ornamented with the royal symbol when he brought a message from the
Lord of the Universe to the Maiden of the House of David, who was to be
the Mother of His Son. Gradually the fleur-de-lys gained some likeness
to the natural lily. The sceptre was made of ivory. It was white. Two
leaves appeared wreathing the stick. Midway in the transformation are
the lilies carried by the lovely choir of seated angels in a picture
by Guariento.[223] Each angel holds in his left hand an orb and in
the right a straight lily stem with leaves growing naturally up its
whole length. At the top is a single flower, which, seen in profile,
has the shape of the fleur-de-lys. Simone Martini indicates the
blossom’s cup-like form. With Orcagna we find the fully-realized stem
of lilies. One unidentified master of the fourteenth century[224] went
even further in botanical fidelity, and paints the bulb and pendent
rootlets, though, strangely enough, he at the same time keeps to the
old convention and places a scroll in the hand of both Madonna and
angel.
Meanwhile, in 1344, Ambrogio di Lorenzetti had painted an
Annunciation[225] in which the angel, crowned with olive, holds
the palm branch with which the ancient Romans were accustomed to
salute a conqueror. The symbol of the palm was used also by Spinello
Aretino,[226] a pupil of Giotto, and was supported by Dante, who
describes the angel Gabriel as:
‘He that bore the palm
Down unto Mary, when the Son of God
Vouchsafed to clothe Him in terrestrial weeds.’
But it did not come into general use in this connection, and chiefly
for the reason that the palm became consecrated to representations
of the last scenes of the Virgin’s life. The _Legenda Aurea_,
when recounting how the angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin her
approaching death, states: ‘He (Gabriel) gave her a branch of palm from
Paradise, which he commanded should be borne before her bier.’
The palm was, therefore, a necessary detail in this scene, and it was
probably to avoid confusion between these two separate appearances of
the angel to the Virgin that the palm has been reserved entirely for
the last Annunciation. The religious sentiment of the age forbade the
portrayal of any sign of decrepitude in the Virgin even at the hour of
her death, and except for the substitution of the palm for the lily
and the reversal of the usual places of the figures, the Virgin being
placed on the left and the angel on the right, it would be difficult
to distinguish the scene where the Virgin receives the news of her
approaching death, from that in which her approaching motherhood is
announced to her.
It became the general rule, then, for Gabriel, as the angel of the
Annunciation of the Saviour’s birth, to carry a lily. But the rule
was not invariable. The early Flemish artists, half painters, half
craftsmen, loved to depict the delicately-chiselled gold of jewelled
sceptres topped by an elaborate fleur-de-lys or the cross-surmounted
orb which signified the sovereignty of Christ upon earth. These
precious sceptres accorded well with the opulent and prosaic comfort
of the surroundings in which they set the sacred drama, and reflect
the spirit of the Northern mystics. The clear detailed visions of
Saint Matilda, the inspired nun of Saxony, which occurred during the
last half of the thirteenth century, and whose imagery has distinctly
influenced Northern religious art, fairly scintillate with mystical
gems. Even the roses and the lilies, symbols, she tells us, of divine
love and innocence, which she saw in her glimpses of Heaven, were
embroidered in gold and silver thread upon rich stuffs or cloth of gold.
Italian art had different traditions. It began with the utter
simplicity of Giotto and Fra Angelico, though the Byzantine love of
rich trappings still lingered in Siena. As Florentine art progressed
it did indeed become more elaborate, till its inclination to
magnificence was severely checked by Savonarola, whose influence on
art has usually been wrongly estimated. He was no blind iconoclast,
though without doubt objects of great artistic worth were burnt in his
famous holocaust of ‘vanities,’ which finished the Carnival of 1497.
On the contrary, as Senator Pasquale Villari points out, he was always
surrounded by the best artists of his century. Fra Bartolommeo, for
four years after his death, did not touch a brush, such was his grief.
The Della Robbias were devoted to him; two received the habit from
his hands. Lorenzo di Credi was his partisan; Cronaca ‘would speak
of nothing but the things of Savonarola.’ Botticelli illustrated his
works, and Michael Angelo was a most constant listener to his preaching.
He spoke plainly to the painters from his pulpit. The beauty of the
Divinity, of the Virgin and the Saints was the beauty of holiness, not
of outward adornment of fine raiment, gold and jewels, and ‘the beauty
of man or woman in so far as it approaches to the primal beauty, so is
it great and more perfect.’[227]
We read of the Virgin that by her great beauty the men who saw her were
astonished (stupefatti).
... ‘Do you believe that she went about in the manner in which you
paint her? I say to you that she went dressed as a poor woman!’[228]
But he who taught for choice beneath the damask rose in the centre
of his cloister admitted roses and lilies where he denounced rubies
and pearls. Flowers alone survived as emblems or as votive decoration
even after the puritanical current towards the ideal set in motion
by the great Dominican became merged in the over-sweeping wave of
classicism--and even those late artists who dispensed with every other
convention for the expression of the abstract, placed a lily in the
angel Gabriel’s hand.
Modern art has adopted the tradition and in the ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’
of Rossetti[229] the wingless angel carries a stalk of lilies. There
is also a white lily embroidered upon the strip of material which is
stretched upon an embroidery frame at the foot of Mary’s bed.
The angel brings the lily to the Virgin in recognition of her perfect
purity, the transcendent quality by which alone she found favour with
God. Through it tremendous honour came upon her, and by the marvellous
nature of that honour she was eternally bound to her virginity.
‘Mary Virgin, ever a Virgin.’ In a very charming picture by Filippo
Lippi,[230] Mary, with bent head, and fully understanding the grave
significance of the gift, reverently accepts the lily which the angel
Gabriel places in her hand.
In another Annunciation by Filippo Lippi,[231] a second angel, peeping
through the entry behind Gabriel, also carries a lily, but it is a
fancy which seems to have no particular significance and rather impairs
the dignity of the subject.
So constantly did painters and sculptors of the Annunciation place
a lily in the archangel Gabriel’s hand that it gradually became his
special attribute, which he wore, as a knight did his crest, to
distinguish him from other angels and archangels.
In the apocryphal Book of Tobit is the story of Tobias, who was
accompanied by the angel Raphael on the famous journey which he took
to recover his father’s money, a journey in which he not only caught
the fish whose gall was to cure his father’s blindness, but also found
a wife. It is the only subject from the Apocrypha which now decorates
Christian churches, and owes this grace to the force with which
the story, despite its fantastic details, illustrates the constant
watchfulness of Heaven over those still on their earthly pilgrimage.
In the fifteenth century it was a favourite subject for a votive
picture on behalf of one about to take a journey. The young man, rather
helpless in his youth and inexperience, protected by the strong, wise
guardian angel, was a group painted with the greatest pleasure, and
the fascination of ideal, sexless beauty, of curved, sweeping wings,
tempted to an amplification of the subject, and though the Book of
Tobit mentions one archangel only--
‘... The affable archangel
Raphael; the sociable spirit that deign’d
To travel with Tobias, and secured
His marriage with the seven-times wedded maid--’[232]
there suddenly sprang up in Florence a short-lived fashion for
depicting Tobias with three archangels.
There are two of these pictures in Florence;[233] others at
Verona,[234] Turin[235] and Munich.[236] In each Michael is armed,
Raphael grasps Tobias by the hand, and Gabriel carries a branch of
lilies.
But the four figures in a row make an awkward composition, and
stiffness is avoided at the expense of dignity. A mincing angel, too
conscious of his pretty wings and daintily-held lily, is the Gabriel of
the best known of these pictures, attributed of late years to Botticini.
[Illustration:
_Jörg Brue_
THE COLUMBINE OF THE SEVEN GIFTS
(Berlin)]
[Illustration:
_The Master of Flémalle_ _Photo Hanfstängl_
SAINT BARBARA WITH THE ROYAL LILY
(Prado)]
The lily is, of course, here used non-symbolically, merely to
distinguish one archangel from another, and for the same reason that
Michael is given the sword and frequently the scales for the weighing
of souls, Raphael the traveller’s staff and gourd, or, when with
Tobias, a small box. The angel Gabriel’s primary function is to be
the herald of God, as it is Michael’s to lead the hosts of Heaven,
and Raphael’s to guide the straying. Therefore Gabriel carries the
herald’s wand, now developed to a lily, Michael the sword, and Raphael
the staff.
Thus Gabriel, when in company with other archangels and angels,
carries the lily to establish his identity, but where, as in a
Coronation[237] or an Enthroned Madonna, he stands with Saint Michael
guarding the throne, he usually holds also a scroll with ‘AVE MARIA’
upon it, showing that the main function of the lily is to proclaim the
spotlessness of the Virgin.
A rather charming treatment of the Annunciation lily, which originated
in Germany, is to strew the lily heads upon the floor. They then have
the appearance of having fallen from Heaven in a shower, like those
falling roses, symbols of divine love, which were so often painted
by the artists of Italy and Spain. ‘The Master of the Sterzinger
Altar’[238] introduces seven of these lily blooms and buds, snapped
off short, and with only an inch or two of stalk, into his fine
Annunciation painted in 1458, and, satisfied with these, he uses lilies
neither in a vase nor in the angel’s hand. Other artists of his day
liked the fancy well, but wished to keep the mystic vase, so, to avoid
doubling the symbol, they turned the fallen flowers to roses, or roses
and carnations, symbols of the divine favour which had fallen upon the
maid. It was a graceful exposition of the underlying meaning of the
scene, symbolically right and delightful in pictorial effect.
XVI
THE FLOWERS OF THE DIVINITY
The only growing thing which is used to represent the Trinity in Unity
is the trefoil or shamrock. Saint Patrick is said to have plucked from
the ground a leaf of shamrock and by it illustrated to the heathen
Irish the mystery of the Triune Godhead. Architectural details, and
more especially windows, based upon the trefoil’s form, are common in
Gothic churches. In pictorial art it is rather unusual as an emblem,
but Michael Angelo, who so rarely used symbolical detail, paints the
triple-leaved plant and no other leaf or flower in the foreground of
his Holy Family.[239]
But though the trefoil is the only direct floral emblem of the Trinity,
distinct reference to it is often found in the triple grouping of
the flowers which are the attributes of the Saviour. For instance,
the three carnations of divine love in the crystal vase before the
Infant Christ in Hugo van der Goes’ ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’;[240]
the three lilies (one in bud) which the angel holds in Crivelli’s
‘Annunciation’;[241] and the three irises in the Annunciation of
Pesello.[242]
There is no plant or flower used as the emblem of God the Father. From
time to time the Hebrew metaphor of the Burning Bush has been used
pictorially to indicate His presence; but as early as the fifth century
this image was appropriated to express the purity of the Virgin Mother,
enveloped but not consumed by the divine love.
In the Catacombs and on many mediæval crucifixes the Person of God the
Father is indicated by a hand issuing from the clouds and holding a
wreath of laurel, palm or olive. But the wreath in this case is not the
attribute of the Divine Father, but the attribute of him above whose
head the wreath is held. In the Catacombs it is the martyr’s crown; on
the crucifix it is Christ’s crown of victory over sin.
As already mentioned, the lily of purity and the olive branch of peace
are occasionally used as the attributes of God the Holy Ghost. As His
direct emblem the dove only is employed, since Scripture states that
He descended in ‘the form of a dove.’ Sometimes in French manuscripts
of the fourteenth century He is represented in human form, but such
representations are seldom found elsewhere.
Poetry and art have enwreathed the entire life of Jesus Christ with
flowers.
‘The Annunciation was the festival of early spring. Christ, whose birth
was foretold by Gabriel, was a flower that blossomed from the stem
of Jesse; His Mother, to whom the imagery of the Song of Solomon was
applied, was a flower of the fields and a “lily of the valley.” And the
place where the Annunciation occurred had a name, Nazareth, which in
Hebrew, according to an old but incorrect interpretation, means flower.
Such a meeting of associations was naturally not left unutilized by
the theological authors. It was often set forth in sermons how the
promise of the birth of God as man was connected with the spring’s
promise of flowers and fruit. S. Bernard in particular worked out the
flower symbolism of the Annunciation in poetic and ingenious conceits.
The flower, he said, had been willing, at the time of flowering, to
be born of a flower in a flower--_i.e._, Jesus permitted Himself to
be announced to Mary at Nazareth in the spring: “Flos nasci voluit de
flore, in flore, et floris tempore.”’[243]
So we find a stem of lilies or a vase of flowers as the symbol of His
miraculous birth, and on the morning of His nativity rejoicing angels
carried olive branches as they sang of peace on earth and goodwill
towards men. A helpless Infant, He lay upon the ground to receive the
Adoration of His Mother and of angels, among roses of love and lilies
of purity, or in grass thick with the daisies, violets and strawberries
which told of His innocence, humility and righteousness.
As a boy, growing perhaps to a consciousness of His mission, in Spain
He is found with thorny roses, wounding Himself sometimes with the
thorns of grief and suffering springing from His divine love itself.
Early devotional art left Christ’s life with its miracles and parables
and passed to His Passion. For the entry into Jerusalem there is
the palm of victory and the olive branch of peace. In the Ecce Homo
He wears the Crown of Thorns, and the reed as a sceptre is placed in
His hand. For the Crucifixion Signorelli painted below the Cross many
pleasant flowers, among which are noticeable the violet and daisy.
But the Northern schools reserved for this scene the bitter herbs and
flowers, the willow, dandelion and thistle. These weeds, carefully
chosen and painted with marvellous minuteness, fill the foreground in
the Crucifixion by an unnamed German master in the National Gallery.
In the last scenes of all of the divine tragedy there is no symbol but
the Crown of Thorns, and to the Resurrection no flower is specially
dedicated. But in the Thomas Altar,[244] by the Master of the
Bartholomew Altar, the newly-risen Christ is shown, and round His feet,
upon the marble step, are lying blossoms of violets and daisies and
seven heads of the holy columbine.
The passion flower does not appear in art before the seventeenth
century. It was unknown in Europe before the Spanish conquest of South
America, and it is said that when the Jesuits brought home reports of
the miraculous flower bearing the insignia of the Passion, which grew
from tree to tree in the forests of the new land, their tale was first
received as a pious invention. But the plant itself at length arrived,
and early in the eighteenth century Francesco Trevisani painted a
delightful little picture[245] less noticed than it deserves to be.
The Virgin, who is very sweet and gentle, both in pose and expression,
sits sewing beside a table on which is a vase of roses and lilies. The
little Christ, who has apparently just run in from the garden, points
out to His Mother, with a most childlike gesture, the little thorny
crown upon the passion flower which He holds in His hand. The picture,
which is not unlike the work of Andrea del Sarto in miniature, is
wonderfully attractive.
XVII
THE FLOWERS OF THE VIRGIN
There were many flowers used by the early writers as similes of the
Virgin.
‘Thou art the myrtle and the blooming rose of Paradise,
Thou art the fairness of heaven, and
The feast-day of our hearts,’
wrote Saint Petrus Damiani in the eleventh century.
In Saint Bernard we read:
‘Mary is the violet of humility, the lily of chastity and the rose of
charity.’
Conrad von Würtzburg compares her to the balsam of purest perfume,
the fairest among flowers, the cedar of Lebanon, the cypress of Zion,
fennel and mint, the white lily, the early flowering almond, the
healing mandrake, the musk-flower, the evergreen myrtle, the low nard,
the thornless rose in the dew of heaven, the noble frankincense and
the hidden violet, and further addresses her as
‘A living Paradise
Of grandly coloured flowers.’[246]
But though poets, and particularly German poets, ranged widely through
the fields in their search for blossoms which by their beauty or by
their healing virtues were fit to symbolize the Virgin, the early
artists painted very few. In those mystical Enclosed Gardens which so
charmed the Germans of the fifteenth century, only a few plants appear.
The lily, which is often the lily of the valley, the rose, the violet,
and the strawberry, are the most usual. Later the iris, the royal lily,
was added, and sometimes the seven-blossomed columbine. Occasionally
in Italy the jasmine and the daisy are also found in the vase beside
her, but all other flowers of the garden and field, the tulip, anemone,
ranunculus, primrose, daffodil, dahlia, etc., were rigidly excluded.
It will be noticed that, with the exception of the rose, all the
flowers of the Virgin are white or blue, her own colours. An
exception, which is unique, is the golden sunflower springing from her
halo on a twelfth-century window in the Church of St Rémi at Reims, and
even that is not exclusively hers, since Saint John, on the other side,
bears the same flower. White and blue are the two colours which are
held most sacred in the Christian Church. White, symbol of the Supreme
Being and of the Eternal Truth, is used in the ornaments for the feast
of Our Lord and of the Virgin, for it announces loving-kindness,
virginity and charity.[247] Blue is the symbol of chastity, innocence
and candour. Only one yellow flower is used symbolically, and that only
in scenes from the Passion, by artists of the early Flemish and German
schools. It is the dandelion, and its significance is, apparently,
bitterness of grief.
The white lily, which symbolizes purity, is found chiefly in pictures
of the Annunciation, but it has been introduced in many other scenes
from the life of the Virgin. In the first exhibited painting by
Rossetti, entitled ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,’[248] the Virgin, in
grey robes, is seated at a curiously-shaped frame embroidering a white
lily upon a ground of red material. The flower she is copying grows
in a vase beside her and an angel with rose-coloured wings waters it.
St Anne stands near, and in the background Joachim trims a trellised
vine upon which the Holy Dove is perched. In the ‘_Ecce Ancilla
Domini_’[249] of Rossetti, this same strip of embroidery, now finished,
hangs beside the bed.
The older artists paint no lily in the early scenes of the Virgin’s
life; it first appears at the Annunciation, where it was used so
repeatedly that it became in itself the symbol of the miraculous
birth of Our Lord. Giotto brings it forward in the ‘Visitation.’[250]
Elizabeth, hurrying from the house to meet the Virgin, passes beneath a
portico on which blooms a large vase of lilies.
There are endless pictures representing the Virgin seated with the
Holy Child, in which a vase of lilies is placed as a votive offering
before her feet, or lilies are held by attendant angels. One of the
earliest of these pictures is the ‘Enthroned Madonna’[251] of Giotto.
Two angels offer golden vases filled with lilies and roses. The angels
have searched Paradise for its most precious flowers and have chosen
those which symbolize purity and divine love. As the symbol of divine
love the roses are very appropriately mixed with the lilies in the
vase which Ghirlandaio[252] places on the lowest step of the Madonna’s
throne. He has also added the starry wild white campion which closely
resembles jasmine, a flower never definitely accorded to the Queen of
Heaven by the symbolists of the Church, but its clear starlike form
bringing to mind both her title _Stella Maris_ and the starry crown
described by Saint John, painters frequently use it, and white flowers
of the same shape, as her attribute.
But the appearance of the jasmine in the Madonna pictures may in part
be owing to some confusion between the jasmine and the myrtle, for the
latter was quite definitely one of the Virgin’s flowers and is even
used when addressing her in metaphor.
‘O myrtle tree of Paradise
So richly hung with fruit.’[253]
Dr Anselm Saltzer, O.S.B., writes: ‘The Greeks and Romans held the
myrtle to be the symbol of beauty, youth and marriage, because of its
delightful perfume, its evergreen leaves, white blossoms and aromatic
berries. In connection with Mary, the myrtle serves as a figure of her
purity and other virtues as well as of her influence over the unruly
impulses of the human soul.’[254]
Francesco Franciabigio[255] places a vase of single white roses at the
Virgin’s feet. Double roses, pink or red, are the symbol of divine
love, the love of Christ for His Church upon earth, and the white
single roses might be the symbol of the passionless love of the ‘_Mater
Consolatrix_.’
These flowers, placed in vases before the Virgin, are usually
significant and appropriate, but they are really more votive than
symbolical. The Latins had brought to the shrine of Venus the myrtle
and roses, the apples and poppies that were sacred to her, and painters
of Central Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the
same desire to present and sacrifice to their Lady the flowers which
were by association peculiarly hers, painted roses and lilies carefully
and beautifully in the foreground of her pictures. It was their gift to
the Madonna, as the paper roses on so many modern altars and the wild
flowers on the wayside shrines are also gifts.
In Northern Italy, particularly among those who studied in the school
of Squarcione, fruit took the place of the votive flowers, and is laid
before the Madonna and the Child, or hung in garlands across the upper
part of the picture.
The painters of the Italian Renaissance, in spite of diligent classical
study, were probably quite unconscious of this survival of paganism in
their work. But the ancient traditions of the soil did crop up from
time to time, in the same way that traces of the Norse conception of
Heaven as a magnificent big-game hunt appear occasionally beneath the
symbolism of Christian mediæval art in Germany.
North of the Alps, where the pre-Christian sacrifices had usually run
with blood, there was no inherited love of floral offerings, and we
seldom find these votive vases or wreaths.
The Madonna attributed to Mabuse in the Prado has a large vase of roses
placed directly below her, but as a rule in Northern art the flowers
are introduced strictly as symbols to recall some aspect or function of
the Virgin or of her Divine Son.
In an ‘Adoration’ the surrounding angels bring their roses and their
lilies in tribute to the sinless Child. As Saint Mectilda says:
‘The lily figures His innocence and the rose His invincible
patience.’[256]
Where the Virgin is seated enthroned, surrounded by saints and angels,
even though the Holy Child is upon her knee, all symbols except that
which the Child holds in His hand refer again to her.
It is rare, however, that, when holding the Child, she carries her own
attribute herself. Usually the symbols, flowers or fruit, are held by
angels or laid beside her throne, but in the large ‘Enthroned Madonna’
of Signorelli,[257] a painter who showed some originality in his use
of symbols, Mary encircles the Child with her right arm and in her left
hand holds a handsome stalk of lilies. That the flower refers to the
wonder of her own purity in conjunction with her motherhood, and not to
the Child’s sinlessness, is proved by the words on the scroll of the
Prophet Isaiah, who stands below gazing up at her with rapture:
‘Behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son.’
Vasari says of this work:[258] ‘In his old age he painted a picture for
the brotherhood of San Girolamo in Arezzo, partly at the cost of Messer
Niccolò Gamurrini, doctor of laws, and auditor of the Ruota, whose
portrait, taken from life, is in the picture; he is kneeling before the
Madonna, to whose protection he is recommended by Saint Nicholas. In
the same work are figures of Saint Donatus and Saint Stephen, with that
of Saint Jerome, undraped, beneath; there is likewise a figure of David
singing to a psaltery with two prophets who are seen, by the written
scrolls which they hold in their hands, to be engaged in a conference
on the conception of the Virgin.’
In another altar-piece by Signorelli[259] it is the Infant Christ who
carries the lily, the symbol of His own sinlessness. In this picture
all the symbolism refers to the Holy Child, not to the Virgin, which is
unusual in an ‘Enthroned Madonna.’ But the scroll upon the cross of the
Baptist, with the words ‘_Ecce Agnus Dei_,’ directs the devotion of the
worshipper to the Son.
In still another of Signorelli’s compositions[260] the archangel
Michael stands on one side of the Madonna’s throne with his scales for
the weighing of souls, and Gabriel upon the other side with a large
stalk of lilies. The latter carries the lilies, not merely as his own
attribute, to denote that he is Gabriel, but also in greeting to the
Madonna, for in his other hand he holds a scroll with the words, ‘_Ave
Maria, gratia plena_.’
There is a Madonna and Child by Fra Angelico,[261] where the Virgin,
whose features are more strongly marked than is usual with the Master,
holds in her right hand a vase in which are three roses and a stem of
lilies. Her left arm is round the Child, whose little hand grasps a
single lily cup. The composition is not pleasing, for the Mother is
embarrassed and encumbered by the great vase; also the symbolism is not
very clear, but apparently the roses and the lily in the vase are the
attributes of Mary, while the flower in His hand refers to the Holy
Child.
There are very few flowers which are placed within the hand of the
Madonna. In Italy she sometimes holds the _lilium candidum_ of the
virgin saints in her character of Queen of Virgins. In Germany
and the Tyrol the large white lily is replaced by the native
lily-of-the-valley; and in the ‘Madonna with the Siskin’[262] of Albert
Dürer she accepts some sprays of the sweet-scented white bells from the
hand of the tiny Saint John. In many pictures she holds a rose. Apart
from symbolism, a flower was a fitting thing to grace a woman’s hand,
and the rose was considered the fairest of flowers.
‘As the rose is the flower of flowers,
So is Thy House the House of Houses,’
says the ancient inscription within York Minster, and the rose was
_the_ flower _par excellence_ in every European country.
But when Mary places the rose within the hand of the Infant Saviour,
then it becomes His attribute with the full significance of divine
love, and when she places a carnation between the little fingers,
divine love is again expressed.
But, as already noticed, in pictures of Florentine origin, the rose
in the Virgin’s hand has a special meaning, for it illustrates her
title of ‘_Madonna del Fiori_,’ and the Cathedral of Florence was
dedicated to ‘Our Lady of the Flower.’ Also in pictures painted for
some charitable institution the rose or roses of the Virgin have still
another meaning, for then, following the interpretation of Raban Maur,
they are the symbol of charity. One picture with such roses is that
painted by Giambono for the _Congregazione di Carità_ at Fano. That
these roses are in no way the attribute of the Child is shown by His
attitude, for His back is turned to the hand which holds the flowers.
One of the most beautiful things in the beautiful city of Lucca is the
little chapel of Santa Maria della Rosa. It was originally dedicated to
Saint Paul and fell into disuse, but in the very earliest years of the
fourteenth century a fresco was discovered beneath the creepers which
covered the walls. The fresco was even then considered to be extremely
ancient, and represented the Virgin with the Child and holding three
roses in her hand. In 1309 the Bishop of Lucca conceded to the
_Università de’ Mercanti_ the power to erect on the spot a church
dedicated to the Virgin of the Rose and the Apostles Peter and Paul,
and the present exquisite little building was commenced.
The outside is ornamented with lovely arabesques of roses in low relief
executed in 1333, and upon one angle is a statue of the Virgin with a
rose in her hand, possibly by Giovanni Pisano. In the sacristry are the
arms of the confraternity figuring Mary surrounded by an oval nimbus
and supported by two bushes, which carry thirteen roses, and form a
crown from which rise patriarchs and prophets. The original fresco has
disappeared.
Very rarely the Virgin holds a violet. The flower is used in Christian
art almost exclusively to indicate the humility of the Son of God in
taking upon Himself our human form, and in the beautiful altar-piece
by Stephen Lochnar[263] the Saviour stretches up His tiny hand to
grasp the violet held by Mary, so making it His individual attribute.
The panel is rich in colouring, but Mary is of the simple, placid
type of the early German school. She is gravely, deeply happy in her
motherhood, and not saddened, as in Italy, by painful forebodings. The
Child reaches up His hand with a pretty gesture, accepting from her,
who had given Him His tender little body, also the violet, symbol of
His humility.
In a picture by Bruder Wilhelm[264] the Virgin holds a sweet-pea,
bearing both the flower and ripened pods. The symbolism of the pea is
obscure and is not to be traced in Christian iconography, though there
is the legend of the _erbilia_, a species of pea which, springing first
from the footsteps of Saint Columban, still grows upon the Tuscan
mountains. Possibly the symbolism may lie in the simultaneous flowering
and fruiting of the pea, for the palm was held by some writers to be an
emblem of the Virgin, and for the reason that ‘it flowered and fruited
at one and the same time.’[265]
There are three subjects, all connected with the Virgin’s death, where
lilies are once more found. They are her Ascension, the Giving of
her Girdle to Saint Thomas, and her Coronation. In each of these the
flower-filled tomb, from which she has just arisen, is introduced,
usually as the base of the composition.
But the lilies in these pictures do not refer to the immaculate purity
of the Virgin Mother, but represent the souls of ‘angels, confessors
and virgins.’ The legends which the _Legenda Aurea_ contains were
collected by Jacobus de Voragine during the last half of the thirteenth
century, while the lily was still the flower of virgin martyrs and
was not yet the Madonna’s lily. He gives the following account of the
burial of the Virgin:
‘The Lord commanded the Apostles that they should carry the body into
the valley of Jehoshaphat and place it in a new tomb that had been dug
there, and watch three days beside it, till He should return.
‘And straightway there surrounded her flowers of roses, which are the
blessèd company of martyrs; and lilies of the valley, which are the
bands of angels, confessors and virgins.’
But the _Byzantine Guide to Painting_, in the paragraph entitled ‘How
to represent the Assumption of the Divine Mother,’ directs that in the
lower part of the picture there should be ‘an open and empty tomb.’
There was therefore divergence of opinion, and the Church apparently
left the artist free.
Jacobus de Voragine seems to have collected the many floating legends
of the Virgin, and with that poetic judgment which was the peculiar
gift of his generation, to have preserved those forms particularly
marked by sweetness or distinction of incident. But some even of his
own countrymen apparently preferred the legend in its balder form, for
the astonished Apostles surround a bare and empty tomb. Beyond the
Alps, where the _Legenda Aurea_ never had much influence, the tomb is
almost invariably empty, and indeed all three subjects are rare in the
North, though the death of the Virgin is frequently represented.
The majority of Italian painters, however, gladly seized the pretty
detail, and the Virgin’s tomb is usually flower-filled. But the
painters of the high Renaissance did not keep strictly to the symbolism
of the legend. There is a beautiful fresco by Sodoma,[266] in which the
Virgin, dignified and lovely, ascends from a tomb brimming over with
roses, and from among them springs one mystic lily.
Raphael,[267] too, gives a single lily rising from among the roses,
and both he and Sodoma seem to have adopted the later fashion of
considering the lily as exclusively the Virgin Mary’s flower, and
instead of serried lilies, representing bands of angels and virgin
saints, they paint one only flower, emblem of the Queen of Virgins
rising to Heaven attended by the glowing souls of martyrs.
Botticelli,[268] on the other hand, has left the roses and painted
lilies only, lilies crowded together in such a mass of loveliness that
the mourners seem blinded even to the gorgeous bow of angels in the sky
and to the greater wonder in the opening heavens high above.
Benozzo Gozzoli[269] gives the flower-filled tomb, but neglects the
symbolism of the legend, for to the roses he adds daisies and jasmine.
It is simply a collection of the flowers sacred to the Virgin.
Giulio Romano,[270] in the _Madonna di Monteluce_, paints neither roses
nor lilies, merely small, indeterminate blossoms, mauve, blue and
yellow.
On one panel,[271] of the fifteenth century, which represents ‘The
Giving of the Girdle to Saint Thomas,’ cut roses and lilies lie upon
the top of the closed tomb, which seems a misapprehension of the
legend, but possibly the artist merely intended to paint the flowers
usually used as attributes of the Virgin--the rose of love and the lily
of purity--without any reference to the story as told in the Golden
Legend.
But though the lilies of the Virgin’s tomb represent angels and virgin
saints, in those pictures of her Coronation or Assumption, where no
tomb is shown, the flower is the symbol of her own purity. Through her
perfect purity she has attained the crown, therefore it is with stems
of white lilies that the rose-crowned angels hail her Queen.
Fra Filippo Lippi[272] paints her kneeling to receive the crown from
God the Father:
‘Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
As puff on puff of grated orris-root.’[273]
A child-angel holds a scroll with the words:
‘_Is perfecit opus_,’
and the archangel Gabriel with a lily, painted in a small lunette above
the throne, recalls the first beginning of the work now perfected;
while before the throne, and thick on either side, is a waving grove of
large white lilies, each stalk held by an adoring angel.
The devotional figure of the Virgin known as the ‘Immaculate
Conception’ is usually presented as the woman with ‘the moon under
her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars;’ four or five
attendant child-angels each carry a symbol of her virtues, and the
lily is always prominent among them.
This particular aspect of the Virgin was especially popular in Spain,
where Murillo was its finest exponent. The flowers of an Immaculate
Conception are the rose, lily, olive and palm, signifying love, purity,
peace and victory. Sometimes the iris, the royal lily, is added;
sometimes it replaces the _lilium candidum_. José Antolines[274] paints
the iris only.
In the chapter on ‘Garlands of Roses’ we remarked the thorns which in
the mystic Enclosed Gardens of Germany illustrate the verse:
‘As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.’
With the closing of the fifteenth century these thorn trellises
passed from Northern art, but the application of the metaphor to the
Virgin still persisted in Northern theology, and since the Immaculate
Conception had replaced the _Hortus Conclusus_ as a devotional subject,
it is as an attribute of the Virgin, risen to glory, that we find the
thorns, and in an Immaculate Conception by Seghers[275] a child-angel
flutters at the Madonna’s feet with a lily enclosed in branches of
thorns.
In the 24th chapter of Ecclesiasticus there is a description of
Wisdom with her attributes in which the Roman Catholic Church has
seen a prefiguring of the Virgin Mary. Some pictorial renderings of
the Immaculate Conception make special reference to this, notably the
large altar-piece, of unknown authorship, but believed to date from the
end of the fifteenth century, which was painted for the Church of S.
Francesco in Lucca.[276]
In the upper part of the picture Christ is seen seated, and holding out
above the kneeling Virgin the sceptre of His royal favour. Above the
sceptre is a scroll with the words from the Book of Esther: ‘Not for
thee was this law made, but for all mankind.’ She alone was immaculate.
Around there is a wreath of angels. Below stand King David, King
Solomon, Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm and Saint Anthony of Padua.
Behind these figures stretches a charming garden. Against the horizon
are the cypresses of Mount Zion, the cedar of Lebanon, the palm tree
of Cades, and also a pomegranate laden with fruit. Midway there is a
rose hedge thick with the roses of Jericho. A terrace runs across the
garden, and upon the parapet are two stone vases, one labelled _Mirra_
and the other _Balsamum_.
These trees and plants are the trees and plants to which Wisdom, and
therefore Mary, is likened in Ecclesiasticus, with the pomegranate of
the Canticles.
‘Quasi cedrus exaltata sum in Libano, et quasi cypressus in Monte Sion:
quasi palma exaltata sum in Cades, et quasi plantatio rosae in Jericho:
... Sicut cinnamomum et balsamum aromatizans odorem dedi: quasi myrrha
electa dedi suavitatem odoris.[277]
‘Emissiones tuae paradisus malorum punicorum cum pomorum
fructibus.’[278]
XVIII
THE LILY OF THE SAINTS
The ancient Hebrews took the lily as the symbol of chastity. The name
of the chaste woman of the apocryphal story was Susannah, in Hebrew
Shusan, which signifies a lily. The derivation was not forgotten by
German artists, for a lily is usually conspicuous in the elaborate
garden scenes in which they set this subject, though the Italians
reserved the flower for the Madonna and the saints of the monastic
orders.
Originally the lily was given to all virgin saints, and it was
considered their special attribute before the flower was particularly
associated with the Virgin Mary.
‘Jesus, corona virginum
Qui pergis inter lilia
Septis choreis virginum
Sponsus decorus gloria.’
In the Catacombs there are no virgin martyrs depicted, and the few
lilies found there represent merely the flora of Heaven with the
general significance of celestial bliss. In the early mosaics, too,
both in Ravenna and Rome, the lilies are decorative and the virgins
carry crowns of victory.
But as early as the ninth century the lily is used pictorially as the
indication of virginity in the famous Beneditional of Saint Ethelwold
of Winchester.[279] The Saxon queen, Saint Ethelreda (Saint Audry),
who leads the choir of virgin saints, wears the Benedictine habit, is
crowned, and holds in one hand the gospel and in the other a lily. She
founded Ely Cathedral and, at least after her second marriage, lived as
a nun. The miniature was executed in 980.
In the Church of S. Chiara in Naples there is a picture executed in
mosaic of the early Christian martyr, Saint Reparata. The mosaic, which
is of the thirteenth century, is attributed to Cavallini, and the saint
has a lily by her side.
But after the thirteenth century the lily is given almost exclusively
to saints of the monastic orders, the higher distinction of the palm
being awarded to the martyrs. ‘For,’ says Durandus, ‘the Martyrdom
taketh precedence of the Virginity; because it is a sign of the more
perfect love: according as the Truth saith, “Greater love hath no man
than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”
Occasionally these early saints are given the lily in addition to the
palm. Mantegna paints Saint Euphemia with a lily in the right hand and
a palm in the left.[280] But usually they have the palm alone. The
lilies of Saint Cecilia allude to the celestial lilies of her legend.
_À propos_ of Saint Cecilia, Chaucer’s very charming, if fanciful,
derivation of her name may be recalled:
‘First wol I you the name of Sainte Cecilie
Expoune as men may in hire storie see:
It is to sayn in English, Hevens lilie,
For pure chasteness of virginitee,
Or for she whitnesse had of honestee,
And grene of conscience, and of good fame
The swote savour, lilie was her name.’
Since the lily was appropriated by the celibates of the Church another
symbol had to be found for the chastity of those still in the world,
and for the virtue of the secular the unicorn was chosen. The mediæval
legend ran that the unicorn was of all created beasts the fiercest and
most difficult to capture. But should a maid be in his path he would
lie down with his head upon her lap and then the hunter could take him
with great ease.
‘The Triumph of Chastity’ with the ‘Triumph of Love’ as a pendant
were rather favourite subjects in the fifteenth century in Italy,
particularly as a decoration of the elaborate bridal chests or
_cassoni_, then in vogue. ‘The Triumph of Chastity’ of Liberale da
Verona[281] is typical. The white-clothed figure of a young woman
stands upon a car drawn by unicorns, while behind follows a rejoicing
crowd. She holds a cornucopia but no lily appears.
On the shutters in the Hall of Heliodorus, in the Vatican, there is a
very beautiful Renaissance design in which the lily and the unicorn are
united, but usually in Italy the lily was kept as an ecclesiastical and
the unicorn as a secular symbol.
In German art both lily and unicorn are held to be symbols of the
Virgin’s purity, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there
were many tapestries and embroideries executed in the convents
illustrating that strange allegorical version of the Annunciation known
as ‘The Hunting of the Unicorn.’ But the unicorn is never associated
with the monastic saints, and indeed, in Northern art, monastic saints
themselves are rather rare.
The lily was, therefore, latterly the symbol of monastic celibacy.
There is a curious allegorical picture of Saint Francis by Sassetta.
The present owner, Mr B. Behrenson, describes it thus:
‘Over the sea and the land, into the golden heavens, towers the
figure of the blessed Francis, his face transfigured with ecstasy,
his arms held out in his favourite attitude of the cross, his feet
firmly planted on a prostrate warrior in golden panoply. Cherubim and
Seraphim, with fiery wings and deep crescent halos, form behind the
saint a nimbus framing a glory of gold and azure, as dazzling as the
sky and as radiant as the sun. Overhead, on opalescent cloudlets,
float Poverty in her patched dress, looking up with grateful devotion,
Obedience in her rose-red robe with a yoke about her neck and her hands
crossed on her breast, and Chastity in white, holding a lily.’[282]
All three maidens are attractive, and Chastity the prettiest of the
three, unlike the immured ‘Castitas’ of Giotto,[283] whose guards, with
surely unnecessary vigour, drive off ‘Amor’ with pitch-forks.
The two men not in holy orders, who are permitted to carry the lily,
are Saint John the Baptist and Saint Joseph. The former, even if he
took no formal vow of celibacy, is looked upon as the first of the
Christian anchorites, and the lily of Saint Joseph is the symbol of the
self-abnegation of his married life.
The history of the marriage of the Virgin Mary is found in the
apocryphal ‘Gospel of the Birth of Mary,’ translated by Saint Jerome
and abridged in the _Catalogus Sanctorum_ of Peter de Natalibus.
‘And when Mary was fourteen years of age the High Priest commanded
that the virgins brought up in the temple should return home and be
wedded according to law. And all obeyed except Mary, who replied that
she might not, as her parents had dedicated her to the Lord and she
herself had vowed her virginity to God. And the High Priest, being
perplexed by Mary’s vow (which ought to be kept) on the one hand, and
the introduction of a new custom in Israel on the other, summoned the
elders together to consult upon the matter. And as they prayed, a voice
came from the sanctuary commanding that every man of the house of
David, who was not wedded, should place his rod on the altar, and he
whose rod should bud, and the Holy Spirit descend upon it in the form
of a dove, according to the prophecy of Isaiah, should be the spouse of
Mary.
‘And there was among the rest a certain Joseph of the House of David,
an old man and a widower, and who had sons and grandsons. And thinking
it unseemly that an aged man should marry a tender virgin, when the
others presented their rods he withheld his own. And no miracle
appearing, the High Priest inquired of the Lord, who answered that he
only to whom the Virgin was to be espoused had not presented his rod.
So Joseph was brought forward, and presented his rod, and straightway
it budded, and the dove descended from heaven and settled upon it. And
it was clear to all men that Mary was to be his wife.’
In one of the earliest representations[284] which we have of the
‘Marriage of the Virgin’ Joseph holds a stalk of _lilium candidum_ with
a single flower at its summit, on which is poised the holy dove. Thus
Giotto, always thoughtful and original in his symbolism, modified the
legendary flowering staff to the flower which should symbolize Saint
Joseph’s wedded life with the Virgin.
But the great majority of artists have followed the legend more
closely. Taddeo Gaddi[285] gives a bunch of leaves at the staff’s
top, just such leaves as would sprout from a staff of ash. There is
only one tiny bud upon the bare stick above which the dove hovers in
the ‘Marriage’ attributed to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo,[286] and Gaudenzio
Ferrari[287] paints a scarcely-budded staff.
Sometimes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the staff of
Saint Joseph bears red or pink flowers resembling the oleander, and
to-day the country people in Tuscany call the oleander _Il Mazzo di San
Giuseppe_, that is, ‘The Staff of Saint Joseph.’
Northern art, uninfluenced by the _Legenda Aurea_, gives Saint Joseph
no flowering staff. Lucas van Leyden[288] paints him as an entirely
unidealized workman with tools upon his back but places the lily in his
hand. And he has also a lily in the ‘Holy Family’ of Geertgen tot Sint
Jans,[289] though in the many representations of ‘The Adoration of the
Magi’ in North Germany and the Netherlands he is undistinguished by any
attribute.
After the seventeenth century Saint Joseph began to have a status of
his own as patron of married virtue. Single figures of him appear
carrying a lily, not a staff, and in the ecclesiastical art of the
present day he carries sometimes the Child-Christ and sometimes a book,
but also invariably a lily. A large oleograph which hangs in the Church
of the Angels at La Verna shows the Child-Christ crowning him with a
wreath of lilies.
Occasionally the lily is given to young girls who are neither saints
nor martyrs. There is an engraving from a gold medal in the royal
library at Windsor of the Empress Leonora of Portugal. The portrait
is half-length, standing, with long hair, beneath the arched imperial
crown, and she holds in her hand a lily stem with two flowers and three
buds. It is inscribed:
‘Leonora Augusta Frederici Imp. Uxor.’
She was the daughter of King Edward of Portugal and wife of Frederick
of Austria, also great-grand-daughter of John of Gaunt. It is a pretty
figure, childish but dignified. The long hair, Mr Augustus Franks
points out,[290] is generally looked upon as the mark of a virgin
bride, and it is explained by her coronation having taken place before
the consummation of the marriage. The lily also, like the flowing hair,
proclaims her maidenhood.
But, as a rule, the _lilium candidum_ is strictly a flower of the
church. Paul Veronese[291] painted a Juno with a white lily, but the
flower has sharply turned-back petals resembling the turn-cap variety
and gracefully curving stems.
It was not till the eighteenth century that Cipriani and Bartolozzi,
both members of the English Royal Academy, could design and engrave a
heathen goddess, who, with one hand caressing a peacock, held in the
other the traditional symbol of virginal innocence.
Lilies are proper to all virgin saints.
‘Liliis Sponsus recubat, rosisque;
Tu, tuo semper bene fida Sponso
Et rosas Martyr simil et dedisti
Lilia Virgo.’
But some carry them as a special distinction.
Among them Saint Catharine of Siena comes first. She was still merely
one of the many children of a working tanner of Siena, her sanctity
unrecognized, when she was sent a dream from Heaven. In her dream she
saw Saint Dominic, who held in one hand a lily which, like the burning
bush of Moses, burned but was not consumed. With his other hand he
offered her the black and white habit of the Dominican Tertiaries.
Saint Catharine regarded the dream as a definite call and later joined
the third Order of Saint Dominic. She was a woman not only of most
saintly life but of wonderful force of character, and intervened with
altruistic motives and plain common sense in the complicated politics
of her day. She experienced the mystical trances which were the crown
of holiness to the mediæval mind, and was remarkable also for the
austerities and good works which her devoted friend and biographer,
Raimondo da Capua, likens to lilies.
‘Taught, nay rather compelled, by her supreme Teacher, she learned
every day more and more both to enjoy the embraces of the Celestial
Bridegroom in the bed of flowers, and to descend into the valley of
lilies to make herself more fruitful, nor ever to leave or lessen the
one for the sake of the other.’
The most interesting of the pictures of Saint Catharine is that by
her friend and disciple, Andrea Vanni,[292] and which is therefore a
portrait from memory, if not from life. It was probably painted at the
time of her canonization, thirteen years after her death, and shows her
as a tall, slight woman with a refined enthusiastic face. In her left
hand she holds the lilies[293] which represent the austere virtues of
a monastic life. She is the most distinguished woman who wore the veil,
and since she is almost invariably represented with a lily, the _lilium
candidum_ is sometimes called Saint Catharine’s lily.
Saint Scholastica of the Benedictines[294] and Saint Clare of the
Franciscans are also usually depicted with lilies. The last, who
styled herself the Little Flower of Saint Francis, has met with
great good fortune at the hands of the painters, for two at least,
Simone Martini[295] and Luca Signorelli,[296] have very beautifully
materialized her sweetness and humility.
Pictures which represent the mystic espousals of any nun usually have
the lily as a detail.
Chief among the monks who carry the flower is Saint Dominic. He was
a Spaniard and had all the chivalrous Spanish devotion to the person
of the Virgin. It was he who arranged the rosary and instituted it
as a religious exercise. He founded a community of preachers for the
conversion of heretics, which afterwards developed into the great
Dominican order. The great aim of his life was to guard the purity of
the Catholic faith, and to this end he hunted forth the Albigenses with
his hounds of the Lord--the _Domini canes_. He is rewarded with the
lily which, in his picture by Bellini,[297] has a singularly rigid stem.
During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sainted
monks were comparatively rarely painted, preference being given to
the more picturesque figures of the early martyrs who suffered under
Roman persecutions. But the earliest to appear, and the most frequently
seen, is Saint Dominic. Duccio di Buoninsegna puts him beside the
Madonna; Orcagna painted him among the happy souls in the Paradise
of Santa Maria Novella. And the reason why he, rather than the other
great founders, should appear in heavenly groups is not the fine relief
of his black habit among the gay gowns of the angels, but because
his order spent their gold on painted decorations at a time when the
Franciscans, vowed to poverty, and the Benedictines, devoted to the
making and collecting of books, had less to spend on the encouragement
of art. Later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and more
particularly in Spain, saints in all habits constantly appear.
Saint Dominic almost always carries a lily. Saint Francis was
sufficiently distinguished by the stigmata, Saint Benedict by the
chalice; but Saint Dominic has a lily white as the austerity of his
faith.
Saint Anthony of Padua is to-day the most popular of all the monastic
saints. His sane and gentle piety and his reputation for granting
little ordinary boons has endeared him to simple folk. There seems
no particular reason why he, above other saintly monks, should be so
distinguished, but when he is not represented with the Infant Christ
in his arms he invariably has a lily. In the very beautiful ‘Vision of
Saint Anthony,’ by Murillo,[298] where the Holy Child appears in a ray
of light, a vase of lilies stands upon the table. In another picture,
by Annibale Caracci, the Child-Christ Himself holds the lily.
Another bearer of the lily is he
‘Whom Mary’s charms
Embellish’d, as the sun the morning star’--
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.
Though opposing the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the
Virgin, he had a very special devotion to the Mother of Christ.
Many of his sermons, called by Henault _Chefs d’œuvre de sentiment et
de force_, celebrate her perfections, and, in particular, the famous
series of sermons upon the Bride of the Song of Solomon.
It is said that it was his love for the ‘lily of the valleys’ which so
impressed the lily form upon the architecture of his order, for again
and again in the Gothic stone-work of the Cistercian abbeys ‘lily work’
is found.
The lily, it may be remarked, is given to those saints in holy orders
who were pious from their earliest youth and not to those who had
passed a gay time in the world before conversion.
XIX
THE VINE
The principal of the allegorical fruits is the vine. It is one of the
most ancient emblems of Christ, and is founded upon His own words, ‘I
am the vine, ye are the branches.’
It is seen in the Catacombs, on early Christian sarcophagi, and in
the early mosaics, always as the emblem of Christ or of His Church.
A fruiting vine very beautifully expresses a perfect life rich with
the fruits of the spirit, and even were the analogy not suggested by
Christ’s own words, it is possible that Christians would have seen in
the tree whence comes the sacramental wine, emblem of the holy blood, a
likeness to Him who shed that blood.
Where the cross, the sacred monogram or the figure of Christ Himself
is introduced, the vine takes a secondary place as emblem of the
Christian Church, and taken in this sense the symbolism admits of some
complication, twelve bunches of grapes typifying the twelve Apostles,
and birds among the branches Christian souls.
One example among many of its decorative and symbolical use is on
the gravestone of Saint Cummian, an Irish bishop, who died a monk at
Bobbio about the middle of the eighth century. Two vine branches spring
from the holy chalice and form a border of oval arabesques, one oval
enclosing fruit and leaves, the next framing a star alternately. At
the top, where the two branches almost meet, are two doves standing on
either side of the holy monogram.
The vine is the Christian Church, springing from the chalice of
Christ’s blood; the fruit represents the good works of the righteous;
the stars which shine through the branches Christian hope. The doves,
by the convention of the Catacombs, signify departed Christian souls
adoring Christ, who is represented by the ancient star monogram, formed
of the two Greek letters, I = Iota, and X = Chi, enclosed in the circle
which is the symbol of eternity. The gravestone was executed by order
of King Luitprand, and, by an oversight not unique among Christian
marbles before the twelfth century, the border has been placed
reversed round the inscription--the doves, with their feet in the air,
being at the bottom.
As directly emblematical of Christ Himself the vine received the
place of honour in all Christian churches, and, even when our Lord
was represented in His own person, it was often there by right of its
secondary significance as the Church of God--‘Ye are the branches.’ A
mosaic in the Church of Saint Prisca[299] shows a half-length figure
of Christ framed in branches of vine, and the golden branches, often
intricately wreathed against a dark-blue ground, occur repeatedly in
the early mosaics.
But when it grew more usual not only to represent Christ in His own
person but also the martyrs, saints and prophets of the Church, the use
of the vine became decorative rather than devotional, and was chiefly
applied to the ornamentation of vestments, altar-cloths and the vessels
used in the celebration of the Eucharist. When, in a painting, the vine
is introduced as the emblem of Christ or His Church, it is usually in
some detail, as in the very beautiful design of the Pelican in its
Piety among grapes and vine leaves behind the figure of God the Father,
King of Heaven, in Hubert van Eyck’s magnificent altar, ‘The Adoration
of the Lamb.’[300]
Botticelli, who handled symbols with a depth of sentiment unknown
to art before, paints grapes with a different significance. For
him grapes, like the Eucharistic wine, are the symbol of the Holy
Blood, and in one of the most beautiful and unaffected of all his
pictures[301] an angel, standing beside the Infant Christ, holds grapes
and corn ears, symbols of the sacrifice of His death.
The Northern symbolists, also, took clustering grapes to have the same
value as the Eucharistic wine as an emblem of Christ’s blood. This is
clearly seen in a tapestry of the fourteenth century, formerly in the
Spitzer Collection. The Infant Christ, seated between the Virgin and
Saint Joseph, presses with His hands the juice of a bunch of purple
grapes into a chalice.
Another Flemish tapestry of the same period, which was also in the same
collection, depicts the Holy Family with Saint Anne. Mary, from whom
the Saviour received His human blood, hands to her Son the grapes which
He crushes till the wine drops down into the cup.
But the cluster of grapes which several of the Flemish artists place in
the hand of the Infant Christ seems to be not only the emblem of the
holy blood, but also, in some sort, the antithesis of the apple as the
fruit of redemption, which in the hand of the second Adam replaces the
fruit of the Fall.
In a picture by Mabuse, inscribed ‘Verus Deus et Homo: casta mater et
Virgo,’[302] the Virgin offers a bunch of grapes to the Infant Christ,
who holds a quince, foreshadowing that He should exchange the fruit of
Eden, by which all men died, for the fruit of redemption, by which they
shall be saved, and this substitution of the fruit of the vine for the
apple of Eden became in the North a rather favourite variation of the
symbolism of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
XX
THE FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
The Scriptures give no indication whatever as to the size, shape or
colour of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which
grew in the midst of Eden, and it has been variously interpreted. Adam
is depicted with an apple, a pear, a quince, a fig, according to the
individual opinion of the painter. Milton took the tree to be an apple:
‘A goodly tree....
Laden with fruit of fairest colours mixt
Ruddie and gold ...
Sharp desire I had
Of tasting those fair apples.’[303]
And the majority of artists have chosen that fruit. It grew in every
part of Europe, and, except the cherry, it was almost the only
cultivated fruit in Germany and the Netherlands. Besides grapes, figs
and pomegranates it is the only fruit mentioned in Scripture, and it is
also possible that some found reason for identifying it with the fruit
which brought sin into the world in the apparent similarity of the two
Latin words, ‘mălum’ = evil, and ‘mālum’ = an apple.
And as the fruit varies in the hand of Adam so it varies in the hand
of the Infant Christ, the second Adam. Memling and the painters of
Cologne depict Him with an apple. Il Moretto paints a pear,[304]
Giovanni Bellini a quince,[305] and Botticelli a pomegranate.[306]
The Eve of Jan van Eyck holds a lemon,[307] but he keeps to the older
convention in the symbols which he places in the hand of the Infant
Saviour: the bird, emblem of the human soul, the inscribed scroll or
the cross-surmounted orb.
The apple, when in the hand of Adam, is always the symbol of the Fall;
when in the hand of Christ, it is the symbol of the sin of the world
which He took upon Himself. ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ
shall all be made alive.’
But in the early instances of a fruit in the Christ-Child’s hand it
does not appear to be definitely the death-giving apple of Eden. It is
fruit of Paradise, a delight promised to the blessed which the King of
Heaven brings down with Him to earth.
In the early school of Siena, as we have already seen, the little
Christ was still the Royal Infant, still ‘trailing clouds of glory,’
untouched by shadow of suffering, and usually bearing in His hand some
indication of His high estate. Often His hand was raised in blessing,
sometimes He held a lily of Paradise.
On an early fourteenth-century panel in the manner of the Lorenzetti,
in Siena Academy, the Child holds a fruit, but it is not clearly
defined. In one of Sano di Pietro’s most attractive works,[308]
however, which is dated 1444, the Child, seated on the Virgin’s
knee, holds a golden orange with its foliage. To His right and left
are saints, and close around there are six angels crowned with blue
corn-flowers and carrying roses and lilies. No attempt is made to
realize earthly conditions; the glowing scene is set in Heaven, and
the little Lord of Heaven holds in His hand a celestial fruit, just
one of such fruits as hang upon the trees in Giovanni di Paolo’s
‘Paradise.’[309]
In another picture by Sano di Pietro,[310] the Child (perhaps the most
charming ‘_Bambino_’ ever painted in Siena) holds in His hand a bunch
of cherries.
Cherries, painted more than once within the tiny hand by Sano di
Pietro, are always taken as the delicious fruit. Like the lilies of
the earlier Paradises they typify the delights of the blessed, and in
German art particularly they are painted often as the peculiar fruit
of Heaven. They are never taken as the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
of Good and Evil, and therefore, at least in the early Sienese school,
this fruit held by the Infant Christ would seem to be the fruit of
Paradise.
In Northern art, in the work of the French ivory cutters, and
particularly in the work of Memling and of those artists influenced
by him, the apple takes precedence of all other symbols in the
Christ-Child’s hand. Northern theologians, studying the Old Testament
carefully, and deeply interested in types and anti-types, saw in Adam
the type of Christ. The _Biblia Pauperum_, originally designed with
the intention of teaching the faith to the unlettered, served as a
pattern-book for stained glass and other ecclesiastical decoration from
the ninth century onwards. Each page is divided into three sections.
In the centre is a scene from the life of Christ; in the sections
on either side is a scene from Old Testament History, showing some
incident in the lives of those men who are considered to be types of
Christ, which foreshadowed some act of the Redeemer. And chief of these
types is Adam. Therefore in the Northern Church the idea of Jesus
Christ as the second Adam was familiar, and the fruit in His hand was
perfectly understood as a symbol. Memling, who, if he did not originate
the symbolism of the apple of Eden, made it famous by constant
repetition on his magnificently executed panels, usually treats it
quite simply. The apple is the symbol of the Fall, and therefore of
the world’s sin, which Christ accepts as His own. In the fine example
at Chatsworth, the Infant Christ, with one hand pointing to the book of
prophecy, takes with the other the apple held by an attendant angel.
But one painting by Memling[311] is especially interesting, since it
links together the two symbols, the fruit of heavenly bliss and the
fruit of Man’s redemption. The Child sits upon His mother’s knee,
and in one hand clutches cherries, the fruit of Paradise. He seems,
however, on the point of relinquishing them to take the apple from the
angel’s hand, as He relinquished heavenly joy to take upon Himself the
sin of the world.
[Illustration:
_Hugo van der Goes_ _Photo Brogi_
THE FRUIT OF DAMNATION EXCHANGED FOR THE FRUIT OF REDEMPTION]
[Illustration:
_Memling_ _Photo Brogi_
THE FRUIT OF HEAVEN RELINQUISHED FOR THE APPLE OF EDEN]
Meanwhile the painters of Florence, Fra Angelico, Neri di Bicci,
Filippo Lippi and Botticelli, had painted the Child with the
pomegranate, and it is not very clear whether they held to the Sienese
symbolism or sympathized with the Northern tradition. But it was
probably the fruit of Eden, for in all other points the Florentines had
broken with the Byzantine conventions, and the Child was for them no
longer the Royal Child, richly clothed and dignified in gesture, but
He was a little naked human baby, born into the world to repair, as
the second Adam, the old Adam’s fault. That He is the Saviour, rather
than the King, is particularly emphasized by Botticelli, who seldom
fails, even though it be only by the foreboding in the grey eyes of the
angels, to give some hint of the coming tragedy.
On the other hand it may be possible that the painters of Florence
in the fifteenth century had harked back to another source for their
symbolism and had taken the imagery of Saint Gregory the Great, who
used the pomegranate as the emblem of the Christian Church ‘because
of the inner unity of countless seeds in one and the same fruit.’ But
in later Italian art, as in all the Northern countries and in modern
Church symbolism, the fruit, most usually the apple, which is in the
hand of the Infant Christ, is the fruit of redemption, as the apple of
Adam was the fruit of damnation.
Following the same analogy, the Virgin is regarded as the second Eve,
the second universal mother, who, through her Son, is to repair the
fault of the first.
The symbolists of the thirteenth century found what they considered
proof of this in the word of Scripture.
Conrad von Würztburg writes:
‘Let a man take three letters:
When these straightforward are read,
The little word “Ave” stands out,
The new word of salutation (or healing).
Let him begin at the end,
And read to the beginning,
And “Eva” is found written.
* * * * *
That one may thereby know,
It is thou who fulfillest,
The old and the new Covenants.
The greeting from the angel’s mouth
Greeting thee, O royal spotless maid,
Hath told me this.’[312]
Therefore the apple, which masters of the Flemish and early German
schools sometimes introduced into Annunciations, laying it, for
instance, upon the window-sill, is the apple of redemption.
The apple in the hand of Eve is always the apple of damnation. There is
a curious drawing by Martin Schöngauer of the ‘Descent into Hell.’ Adam
and Eve come forth first of the released souls, Eve holding the apple,
which has the marks of her teeth still upon it.
In the hand of Mary it is again the apple of redemption, but it is the
fruit of the Fall when it is between the jaws of the serpent or dragon,
which she, at her Assumption, treads under foot.
[Illustration:
_Martin Schöngauer_
ADAM AND EVE DELIVERED FROM HELL
(Print Room, Alte Pinakothek, Munich)]
In Italian art the apple is less often found in the Madonna pictures,
but the ancient analogy was not forgotten. On the predella of Lorenzo
di Credi’s ‘Annunciation’[313] there are three exquisite little scenes
from the life of Eve, and Vasari introduces the Tree of the Knowledge
of Good and Evil into his ‘Conception of the Virgin,’ painted in 1540.
Vasari describes it himself:
‘The Tree of the Original Sin was represented in the centre of the
painting, and at the roots thereof were placed nude figures of Adam and
Eve bound, as being the first transgressors of God’s commands. To the
principal branches there were also bound Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses,
Aaron, Joshua, David and the rest of the kings, law-givers, etc.,
according to their seniority, all fastened by both arms, excepting
only Samuel and Saint John the Baptist, who are bound by one arm only,
to intimate that they were sanctified before their birth. At the trunk
of the tree, and with the lower part turning around it, is the Old
Serpent, but the upper part of the form has the shape of Man, and the
hands are confined behind the back; on his head is one foot of the
glorious Virgin, which is trampling down the horns of the demon, while
the other foot is fixed on a moon. Our Lady is clothed with the sun
and crowned with twelve stars, being sustained in the air within a
splendour of numerous angels, nude, and illuminated by the rays which
proceed from the Madonna herself. These same rays, moreover, passing
amidst the foliage of the tree, give light to the figures bound to the
branches; nay, they seem to be gradually loosening their bonds, by the
power and grace which they derive from her out of whom they proceed. In
Heaven, meanwhile, that is, at the highest point of the picture, are
two children bearing a scroll, on which are the following words:
‘“_Quos Eva culpa damnavit, Mariæ gratia solvit._”’[314]
It was thus that Vasari united in one picture the two universal
mothers, the physical and the spiritual, and his allegory was typical
of the mysticism of his day, for he tells us that, being doubtful as
to the due treatment of the subject, he and his patron, Messer Bindo,
‘took counsel with such of our common friends as were men of letters,’
and Vasari’s friends included the fine flower of Italian intellect.
The picture, which is a good deal darkened by time, and less
interesting than the description leads one to expect, is still in its
original place in the Church of SS. Apostoli in Florence.
In some pictures, particularly those showing the influence of Memling,
an attendant angel holds the apple, holding it ready till the time
shall come when the Infant Saviour, with growing consciousness of His
mission, holds forth His hand to take it.
But there are various ‘Holy Families’[315] of the early German school
in which Saint Anne sits holding the apple. It seems strange that she
should, but it is to be remembered that in German popular religion and
in German art Saint Anne holds an important place. Altars were often
dedicated to her, and the holy family might, in a manner, be called her
attribute. Frequently Saint Anne and the Virgin are depicted seated
on one seat, apparently with equal possessive rights over the Holy
Child, who stands between them. There is also that strange allegorical
conception usually styled ‘_Mutter Anna selb-dritt_,’ where Saint Anne
sits with the Infant Christ on one knee and the Child-Virgin on the
other. She was the Virgin’s nearest blood-relation, and if the Virgin
was without sin, it was Anne, born in sin but the Mother of His Mother,
who most nearly connected the incarnate Godhead with the erring human
race. It was perhaps fitting, therefore, that she, representing sinful
humanity, should offer to the Saviour the fruit of the Fall, which in
His hand would become the fruit of Redemption. At other times it is
Mary who holds the fruit, but offering it to the Saviour, who raises
His hand to take it. She, as the second Eve, places in His hand the
apple by which mankind is to be redeemed, not lost, since she, by
giving Him a human body, had made that redemption possible.
In the Corsini Gallery[316] there is a picture, attributed to Hugo
van der Goes, in which Mother and Child hold each a fruit. At first
sight it seems as if it were a presentment in one picture of Christ as
the second Adam, and Mary as the second Eve, with a doubling of the
symbolism of the apple which would be illogical. But the fruit held by
Mary is distinctly a pear, that held by Christ apparently an apple. The
artist has, therefore, discriminated between the apple of damnation and
the sweeter, mellower fruit, which may be the symbol of Redemption, for
the Holy Child seems to be in the act of exchanging one for the other.
This may possibly also explain the thought in the mind of the
French ivory-cutters of the fourteenth century, for they, too, not
infrequently, placed a small round fruit resembling an apple in the
hand of the Infant Christ and a larger pear-shaped fruit in that of His
mother, though they give little indication of any action of exchange.
Northern art, though realistic, was very placid, and, except in scenes
from the Passion, quite unmarked by the sometimes painful pathos of the
Italian and Spanish schools. In the Madonna pictures the only faint
reminder of the tragedy for which the Child was born into the world
is the rosy-cheeked apple in the tiny hand. The mother is satisfied
and untroubled, the Child smiling happily, and an apple is a natural,
pleasant thing to place within a baby’s hand. Rubens painted a
delightful ‘Holy Family beneath an Apple Tree’[317]--a little scene of
idyllic happiness; and scarcely noticeable is the pathetic suggestion
of the branch of apples which Zacharias holds towards the little Christ.
The shifting of theological and artistic standpoints at the Reformation
in no way disturbed the Northern love of Old Testament analogies or the
affection for this particular symbol, and in Germany one of its most
charming developments was the Christmas tree, the evergreen tree laden
with golden and silver apples, set up in every home to commemorate the
birth of Christ. It is the Tree of Eden, which Christ by His birth and
death transmuted into a tree of Paradise.
The apple is the most usual fruit in the hand of the Infant Christ, but
some Flemish painters of the early sixteenth century give Him grapes
instead. The grapes symbolize the divine blood by which souls lost
through Adam’s fall are redeemed. Gerard David[318] puts a cluster of
white grapes in the tiny hand; Lucas van Leyden[319] white grapes also
with leaves and tendrils; and in another picture Lucas van Leyden[320]
places the apple and the grapes together upon the broad ledge in the
foreground. In this last there is the same idea of exchange which is
found more clearly expressed in the picture by Mabuse at Berlin.
This substitution of the fruit of the vine for the apple of Eden seems
only to be found in the Netherlands. In a very beautiful picture by
Botticelli, the grapes held by the angel have a simpler meaning. They,
with the corn, are the direct emblems of the body and the blood of the
Saviour, and foretell the coming sacrifice of His death; the symbolism
is identical with that of the embroidered vine-leaves and wheat-ears of
so many modern altar frontals.[321]
Very often, as upon the façade of Orvieto Cathedral, the fig-tree
is taken as the Tree of Temptation, for, it might be argued, our
first parents would take to make themselves garments the leaves of
the tree nearest to their hand, the leaves of that same tree of
whose fruit they had just eaten. ‘It is possible that the erotic
significance which the fig had among the ancients was also considered
in this connection,’[322] and it is probably because of its classical
associations that the fig was never placed in the hand of the Infant
Saviour.
Except as the forbidden fruit the fig is not found in Italian or
Flemish ecclesiastical art, but in Germany there appears to have been
no prejudice against it. It is painted frequently in the Madonna
pictures. A small fig-tree overshadows the cot of the Infant Christ
in a picture by Matthias Grünewald;[323] Hans Burgkmair[324] paints
it with the rose, the iris, the columbine and other attributes of the
Virgin; Hans Holbein[325] the Younger sets his Saint Ursula against a
fig-tree; and it is the only growing thing introduced in his best-known
work, the beautiful Madonna of the Bürgomeister Meyer.[326]
These fig-trees, unlike the barren fig-tree of Scripture, always bear
fruit and appear to be the symbols of a holy life rich with the fruits
of the Spirit.
XXI
THE GOURD
In the works of Crivelli, who painted in the cities of the Marches
between 1468 and 1493, the apple repeatedly occurs with a gourd laid
close beside it. In the ‘Annunciation’[327] they are together upon
the foreground’s edge. In ‘The Infant Christ giving the Keys to Saint
Peter’[328] the apple lies on the ground and the gourd is suspended on
the right hand of the throne. In the triptych in the Brera they hang
forward prominently from the wreath above the Madonna’s head. They
are again suspended, singly, each side of the head of Saint Giacomo
della Marca[329] (sometimes taken to be Saint Bernadine), toning with
the colour scheme, which has all the subdued richness of old Cordova
leather; and exactly the same apple and gourd lie on a ledge before
the ‘Madonna with the Child’ by Francia,[330] and have the identical
position in an ‘Enthroned Madonna’ by Lorenzo da San Severino.[331]
As the grouping of these two fruits is so insistently repeated there is
reason to think that it was no chance arrangement. The painter seems
to attach some definite meaning to their juxtaposition, and since not
Crivelli only, but also Francia and Lorenzo da San Severino, place them
together, and well forward in the picture where the eye cannot miss
them, they are apparently recognized symbols, not the whim of a single
painter.
The apple is, probably, here as elsewhere, the fatal fruit of Eden, and
the gourd may represent the fruit which is to be the antidote, in the
same sense that the grape is occasionally used by painters of the early
Flemish school. In this case the gourd would represent the Resurrection
and be the revival of a very ancient symbol which has an interesting
history. Among the wall paintings of the Catacombs the story of
Jonah is very repeatedly found. He is taken as the type of the risen
Christ,[332] since Christ Himself, answering the Pharisees, made the
comparison. He is represented both as being cast up by the fish and, in
the ensuing incident of his history, reposing under the gourd on the
east side of the city of Nineveh. The first subject being certainly
grotesque, it became more usual to depict him beneath the booth covered
with long-shaped gourds, and his sleeping figure (usually with the
legs crossed) is found constantly both among the Catacomb paintings
and on fragments of the early Christian gilded glass. Above him there
is always the same pergola-like booth with the hanging gourds. One
small disk of gold-ornamented Catacomb glass[333] has upon it the usual
gourd, but below, in place of Jonah, there is a large fish (Ichthys),
an emblem of Christ dating from the second century. Thus the type of
Christ has been replaced by His emblem, but the gourd, by association
symbol of His Resurrection, remains.
Therefore in these pictures by Crivelli the apple would be the symbol
of our death by the act of Adam, and the gourd of our Resurrection by
the act of the second Adam, Jesus Christ.
In a picture of the Fall, painted in 1570 by Floris Francesco of
Antwerp,[334] Adam sits upon the ground while Eve offers him an apple
from the tree. On the earth beside Adam lies a very large gourd. This
gourd may only exemplify the fruitfulness of Eden, or it may be another
example of the antithetical use of this symbol.
XXII
THE POMEGRANATE
Neri di Bicci,[335] Fra Angelico,[336] Filippo Lippi[337] and other
artists of the fifteenth century painted the Infant Saviour with a
pomegranate in His hand.
On the wall of the Bargello,[338] in the Chapel of the Podestà, is
a frescoed Paradise, which contains a figure long believed to be
a portrait of Dante by Giotto. He is seen in profile, wearing the
characteristic hood, and holds in his hand a small branch on which
are two ripe pomegranates. The fresco is not now considered to be by
Giotto, nor the portrait contemporaneous, but that would not materially
affect the meaning of the pomegranates, if they be a symbol, since the
painting dates from the last half of the fourteenth century.
Were it not for Dante’s pomegranate there would be no particular
reason to think that the artists of the ‘Quattrocento’ meant more than
simply to indicate some heavenly fruit when they placed the pomegranate
in the hand of the Child Christ. In accordance with the Byzantine
tradition to which Siena held, they regarded Him as the Royal Child
come to earth with Heavenly gifts in His hand; they had not yet adopted
the symbolism of the North, which saw in the Infant Christ the second
Adam, holding the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,
though indeed Botticelli, who almost always gives some indication of
coming sorrow in Christ’s childhood, seems to have found some sad inner
meaning in the symbol.
But in Dante’s hand the fruit could not be the fruit of Paradise, and
it may therefore have some further meaning even when held by the Infant
Saviour.
[Illustration:
_Botticelli_ _Photo Brogi_
THE CHILD WITH THE POMEGRANATE SURROUNDED BY ANGELS WITH LILIES AND
ROSE-GARLANDS
(Uffizi Gallery, Florence)]
Walter Pater writes: ‘The mystical fruit, which because of the
multitude of its seeds was to the Romans a symbol of fecundity ... to
the middle age became a symbol of the fruitful earth itself; and then
of that other seed sown in the dark underworld; and at last of the
whole hidden region, which Dante visited.... Botticelli putting it
into the childish hands of Him, who, if men went down into hell, is
there also.’
So, as the symbol of the life on the other side of death, the
pomegranate is exceedingly well placed when given to the writer of the
_Divina Commedia_, and it is even more appropriate in the hand of the
incarnate Godhead--He who holds our future destinies in the hollow of
His palm.
But it is difficult to ascertain if this was really the thought in the
minds of the Florentine artists.
Mrs Jameson considers the pomegranate to be the symbol of immortality,
or, showing the seeds, of hope in eternity.
But it would scarcely be the symbol of immortality in the Infant
Saviour’s hand, since the symbol so placed is never His exclusive
attribute, but the indication of some relationship with humanity. But
showing the seeds--and the seeds are usually shown--it might be the
symbol of a hope in eternity which He gives to man, the parallel lying
in the unexpected sweetness of the fruit within the hard rind.
But possibly the authority followed by the masters of the
‘Quattrocento,’ or by those churchmen who gave them their commissions,
was Gregory the Great, for he says: ‘The pomegranate is the emblem of
congregations because of its many seeds: also emblem of the Christian
Church because of the inner unity of countless seeds in one and the
same fruit.
Following this interpretation, the pomegranate, when carried by Dante
or any other being of mortal birth, would indicate his faith in the
Holy Catholic Church.
In Northern art the pomegranate is very rare. The Flemish artists
ignore it, and those few German artists who paint it are those who
had come under Italian influence. And it does not seem entirely clear
whether those German artists who, like Hans Burgkmair,[339] paint it
in the Infant Christ’s hand, give to the Southern fruit the Southern
significance, or if for them it becomes the fruit of Eden in the hand
of the second Adam.
In scenes representing different events in the life of Christ, trees
of pomegranates are occasionally introduced. Giovanni di Paolo sets
the ‘Nativity’[340] in an orchard of pomegranates, and in a Florentine
picture of the fourteenth century[341] the newly-risen Christ is
surrounded by palms, pomegranates and flowers. These pomegranates,
however, do not seem to be used attributively but merely to give some
slight geographical indication. Bethlehem was an Eastern city; the tomb
of Christ was in an Eastern garden.
The pomegranate is also, theoretically, the emblem of the Virgin. ‘In
the symbolism of the cult of Mary, the ripe pomegranate, because of
its pleasant fragrance and its numerous seeds, represents her beauty
and many virtues, but the gradually-developing fruit refers to her
life.’[342]
‘The pomegranate with its crowned top is her as queen, and typifies
also hope and fruitfulness, the “Virginitas fecunda” of the octave of
Christmas.’[343]
Jeremy Taylor, in a beautiful passage, describes Mary as the
pomegranate tree and Christ as the fruit.
‘When the Holy Virgin now perceived that the expectation of the nations
was arrived at the very doors of revelation and entrance into the
world, she brought forth the _Holy Jesus_, who, like light through a
transparent glass, past through, or a ripe pomegranate from a fruitful
tree, fell to the earth, without doing violence to its nurse and
parent.’
In art, however, the pomegranate is very seldom used as the attribute
of the Virgin. Occasionally the Florentine masters ornament the
Virgin’s throne with knobs which more or less resemble the fruit, and
Flemish artists, Memling in particular, place behind her a brocaded
panel of the well-known pomegranate design. But these pomegranate knobs
were a very usual detail in carved work, and the pomegranate pattern,
which still persists, was a standard design of the silk-weavers of
France and Italy.
The fruit itself is not used by the older masters. Even Crivelli, who
lavishes fruit of almost every sort upon his slender, long-figured
Madonnas, leaves the pomegranate aside.
In modern work, Podesti, in his vast fresco of the Immaculate
Conception,[344] has placed a large single pomegranate upon a book
arranged prominently in the foreground. It is the symbol, apparently,
of the fruitfulness of the Virgin.
The ancient Jews ornamented their temple with the pomegranate, and
their high priest’s robes were bordered with alternate bells and
pomegranates. In the Christian Church, too, they have been admitted
as decoration, though not with any very clear and definite symbolical
significance. There is a very handsome seventeenth-century altar-rail
of marble on which rest candlesticks and huge brass pomegranates before
the high altar in the ancient church of S. Cecilia in Rome; and a great
bronze pomegranate, worn by much caressing, is on the balustrade in the
tiny chapel which was once the bathroom of the saint.
XXIII
THE STRAWBERRY
The strawberry stands apart from all other symbolical fruits. It is
found in Italian, Flemish and German art, and also in the English
miniatures. There is a finely-executed Spanish miniature of the
sixteenth century in South Kensington Museum. The Pelican in her
Piety is in the centre and the border is formed of roses alternating
with strawberries. As a symbol it is not only widespread, but of
comparatively early origin. In Siena it appears as a flower of Heaven,
growing with lilies, violets and carnations, in the ‘Paradise’ of
Giovanni di Paolo painted in 1445;[345] and, almost at the same time,
a master of the Upper Rhine painted the well-known ‘Madonna of the
Strawberries,’[346] which represents the Virgin sitting upon the edge
of a raised bed filled with exquisitely-rendered strawberries. Behind
is a hedge of roses, and at her feet violets and lilies of the valley.
In the foreground is a small figure of the donor kneeling among tufts
of snowdrops. The snowdrop is rare as a symbol (though by no means
misplaced in a Madonna picture, having all the qualities, except the
perfume, of the lily of the valley), and it was probably the individual
fancy of the donor.
The strawberry is not mentioned in Scripture, neither does it seem
to have been remarked by those Fathers of the Church who concerned
themselves with symbolism, but it was very successful in its appeal
to the artists of the Renaissance. It is a very perfect fruit, with
neither thorns nor stone, but sweet, soft and delicious through and
through. Its flowers are of the whiteness of innocence and its leaves
almost of the sacred trefoil form, and since it grows upon the ground,
not on a tree, there is no possibility of its being the dread fruit of
the Tree of Knowledge.
Its meaning always appears to be the same; it is the symbol of perfect
righteousness, or the emblem of the righteous man whose fruits are
good works.
As the symbol of perfect righteousness, in Italy it is chiefly used in
‘Adorations,’ where the Infant Christ is laid upon the ground among the
grass. Botticelli seems to have been the first to have placed it among
the violets and daisies, but he had many followers, and a very charming
picture, with the little scarlet berries in the foreground, is the
‘Adoration’ by Perugino, now in Munich. Botticelli may, however, have
borrowed the symbol from Giovanni di Paolo,[347] who painted a small
minutely-finished picture of the Virgin, seated on a cushion, with
the Holy Child in her arms. Behind are fruit trees and strawberries,
violets and carnations are at her feet, and since it was usual in
Siena, in pictures where the Infant Saviour appears, to refer all
symbols to Him, they are His attributes. In German art of the fifteenth
century, on the other hand, the symbolical plants, including the
strawberry, which appears in the mystical ‘Enclosed Gardens,’ express
the virtues of Mary.
The symbolical strawberry is almost invariably accompanied by the
violet, from which we may gather that the truly fruitful soul is always
humble.
XXIV
FRUIT IN GARLANDS
Fruit in general signifies ‘the fruits of the Spirit--joy, peace and
love.’ And therefore the painters of Northern Italy wove peach and
plum, apples and grapes into heavy garlands, which they looped above
the place where the Holy Child sat enthroned upon His mother’s knee, or
they laid fresh, ripe fruit upon the step where the Virgin’s feet were
resting.
The wreath of fruit, when festooned behind or below a saint, was more
particularly a symbol of the good works of the righteous; when looped
above his head, it is a festal wreath equalling the victor’s crown.
Such a wreath is that of mingled fruit and flowers above the head of
Mantegna’s ‘Triumphant Saint George.’[348]
But the fruit in many of the devotional pictures of the earlier
Venetian masters would seem, like the rose gardens of Florence, to be
partly votive. They wished to give of their best, and the cool fruit
which came in high-piled boats to the gardenless city among the lagoons
seemed infinitely precious to them--more precious, for they were a
practical race of traders, than the fragile blossoms of ephemeral
flowers. Besides, except for pinks, which, judging from various
pictures, grew then as now in pots along the balconies, flowers to
serve as models were rare in Venice.
Garlands of fruit, excellently modelled but somewhat wanting in
softness and bloom, are especially remarkable in the work of the
pupils of Squarcione, who taught in Padua during the last half of the
fifteenth century. This famous School of Art is known to have been well
furnished with ancient marbles of Greek and Roman origin, and it is to
be supposed that there the pupils acquired a love for the classical
festooned wreath. Mantegna’s wreaths, and those in the earlier work
of Crivelli, are firmly bound and formal. But later, Crivelli laid
classicism aside, painting fruit with a freedom and profusion which is
quite his own, though there is ever the feeling that it is sculptured
and coloured stone, not soft and perfumed fruit-flesh. He, in one
picture, paints fruit decoratively, bound with its foliage into a sort
of bower for the Virgin, places it symbolically in the hand of the
Infant Christ, and also lays it as a votive offering at the Virgin’s
feet.[349]
In a picture by Giorgio Schiavone, another pupil of Squarcione, odd
little angels offer dishes of fruit to the Infant Christ.[350]
But, except in Northern Italy, fruit in garlands was more used in
decoration than in devotional pictures. Magnificent wreaths of carved
stone fruit and foliage droop on either side of the great circular
windows of Siena Cathedral; there are heavy painted wreaths of it
beneath the figures of the Apostles in the chapel of the Vatican
decorated by Fra Angelico; and the Della Robbias enclosed some of
their most lovely works, with apples, pears, lemons, pine-cones and
pomegranates, growing stiffly and beautifully into a symmetrical
border. Fruit-forms were, indeed, infinitely better suited to the
Della Robbia medium than were the delicate petals of flowers.
The Florentines, too, often placed their Madonnas in elaborate wooden
frames of carved and gilded fruit--remembering perhaps the epithet of
Saint Bernard, who styled the Virgin Mary ‘the sublime fruit of the
earth,’[351] finding in her the fulfilment of the prophecy:
‘In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious,
and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely.’[352]
But many of these garlands of fruit, or of mixed fruit and flowers,
are entirely decorative with no hidden meaning. They were a very usual
festal decoration in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and when
swung above the head of Memling’s ‘Enthroned Madonna,’[353] they are
no more a symbol than is the carpet beneath her feet, for an almost
identical wreath, held in place by the same small _putti_, is above the
throne in Gerard David’s ‘Judgment of Cambyses,’[354] while one which
is very similar hangs above the enthroned ‘Emperor Sigis mondo,’[355]
incised upon the pavement of Siena Cathedral. These wreaths distinguish
the throne as being more than an ordinary seat, but, beyond vaguely
indicating pomp and splendour, they have no special meaning.
[Illustration: _The Sacred Heart (19th Century--German)_]
THE PARADISE OF GIOVANNI DI PAOLO
In the Gallery of Siena there is a panel by Giovanni di Paola, the
contemporary and occasional assistant of the better-known Sano di
Pietro. The panel, which was painted in 1453, represents the Last
Judgment, and, naturally, it is the portion of it which is given to
Paradise, that is interesting because of its flower symbolism.
Heaven is depicted as a hill, for in the 15th century the prophet
Esdras was the authority relied on for descriptions of the heavenly
land, and Paradise, he says, has ‘seven mighty mountains on which grow
roses and lilies.’[356]
At the summit of the hill there are six fruit-bearing trees, for the
prophet continues, ‘Saith the Lord, ... I have sanctified and prepared
for thee twelve trees laden with diverse fruit.’[357]
There are six trees, not twelve, in this picture, for, by a convention
common enough in early art, where the space did not admit of a certain
number, that number was halved.
Beneath the trees wander the happy souls, of whom the greater part
appear to have taken holy orders when in the flesh. Those just arrived
are welcomed joyfully by the angels or by friends who had preceded them.
On the grassy bank there are lilies, the symbol of purity; the
carnation, equalling the rose as the flower of divine love, the violet
of humility and the strawberry, whose fruit symbolises the good works
of the righteous.
These are the values of the flowers as symbols; as emblems they
translate this Heaven as a perfected counter-part of the Church upon
Earth, ‘for’ says Durandus, commenting on the text, ‘See the smell of
my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed.’ ‘This
field is the Church, which is verdant with flowers, which shineth with
virtues, which is fragrant with good works; and wherein be the roses
of martyrs, the lilies of virgins, the violets of confessors, and the
verdure of beginners in the faith.’ Following the same authority, the
trees are emblems of righteous men, rich in good works.[358]
So for three different reasons the flowers in this painted Paradise
appealed to the devout. They help to give a realistic picture of
Heaven, presenting in form and colour the description of the prophet;
they express mystically the Christian graces; they represent, to the
instructed, the bands of martyrs, the choirs of virgins, and the
countless happy souls for which the painter had no space.
The little childish beings, with wounds upon their necks or sides, are
the Holy Innocents. Two climb up the lilies which are their attributes
as virgin martyrs. Though unbaptised, the Innocents, since they died
for Christ, were permitted to enter Heaven.
In the foreground, among the violets, are hares, the hare being an
ancient emblem of a Christian, founded upon the words of Tertullian:
‘Upon us, as were we hares, is the hunt let loose.’[359]
Also the early naturalists averred that the hare slept with his eyes
open; whence the prayer of Saint Mectilda:
‘Grant, O Lord, that, like the hare, I may watch for Thee in Spirit,
even while my body takes its needful repose.’[360]
[Illustration:
_Giovanni di Paolo_ _Photo Brogi_
PARADISE
(Instituto delle Belle Arti, Siena)]
THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN
BY
HUBERT VAN EYKE
On the 6th of May, 1432, the great altar-piece painted by Hubert and
Jan van Eyke, entitled ‘The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,’ was erected
as a finished work in the Church of S. Bavon in Ghent.
Each of its twelve panels is extremely interesting but the detail which
is most important in connection with flower symbolism is the crown of
the Madonna. Mary as Queen of Heaven, is seated on the right hand of
God the Father, her head is slightly bowed as she reads from the book
which she holds open.
Her crown is of gold, set with pearls, sapphires and rubies. Above each
large square-cut ruby is placed a lily with two dark-blue columbines
at its base. Above the sapphires and alternate with the lilies, are
roses, each surmounted by three slender stalks of lily of the valley. A
cluster of diaphanous gold stars form a sort of aureole.
The symbolism of jewels is complicated and confused, varying with
different authorities, but that of flowers is almost always unchanged.
In this crown the _lilium candidum_, which takes the place of the
golden fleurs-de-lys that ornament the crowns of earthly queens,
indicates the purity of body and of soul by which the Virgin had found
favour in God’s sight. The roses, three in number, denote the Divine
Love of the Holy Trinity, and since these are placed, though singly, in
a crown, they hold also some measure of heavenly joy.
The seven blooms of the columbine, symbolize the seven gifts of the
Holy Spirit, which, when attributed to the Virgin, are, Faith, Hope,
Charity, Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Strength.
The lily of the valley, found only in northern symbolism, typifies the
meekness and ‘low estate’ of the ‘hand-maid of the Lord.’
The twelve stars suggested by the starry crown of the Apocalypse, are
said by some authorities to represent the twelve Apostles, illustrating
Mary’s title of ‘Regina Apostolorum.’ The ‘great wonder’ had appeared
in Heaven and the lily-like maid was now a queen, ‘the woman clothed
with the sun, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’
[Illustration:
_Hubert van Eyke_
THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN
(From copy by Coxie, Alte Pinakothek, Munich)]
THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS
BY
HUGO VAN DER GOES.
There has been lately placed in the Uffizi Gallery, the large
‘Adoration of the Shepherds,’ by Hugo van der Goes, which was painted
between 1470 and 1475 by order of Tommaso Portinari, agent of the
Medici in Bruges, for the Chapel of the Florentine Hospital of Santa
Maria Nuova.
It is a tryptich. On the side wings are the donor and his family; in
the centre is the ‘Adoration of the Shepherds.’
Upon the ground in the courtyard of a stable, the Holy Child lies in
a pool of light emanating from Himself. His mother kneels beside Him,
and plain little angels with jewelled head-dresses form a circle round
them. To the right is a group of adoring shepherds--to the left Saint
Joseph.
In the foreground of the picture, before the Infant Christ, there lies
a sheaf of corn. There are also two vases. One is of pottery, with
a conventional design of grapes and vine leaves, and is filled with
orange lilies and the purple and the white iris. In the other, which
is of transparent glass, there is columbine and three red carnations;
upon the ground are scattered blue and white violets. Each flower is
painted with the most exquisite precision. Here the flower symbols
all emphasize the spiritual significance of the scene. The scattered
violets symbolize humility, for the King of Heaven lies on the ground
as a little Child. The white ones among them may denote the innocence
of His babyhood. The transparent glass so often seen in Annunciations,
is the symbol of His immaculate conception, the group of carnations,
alike in shape and colour, typifies the divine love of the triune
Godhead, which moved the Son to take a human form for our salvation.
The seven blossoms of the columbine, the flower of the dove, are
symbols of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit with which He was endowed
at birth. The lilies in the vase are His own emblem as the King of
Heaven, since He said: ‘I am the flower of the field, and the lily of
the valleys.’ They are not the _lilium candidum_, the flower of the
Madonna’s purity, but the royal lilies of the field, orange, purple and
white. Even Solomon, in gold, purple and fine linen, ‘was not arrayed
like one of these.’
Lastly there is the vine, pictured upon the vase, and the sheaf of
corn, the eucharistic substances which in the sacrifice of the Mass,
repeat the sacrifice for which He was born into the world as a little
child.
It has been said, and reproachfully, of the Northern artists that they
preferred gold, jewels and rich embroideries to the more ephemeral
loveliness of flowers. This dictum may be just when applied to the
early German schools; of Flemish Art it is not true. In this picture,
for instance, the little angels are richly dressed but not rose-crowned
like their Florentine cousins. They wear instead circlets of precious
stones and pearls, from which spring aigrettes with pendant jewels.
They carry no flowers and no flowers are used to fill vacant spaces in
the picture. Flowers are reserved instead for the highest use of all
and are placed in the forefront of the scene to represent the virtues
of the Holy One.
Hugo van der Goes has painted almost these same flowers of the
Adoration in his Fall.[361] Adam and Eve stand beneath the tree from
which Eve reaches an apple. The lizard-bodied tempter stands behind. In
the centre of the foreground, in front of the figures, is the iris, the
columbine, the violet, a rose-bush not yet in bloom and the strawberry.
There is also a pansy (which is rare as a symbol, except in England
where it was named Herb Trinity,) and its meaning in this picture does
not seem clear.
These flowers, used elsewhere as the emblems and attributes of Jesus
Christ, here are introduced to recall the coming of the ‘second Adam,’
exactly reversing the symbolism which places an apple in the hand of
the Infant Christ.
[Illustration:
_Hugo van der Goes_ _Photo Brogi_
THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS
(Uffizi Gallery, Florence)]
THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
BY
MURILLO
In the 17th century the Spanish Inquisition appointed certain
_familiares_ whose warrant ran:
‘We give him commission and charge him hence forward that he take
particular care to inspect and visit all paintings of sacred
subjects which may stand in shops or in public places; if he finds
anything to object to in them he is to take the picture before the
Lords of the Inquisition.’
Murillo, painting for the Church in Seville, the most orthodox city of
Spain, may therefore be reckoned correct in his method of presenting
sacred subjects. At the period in which he painted, the particular form
of Madonna picture most often ordered by the Spanish Church, was that
known as the ‘Immaculate Conception.’
The sinless birth of the Virgin was a dogma that had been adopted
enthusiastically by the Spanish, so much so that Philip III and Philip
IV sent special embassies to Rome to obtain more explicit papal
recognition of the doctrine. It did not, however, become an article
of faith till 1854 and, as a subject, it is chiefly confined to the
Spanish School.
The scheme of the picture is invariably taken from the Revelation of
St. John.
‘And there appeared a great wonder in Heaven; a woman clothed with
the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of
twelve stars.’
It was usual to add a group of _putti_ about the Virgin’s feet (her
feet, according to an injunction of the Inquisition as to ‘decency’
being carefully covered) and these _putti_ almost always carried
flowers, the rose, lily, olive and palm. Sometimes the iris was added,
and occasionally the iris alone was used.[362] Very often a _putto_
carries a looking-glass,[363] a symbol of the Immaculate Conception
which appears to be of Spanish origin, but which is perhaps a variation
or development of the transparent vase, which in the 15th century art
was a symbol of the virgin birth of Christ. The idea is that the glass,
whatever be the image cast upon it, remains in itself unstained.
In Murillo’s masterpiece, ‘_La Purissima_’ of the Prado, the flowers
indicate Mary’s virtues. The rose, symbol of love and mercy, show
her as the _Mater misericordiæ_; the lily shows her purity--she is
‘_La Purissima_:’ the palm of triumph is hers as the Queen of Heaven
and the olive tells of the healing she brings to mankind; she is the
_Consolatrix Afflictorum_.
And the Church having identified the Virgin with the ‘Wisdom’ of the
24th Chapter of Ecclesiasticus, these symbols are also her direct
emblems, for, says Wisdom:
‘I was exalted like a palm-tree in Engaddi, and as a rose-plant in
Jericho, as a fair olive-tree in a pleasant field.’
And the lily is always her emblem as ‘The lily of the valleys.’
It is noticeable that this figure of the Virgin, realized from the
word picture of the Revelation of Saint John, was one that appealed
strongly to the Spanish. She is ‘clothed with the sun and the moon
under her feet.’ The moon is represented as the crescent moon which was
the sacred device of the followers of Mahomet, and which had surmounted
innumerable mosques throughout the Iberian peninsula for more than
five hundred years. Ferdinand, husband of Isabella, put an end to
the Moorish dominion in 1492, but the impress of the Moor is to this
day strong on the land, and in the 17th century it seemed a fitting
thing that the Virgin’s foot should be upon the hated crescent which
symbolized Moorish rule and the faith of Islam. It was therefore, as
a symbol of the Mohamedan faith [rather than as a symbol of chastity
through its connection with the Goddess Diana, as is sometimes
suggested], that representations of the Virgin with her feet upon a
crescent, became so popular in Spain.
[Illustration:
_Murillo_ _Photo Anderson_
THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
(Prado, Madrid)]
THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY VIRGIN
BY
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
In the year 1848, three young English painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, founded the Preraphaelite
Brotherhood, the aim of which was to bring back to modern art the
sincerity of those painters who had preceded Raphael.
The original characteristics of the brotherhood’s work were a
simplicity in the types chosen and a workmanship almost Flemish in its
careful and minute finish. But later, and more particularly in the work
of Rossetti, ‘Preraphaelism’ became associated with a certain mysticism
of subject whose deeper meaning was accentuated and elucidated by the
use of symbols and more especially flower symbols.
Rossetti’s earliest exhibited work was ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,’
painted in 1849.
The Virgin with Saint Anne by her side, sits at an embroidery frame and
works upon a strip of red material the lily with two flowers and a bud
which grows in a vase before her. A little rosy winged angel waters the
lily, and, lying crossed upon the ground, is a seven-leaved palm and a
seven-thorned briar, united by a little scroll bearing the words ‘_Tot
dolores, tot gaudia_.’
The second part of the double sonnet written by the artist for this
picture explains to some extent the symbolism.
II
These are the symbols. On that cloth of red
I’ the centre is the Tripoint: perfect each
Except the second of its points, to teach
That Christ is not yet born. The books--whose head
Is golden charity, as Paul hath said--
Those virtues are wherein the soul is rich:
Therefore on them the lily standeth, which
Is innocence, being interpreted.
The seven-thorn’d briar and the palm seven-leaved,
Are her great sorrow and her great reward.
Until the end be full, the Holy One
Abides without. She soon shall have achieved
Her perfect purity: yea, God the Lord
Shall soon vouchsafe His Son to be her Son.
Behind the Virgin is the trellis of the ‘Enclosed Garden.’ Beyond--for
still the ‘Holy One abides without’--is the vine, emblem of the ‘True
Vine,’ the figure of Saint Joseph, who tends it, forecasting that he
would be the guardian of Christ’s infancy. Upon the trellis, up which
wreathes the white convolvulus, used in the 15th century as the symbol
of humility, sits the Holy Dove.
Finally, upon the balustrade is a rose in a transparent vase, the rose
of divine love conjoined with the symbol of transcendant purity.
[Illustration:
_Dante Gabriel Rossetti_ _Photo Mansell_
THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY VIRGIN]
LIST OF AUTHORITIES
Antony, Joseph, _Symbolik der Katholischen Kirchen Gebrauche_
Archæologia
Augustine, St, _Confessions_
Beaumont, de, _Recherches sur l’origine du Blazon et en particulier
la Fleur-de-Lis_
Bernard of Clairvaux, St, _Sermons_
_Biblia Pauperum_, Heidelberg Copy, 1440; German Ed., 1471,
Wolfenbüttel Copy
_Byzantine Guide to Painting_ (Didron’s Translation)
Dante, _Divina Commedia_
Didron, _Christian Iconography_
Durandus, _Rational of the Divine Offices_
Edmonson, _Complete Book of Heraldry_, 1780
Ford, _Spanish Handbook_ (First Edition)
Hirn, Yrjö, _The Sacred Shrine_
Huysman, J. K., _La Cathédrale_
Jacobus de Voragine, _Legenda Aurea_
Jameson, Mrs, _Sacred and Legendary Art_
Jenner, Mrs H., _Christian Symbolism_
Liebman, P. S., _Kleine Handwörterbuch der Christlichen Symbolik_
Martin, Arthur, _Mélanges d’Archéologie_
Mectilda, St, _Spiritual Grace_
Menzel, Wolfgang, _Christliche Symbolik_
Neale, J. M., _Hymni Ecclesiae_
Northcote and Brownlow, _Roma Sotterana_
Schmid, A., _Christliche Symbole aus alter und neuer Zeit_
Smith, _Classical Dictionary_
Strabo, Walafrid, _Hortulus_
_Syrian Codice of 586_, Laurentian Library
Taylor, Jeremy, _The History of the Life and Death of the Holy Jesus_
Tertullian
Twining, Louisa, _Symbols and Emblems_
Vasari, _Lives of the Painters_
Venturi, _Storia dell’ Arte Italiana_
INDEX OF ARTISTS
Angelico da Fiesole, 81, 90, 131, 144, 167, 245, 261
Antinoles, José, 216
Barabino, Niccolo, 122
Bellini, Giov., 232, 241
Bonfigli, 91, 158
Botticelli, 45, 71, 75, 85, 100, 119, 122, 123, 124, 128, 166, 213,
238, 246, 262, 263
Botticini, 77, 188, 213
Breu, Jörg, 107
Bruder Wilhelm, 210
Bürgkmair, Hans, 127, 255, 264
Cano, Alonzo, 128
Carotto, Giov. Franc., 188
Carpaccio, Vittore, 138
Cavallini, 59, 164
Cimabue, 138
Crivelli, 192, 257, 273
Donatello, 158
Duccio di Buoninsegna, 59, 144
Dürer, Albert, 39, 51, 68, 173
Filarete, Ant., 44
Francesca, Piero della, 140
Franciabigio, Francesco, 202
Fries, Hans, 156
Gaddi, Taddeo, 226
Ghirlandaio, Dom., 67, 167, 200
Giambono, 208
Giotto, 59, 157, 166, 200, 224, 226
Giovanni di Paolo, 177, 268, 270
Gozzoli, Benozzo, 98, 214
Grünwald, Mat., 255
Guariento, 180
Holbein, Hans, 256
Holman Hunt, 40, 129
Joos van Cleeve, 250
Leighton, Frederick, 48
Leonardo da Vinci, 12, 39, 166
Liberale da Verona, 222
Lippi, Fra Filippo, 45, 167, 186, 245, 261
Lochnar, Stephen, 210
Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 114, 142, 177, 181, 242
Lorenzo da San Severino, 258
Lucas van Leyden, 51, 227, 254
Luini, 93, 109, 231
Mabuse, 94, 119, 204, 239
Mantegna, 120, 127, 272
Maratta, Carlo, 39
Master of Flémalle, 63, 69, 165
Master of the Bartholomew Altar, 110, 195
Master of the Carnations, 86
Master of the Sterzing Altar, 144, 189
Memling, 50, 63, 65, 66, 100, 119, 168, 243, 245
Michael-Angelo Buonarroti, 12, 191
Moretto, 119, 158
Murillo, 75, 115, 233
Neri di Bicci, 45, 77, 245, 261
Niccolo d’Apulia, 164
Orcagna, 59, 179
Palmezzano da Forli, 68
Perréal, J., 158, 174
Perugino, 45, 276
Pesello, 67, 169, 192
Pinturicchio, 172
Pisano, 209
Podesti, 267
Raphael Santi da Urbino, 12, 93, 213
Robbia, Della, 274
Romano, Giulio, 214
Rosselli, Cosimo, 108, 158
Rossello di Jacopo Franchi, 188
Rossetti, D. G., 40, 175, 185, 199
Rubens, P. P., 20, 51, 140, 253
Sano di Pietro, 38, 242, 243
Sassetta, 223
Sassoferrato, 130
Schiavone, Giorgio, 274
Schöngaur, 123, 247
Schüchlin, Hans, 110
Seghers, 131
Signorelli Luca, 47, 74, 195, 204, 206, 231
Simone Martini, 59, 91, 117, 178, 179, 231
Sodoma (Bazzi), 109, 123, 213
Spinello Aretino, 142, 167, 181
Squarcione, 203
Stefano da Zevio (da Verona), 100
Taddeo di Bartolo, 167
Tobar, Alfonso da, 82
Trevisani, Francesco, 196
Van der Goes, Hugo, 65, 68, 85, 106, 108, 192, 252
Van der Weyden, Roger, 165
Van Eyck, Hubert, 12, 98, 106
Van Eyck, Jan, 63, 165, 167, 241
Vanni, Andrea, 177
Vasari, G., 248
Veronese, Paul, 228
Watts, F. G., 40
Wolgemut, 156
Zurburan, 76, 77, 12
INDEX OF FLOWERS
Acanthus, Chap. xii.
Almond, 197
Anemone, 60, 93
Apple, 14, 32, 94, 119, 240, Chap. xx.
Balsam, 197, 218
Briars, 33
Buckthorn, 33
Burning Bush, 132, 192
Carnation, Chap. vi., 190, 191
Cedar, 26, 217
Cherries, 243, 245
Clover, _see_ Shamrock
Columbine, 30; Chap. viii., 174, 198
Convolvulus, 29, 48
Cyclamen, 33
Daisy, 31, 45, 110, 167
Dandelion, 34, 195, 199
Fig, 255, 256
Fleur-de-lys, 36, Chap. xiii.
Flower, Community of the, 41
Flower, Our Lady of the, 81
Frankincense, 198
Fruit in Garlands, Chap. xxiv.
Gold flower, 73
Gourd, Chap. xxi.
Grapes, 238, 254
Heath, 29
Hellebore, 33
Hemlock, 130
Hyssop, 33
Iris, 36; Chap. iv., 168, 198
Ivy, 130
Jasmine, 31, 48, 167, 201
Laurel, 116, 177
Lemon, 241
Lettuce, 29
Lily, 14, 24; Chap. iii., 92, 198, 211, 215
Lily of Florence, 81
Lily of the Angel Gabriel, Chap. xv.
Lily of the Annunciation, Chap. xiv.
Lily of the Saints, Chap. xviii.
Lily of the Valley, 198, 207
Lilies of the Virgin’s Tomb, 213
Mandrake, 33
Musk flower, 197
Myrrh, 24, 25, 218
Myrtle, 197, 201
Nettle, 25, 33
Oleander, 227
Olive, 24, 36, Chap. ix.
Orange, 242
Palm, 24, 26, Chap. xi.
Palm-tree, 137, 138, 218
Pansy, 32
Passion Flower, 195
Pear, 119, 252
Pomegranate, 98, 119, 218, 245, Chap. xxii.
Poppy, 33
Quince, 119, 239, 241
Rose gardens, 97, 100
Rose garlands, Chap. vii.
Rose, golden, 101, 102, 103
Rose hedge, 99
Rose of Charity, 29, 208
Rose of Divine Love, 24, 28; Chap. v., 172, 190, 198
Rose of Martyrdom, 72
Rose of Venus, 101, 102, 103
Saffron, 26
Shamrock, 30, 191
Snowdrop, 269
Spices, 24
Strawberry, 45, 110; Chap. xxiii., 198
Sunflower, 199
Sycamore, 26
Thistle, 195
Thorns, 33, 77; Chap. x., 216
Thorns, Crown of, 126, 127, 128, 131
Turpentine Tree, 24
Vine, 23; Chap. xix.
Violet, 28, 45, 48, 110, 197, 198, 210
Water-lily, 29
Willow, 195
FOOTNOTES
[1] Dr March states very clearly the difference between a symbol and
an emblem. ‘A symbol stands for an abstract idea, an emblem denotes
a concrete thing, an attribute appears in apposition with the person
it qualifies; for example, in a presentment of the Blessed Virgin,
the lily that she holds in her hand or that flowers by her side is
her attribute. When the lily appears alone it represents the Queen of
Heaven and is her emblem, but if it indicates purity it is a symbol.’
[2] Ghent Cathedral.
[3] The Prado, Madrid.
[4] Antwerp Cathedral.
[5] Author of _Liber aggregationis, seu Liber mirabilium de virtutibus
herbarum, lapidum et animalium_.
[6] Authoress of _The Garden of Health_.
[7] ‘This is that herb which such physicians as are licensed to
blaspheme by authority without danger of having their tongues burned
through with a hot iron called an herb of the Trinity; it is also
called, by those who are more moderate, three faces in a hood ... and
in Sussex we call them pancies.’ Culpeper’s _Herbal_.
[8] C. Marriott.
[9] Corsini Gallery, Florence.
[10] Naples Museum.
[11] Stroganoff Collection, Rome.
[12] Accademia, Florence.
[13] Ex Convent of S. Apollonia, Florence.
[14] Bargello, Florence.
[15] Adoration, Pitti Palace, private apartments.
[16] Cathedral, Perugia.
[17] J. K. Huysmans, _La Cathédrale_.
[18] Attributed to Giotto. Collection of A. E. Street, Esq.
[19] Isaiah XXXV. 1.
[20] Wolfenbüttel Copy, Bibliothèque Nationale.
[21] Marienpfarrkirchen, Danzig.
[22] Town Museum, Leyden.
[23] ‘The Smaller Passion,’ British Museum.
[24] J. K. Huysmans, _La Cathédrale_.
[25] _Complete Book of Heraldry_, 1780. vol. i.
[26] ‘The effigies of the Kings of Navarre, successors to Garcias,
are still to be seen with this order about their necks in the Church
of St Mary at Nagera, St Saviour’s de Layra and St Mary la Reale of
Pompelona, as also in the church at Ronceneux, and at St John’s de la
Pigna.’ (Edmondson.)
[27] Now in Seville Cathedral.
[28] Solomon’s Song v. 9.
[29]
‘Ut ipsa corporis species simulacrum fuerit mentis.’
_De Verginit_, lib. ii. chap. 2.
[30] S. Maria Trastevere, Rome.
[31] National Gallery, London.
[32] Lower Church, Assisi.
[33] Uffizi, Florence.
[34] Or San Michele, Florence.
[35] Frankfort-on-the-Maine.
[36] Berlin.
[37] Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
[38] Royal Museum, Antwerp.
[39] Coll. Radziwill, Berlin.
[40] Royal Gallery, Berlin.
[41] Prado, Madrid.
[42] Uffizi, Florence.
[43] ‘Coronation of the Virgin,’ shrine of Saint Ursula, Bruges.
[44] ‘Christ surrounded by Angels,’ Royal Museum, Antwerp.
[45] ‘Madonna with the Child,’ Marienpfarrkirche, Danzig.
[46] _Purga_, xxix. 81.
[47] _See_ Chapter XIV., ‘The Lily of the Annunciation.’
[48] Accademia, Florence.
[49] The Brera, Milan.
[50] The Rudolphinum, Prague.
[51] Chaucer, _The Knight’s Tale_.
[52] Schifanoja Palace, Ferrara.
[53] Botticelli, Uffizi.
[54] Walter Pater, ‘Sandro Botticelli.’
[55] _Legenda Aurea._
[56] William Dunbar.
[57] _The Book of Spiritual Grace._
[58] Orvieto Cathedral.
[59] Accademia, Florence.
[60] The _Portincula_ or _Porzuincola_ (the little portion) built by
Saint Benedict and rebuilt by Saint Francis was the first church of the
Franciscan order. It is now enclosed by the Church of S. Maria degli
Angeli, and, close by, the rose-bushes of the legend, still thornless,
are shown.
[61] Prado, Madrid.
[62] Cadiz.
[63] Wilton House.
[64] Museo Provincial, Seville.
[65] Florence. To be placed in the Riccardi Palace.
[66] Palazzo Pitti.
[67] Robert de la Condamine, _The Upper Garden_.
[68] In the Bibliothèque de l’Arsénal, Paris.
[69] British Museum.
[70] Dante.
[71] In France at the same period it was very usual to place a
‘fleur-de-lys’ in the Madonna’s hand. For instance, the beautiful
statuette in silver gilt of the early fourteenth century, now in the
Louvre, carries a ‘fleur-de-lys’ of crystal in the right hand.
[72] The Prado, Madrid.
[73] Private apartments, Pitti Palace, Florence.
[74] Uffizi, Florence.
[75] An exception is the Assumption by Fungai in the Belle Arti
of Siena, where white roses and red carnations fill the tomb. The
prejudice appears to have been against the red rose.
[76] Kunst Museum, Bern.
[77] ‘The Key’ of Saint Melitus.
[78] ‘Hortulus,’ Walafrid Strabo.
[79] ‘Spiritual Grace,’ Saint Mectilda.
[80] The Wisdom of Solomon ii. 8.
[81] _Passio S.S. Jacobi, Mariani et aliorum martyrum in Numidia._
[82] _Sensations d’Italie._
[83] S. Maria Novella, Florence.
[84] The Brera, Milan.
[85] _Legenda Aurea._
[86] Prado, Madrid.
[87] Ghent Cathedral.
[88] _Paradiso_, xxx. 114.
[89] _Ibid._ 121.
[90] 2 Esdras ii. 18–19.
[91] Written by the monk Dionysius of Mount Athos in the twelfth
century. Translated by M. Didron.
[92] Adoration of the Lamb, Ghent Cathedral.
[93] Florence.
[94] Ruskin, _Modern Painters_.
[95] Town Museum, Frankfort-on-the-Maine.
[96] The Song of Solomon ii. 2.
[97] Museum, Verona.
[98] _Rat. Off._, iii. 18.
[99] _Trésor_ of Aix la Chapelle.
[100] Arthur Martin, _Mélanges d’Archéologie_.
[101] Opera del Duomo.
[102] Isaiah xi. 1–2.
[103] _Christian Iconography_, Didron.
[104] Ghent Cathedral.
[105] Uffizi Gallery.
[106] _Christian Iconography_, Didron.
[107] Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin.
[108] Uffizi Gallery.
[109] St Petersburg.
[110] Tiefenbronn Church.
[111] Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.
[112] Sophocles, _Œdipus Coloneus_.
[113] Smith’s _Classical Dictionary_.
[114] _De Baptismo_, c. viii.
[115] See title-page.
[116] Northcote and Brownlow, _Roma Sotterana_.
[117] Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.
[118] Taddeo di Bartolo, Sano di Pietro, Francesco di Giorgio Martini,
Belle Arti, Siena.
[119] No. 160, Belle Arti, Siena.
[120] Stefano di Giovanni, Belle Arti, Siena.
[121] _Trésor_ of Aix la Chapelle.
[122] _Trésor_ of the King of Bavaria.
[123] Milton.
[124] ‘The Nativity,’ National Gallery.
[125] ‘The Nativity,’ Belle Arti, Siena.
[126] Collection L. Mond, London.
[127] Durandus, _Rat. Off._, vi. 47–9.
[128] Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 14.
[129] _Lives of the Painters._
[130] Corsini Gallery, Florence.
[131] Monza.
[132] Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.
[133] Uffizi, Florence.
[134] Munich.
[135] Private apartments, Pitti Palace.
[136] Nierenberg.
[137] Mantegna, Belle Arti, Verona.
[138] Botticelli, Poldi Pezzoli Collection, Milan.
[139] Botticelli, Borghese Gallery, Rome.
[140] Museo Provincial, Seville.
[141] Collection of the Duchess of Fife.
[142] Royal Gallery, Augsburg.
[143] Sassoferrato, Church of S. Sabina, Rome.
[144] Accademia, Florence.
[145] Uffizi, Florence.
[146] _Der Goldene Schmiede._
[147] Munich.
[148] 1 Maccabees xiii. 51.
[149] Revelation vii.
[150] 2 Esdras ii. 45.
[151] Chaucer, _The Second Nonnes Tale_.
[152] A. Venturi, _Storia dell’ Arte Italiana_.
[153] _Ibid._
[154] _Rat. Off._
[155] S. Cecilia, Uffizi.
[156] Accademia, Venice.
[157] Dante.
[158] Rubens, Uffizi.
[159] Piero della Francesca, Uffizi.
[160] At Heidelberg.
[161] SS. Annunziata.
[162] Belle Arti, Siena.
[163] Lord Lindsay.
[164] Opera del Duomo, Siena.
[165] Sterzing, Rathaus.
[166] Opera del Duomo, Siena.
[167] Uffizi, Florence.
[168] W. Menzel, _Christliche Symbolik_.
[169] _Die Sinnbilder und Beiworte Mariens in der deutschen Literatur
und lateinischen Hymnenpoesie des Mittelalters._
[170] Rome.
[171] _Ibid._
[172] _Recherches sur l’origine du Blazon et en particulier la
Fleur-de-Lis._
[173] Ragalium Franciæ, Libro duo, 1545.
[174] In possession of Sir J. Tobin.
[175] S. Chiara, Naples.
[176] Westminster Abbey.
[177] Psalterium cum Figuris, Bib. National.
[178] Roman des Trois Pélerinages, Bib. S. Geneviève.
[179] St Martin in Vignes, Troyes.
[180] Germanisches Museum, Nuremburg.
[181] Scenes from the Passion, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
[182] Edmund G. Gardner, Florence.
[183] Louvre.
[184] Uffizi, Florence.
[185] First part of _King Henry VI_, Act I. sc. ii.
[186] Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, 1431.
[187] Florence.
[188] Rome.
[189] At Gaeta.
[190] British Museum.
[191] South Kensington Museum.
[192] Imperial Gallery, St Petersburg.
[193] Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
[194] Collection Mérode, Brussels.
[195] _Spanish Handbook_, first edition.
[196] Lower Church, Assisi.
[197] Uffizi, Florence.
[198] Pantheon, Rome.
[199] Uffizi, Florence.
[200] Belle Arti, Siena.
[201] SS. Annunziata, Arezzo.
[202] Museo di S. Marco, Florence.
[203] Uffizi, Florence.
[204] Vatican, Rome.
[205] Cathedral, S. Giminiano.
[206] National Gallery.
[207] Spedale degli Innocenti, Florence.
[208] _Lives of the Painters_, Titian.
[209] Diptych of Jeanne de Bourbon, Musée Condé, Chantilly.
[210] Collection of Prince U. Radziwill, Berlin.
[211] Royal Gallery, Berlin.
[212] British Museum.
[213] British Museum.
[214] W. Menzel, _Christliche Symbolik_.
[215] _Dies in lætitiæ_, Neale’s translation.
[216] The large transparent vase which stands beside the Madonna with
the Child, by Jean Perréal, in the Louvre, contains iris, the white
lily, lily of the valley and columbine.
[217] Duccio di Buoninsegna, National Gallery.
[218] Giovanni di Paolo, Vatican.
[219] Andrea Vanni, Collection Saracini, Siena.
[220] Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Belle Arti, Siena.
[221] Uffizi, Florence.
[222] Sacchetti.
[223] Museum of Padua.
[224] Vatican.
[225] Belle Arti, Siena.
[226] The Cathedral, Arezzo.
[227] Sermon on Ezekiel.
[228] Sermon on Amos and Zachariah.
[229] Tate Gallery.
[230] In the collection of Miss Hertz, Rome.
[231] Pinakothek, Munich.
[232] Milton.
[233] Botticini, Accademia; School of Botticelli, Accademia.
[234] Carotto, S. Eufemia, Verona.
[235] Alte Pinakothek.
[236] Rossello di Jacopo Franchi, Accademia, Florence.
[237] Luca Signorelli.
[238] Rathaus, Sterzing.
[239] Uffizi.
[240] Uffizi.
[241] Frankfort-on-Maine.
[242] S. Spirito, Florence.
[243] Yrjö Hirn, _The Sacred Shrine_.
[244] Wallraf Richartz Museum, Cologne.
[245] Uffizi.
[246] _Goldene Schmiede._
[247] Huysman, _La Cathédrale_.
[248] Collection of Lady Jekyll.
[249] Tate Gallery, London.
[250] Lower Church, Assisi.
[251] Accademia, Florence.
[252] Uffizi, Florence.
[253] _Goldene Schmiede._
[254] _Die Sinnbilder und Beiworte Mariens in der deutschen Literatur
und lateinischen Hymnenpoesie des Mittelalters._
[255] Uffizi, Florence.
[256] _Spiritual Grace._
[257] Pinacoteca, Arezzo.
[258] _Lives of the Painters_, Signorelli.
[259] Cathedral, Perugia.
[260] Accademia, Florence.
[261] Collection Pierpont Morgan, America.
[262] Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin.
[263] Cologne.
[264] Cologne.
[265] W. Menzel, _Christliche Symbolik_.
[266] Oratory of S. Bernardino, Siena.
[267] Vatican.
[268] National Gallery (now attributed to Botticini).
[269] Vatican.
[270] Vatican.
[271] Cathedral, Bagno di Romagna.
[272] Accademia, Florence.
[273] Robert Browning.
[274] Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
[275] Uffizi, Florence.
[276] Now in the Pinacoteca, Lucca.
[277] Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 17, 18, 20.
[278] _Cant. Cantic._ iv. 13.
[279] In Collection of the Duke of Devonshire.
[280] Cremona.
[281] Museum, Verona.
[282] A Sienese painter of the Franciscan Legend.
[283] Upper Church, Assisi.
[284] Capella dell’ Arena, Padua.
[285] Capella Baroncelli, Santa Croce, Florence.
[286] S. Girolamo Spello.
[287] Cathedral, Como.
[288] Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
[289] Rijks Museum, Amsterdam.
[290] _Archæologia_, vol. 45.
[291] Villa Masèr, near Treviso.
[292] S. Domenico, Siena.
[293] The name Catharine, it will be remembered, is from the Greek
_Katharos_, which has the same signification as the lily, _i.e._,
purity.
[294] Luini, S. Maurizio, Milan.
[295] S. Francesco, Assisi.
[296] Royal Gallery, Berlin.
[297] National Gallery, London.
[298] Seville Cathedral.
[299] Rome.
[300] Ghent Cathedral.
[301] Collection Gardener, Boston.
[302] Berlin.
[303] _Paradise Lost._
[304] Vatican.
[305] Brera, Milan.
[306] Uffizi.
[307] Museum, Brussels.
[308] Belle Arti, Siena.
[309] Belle Arti, Siena.
[310] _Ibid._
[311] Uffizi.
[312] _Goldene Schmiede._
[313] Uffizi.
[314] _Lives of the Painters._
[315] Joos van Cleeve, Royal Gallery, Brussels; Wolf Trant, National
Museum, Munich.
[316] Florence.
[317] Imperial Gallery, Vienna.
[318] Museum, Rouen.
[319] Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
[320] Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin.
[321] The ‘Chigi’ Madonna, Collection Gardener, Boston.
[322] W. Menzel, _Christliche Symbolik_.
[323] Museum. Colmar.
[324] German Museum, Nüremburg.
[325] Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe.
[326] Royal Gallery, Dresden.
[327] National Gallery.
[328] Museum, Berlin.
[329] Vatican Gallery.
[330] Capitoline Museum, Rome.
[331] National Gallery.
[332] “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s
belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the
heart of the earth” (Matt. xii. 40).
[333] Vatican Museum.
[334] Uffizi, Florence.
[335] Uffizi.
[336] Accademia, Florence.
[337] Pitti.
[338] Florence.
[339] German Museum, Nüremburg.
[340] Vatican Gallery.
[341] _Ibid._
[342] Dr Anselm Salzer, O.S.B. _Die Sinnbilder und Beiworte Mariens in
der deutschen Literatur und lateinischen Hymnenpoesie des Mittelalters_.
[343] Mrs Henry Jenner, _Christian Symbolism_.
[344] Vatican.
[345] Belle Arti, Siena.
[346] Town Museum, Solothurn.
[347] Belle Arti, Siena.
[348] Accademia, Venice.
[349] Brera, Milan.
[350] National Gallery, London.
[351] Sermon on the Assumption of the Virgin.
[352] Isaiah iv. 2.
[353] Imperial Gallery, Vienna.
[354] Town Museum, Bruges.
[355] Dom di Bartolo d’Asciano.
[356] II. Esdras II., 19.
[357] II. Esdras II., 18.
[358] Rat. Off. of Altars.
[359] Ad. Nat., 2, 3.
[360] Spiritual Grace.
[361] Imperial Gallery, Vienna.
[362] José Antolines, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
[363] Murillo, Prado, Madrid.
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