Chapter XX: THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY, VIRGIN (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) 286 (2)

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_.

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.

_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.