Chapter XX: THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY, VIRGIN (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) 286 (1)

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.

_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.