Chapter XX: THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY, VIRGIN (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) 286 (4)

On the other hand, some of the Florentine artists who had a special fondness for the flower, notably Fra Filippo Lippi,[206] and the Della Robbias,[207] use both, so doubling the symbolism; but it was more correct, where there was a vase of lilies, to show the angel with folded hands or with a branch of olive, or, as in the beautiful Annunciation of Jan van Eyck at St Petersburg, holding the herald’s wand. In Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation at Berlin, where Gabriel carries a magnificent bunch of lilies, there is no vase.

According to Northern tradition the true Annunciation lily should have no stamens, but this was a refinement of symbolism largely ignored by artists, who were discouraged probably by the insipid appearance of the flower when deprived of its gold-dusted centre. In Italy it was entirely neglected, but some painters of the sixteenth century have placed a tiny flame in the centre of each lily-cup; a burning flame, according to Vasari,[208] signifying eternal love.

There seems to have been sometimes a doubt in the minds of the Northern artists as to which was really the Madonna’s flower, the _lilium candidum_ or the iris, which so closely resembled in form the golden lilies on the royal shields of France and England.

Memling, who had painted the fleur-de-lys heraldically for the Duke of Burgundy,[209] seemed unable to decide, and in the vase of the Annunciation,[210] as well as in the vase which stands beside the enthroned Madonna,[211] he has placed an iris among the white lilies. Or possibly, with a deeper symbolism, taking the iris as the fleur-de-lys, the ancient symbol of royalty, which, with its three united petals, recalls also the nature of the Holy Trinity, he has striven to interpret florally the message of the angel, that God incarnate would spring from a lily-like virginity. It may not be without design that the iris in the Annunciation is overshadowed by the lilies, while in the picture where the Holy Child sits upon His Mother’s lap, the iris in the vase (in this case marked with the sacred monogram) has sprung upwards beyond the white lilies.

_Pinturicchio_ _Photo Alinari_

THE ROSE OF DIVINE LOVE RISING FROM A PRECIOUS VESSEL

(Borgia Apartment, Vatican)]

_Pesello_ _Photo Alinari_

THE ROYAL LILY SPRINGING FROM A HUMBLE VASE

(S. Spirito, Florence)]

In the Church of S. Spirito in Florence there is an altar-piece of the Annunciation which was at one time attributed to Botticelli and is now usually ascribed to Pesello. The vase, placed midway between the two figures, holds three purple irises. Perhaps the artist saw a symbol of the Holy Trinity in the three royal lilies growing on one stalk (though the Church held a belief in the incarnation of the Trinity in unity to be heresy), in which case the colour, the purple of humility, would be appropriate.

More difficult to explain is the symbolism of the vase of lilies in the Annunciation upon the cover of a psalter, in fine English needlework of the thirteenth century.[212] The book belonged to Anne, daughter of Sir Simon Felbrigge, and if the date given, the end of the thirteenth century, is correct, it is a very early instance of the Virgin’s vase of lilies. The figures have much dignity and sweep of line, but the lily, which is a fleur-de-lys in form, is red! Possibly in the garden of the country convent where embroidery was worked no liliums grew. The nun would therefore take the only lilies she knew, those of the royal standard. For colour she would remember that they surpassed Solomon in his glory. But, even so, the red lily argues an insensitiveness to symbolic values scarcely to be found among the Latins.

The original symbolism of the vase of lilies was simple. It signified the purity of the Maid of Nazareth, she of whom it was prophesied ‘A Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son.’ She does not hold the flower in her hand as do the virgin martyrs who preserved their purity through storm and stress, but it grows naturally beside her and merely typifies her girlhood. In the first half of the fifteenth century this seems to have been the invariable intention. But in the later half of that century the meaning was developed and amplified. Distinction was made between the vase and the flower it contained. In France and in Spain, where religious iconography is found in architectural detail rather than in pictorial decoration, the favourite arrangement of the Annunciation was to place the vase midway between the Virgin and the angel, a composition which from its equal balance was most decorative. The Virgin with drooping head and falling veil, Gabriel with curved wings, both leaning forward towards the central vase of lilies, formed an ideal filling for a lunette or the spandrels of an arch, and the simplicity of the group made it particularly suitable for sculpture, both in wood and stone. It is the central motive of many of the great carved and gilded reredos in Spain and of the simpler stone altars of France. The central vase of lilies had, however, a tendency to become ever larger, till, from being a detail, it became the important centre-point, and in some French Annunciations of the sixteenth century the uninstructed heathen would merely see two figures worshipping, apparently, a large vase of flowers.

In two Italian pictures, that of doubtful origin already mentioned which is in S. Spirito, and the Annunciation of Pinturicchio in the Vatican, where the large vase is placed exactly in the centre of the composition, the flowers within the vase are not white lilies; they are iris, the royal lily, in one case, and roses, the flower of divine love, in the other. Therefore the flower-filled vase was no longer strictly the symbol of the Virgin’s purity. A change, hinted at when Memling placed the iris among the lilies, had come about, for the flower which was the attribute of Jesus Christ was now rising from the vase and distinction had been made between the vase and the flower which it contained. Christ is the mystic flower springing from a lowly vessel. He is the flower, Mary the vase. The royal purple lily or the rose of love are, therefore, as appropriate a filling for the vase as was the lily, and there is no incongruity in any attitude of homage towards the vase on the part of the Virgin. But since the compound emblem was the emblem of the Immaculate Conception, naturally it is most often the lily of purity which fills the vase.

In the Annunciation of Albert Dürer’s ‘Smaller Passion’[213] the lily growing in its humble earthen pot undeniably refers to the perfect sinlessness of the soul which was yet to be born, for the flowers are still each tightly folded in its bud, while in the culminating scene of the series, where the Saviour sits in judgment, the lily, with each calyx fully expanded, is shown with the sword of justice behind His head.

Northern symbolism, always deeper and more complicated than that of the South, required that the vase which contained the lilies should be transparent, thus indicating the perfect purity of the body which enshrined the soul of perfect innocence. ‘In so far that the glass allows all surroundings to shine through without being itself harmed, it has become the symbol of the Immaculate Conception. Therefore in pictures of the Annunciation a blossoming lily stalk in a transparent glass is placed at the feet of the Virgin.’[214]

The same idea is traced in the thirteenth-century Christmas carol:

‘As the sunbeam through the glass
Passeth but not staineth,
So the Virgin as she was,
Virgin still remaineth.’[215]

And somewhat akin is the mirror which occasionally appears, held by an attendant _putto_ in a Spanish ‘Immaculate Conception.’

The transparent vase is not often seen in Italian Annunciations, for it was usual in Italy to place the stalk of lilies, a complete symbol in itself of virginity, in the angel’s hand, and there was no need to double the symbolism; but the painters of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in pictures of Mary with the Child or in a Holy Family, use the crystal vase frequently as an attribute of the Infant Saviour, filling it with those flowers which express His virtues, the violet of humility, the rose or carnation of divine love, the daisy of innocence, or the jasmine of heavenly hope.[216]

The actual number of blooms upon the lily stalk has also its significance. Some think they should be three in number, two fully opened flowers and one in bud, forming what Rossetti terms the ‘Tripoint.’

‘I’ the centre is the Tripoint: perfect each
Except the second of its points, to teach
That Christ is not yet born.’

Several of the masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries painted the two flowers with the bud or three fully-opened blooms, but more often, arguing possibly that this lily was the emblem of God the Son when made Man, and not of the Holy Trinity, they painted simply a natural lily plant with clustering buds and one or many blossoms, taking the whole plant as the symbol.

Sometimes the vase holds three distinct stalks of lilies with a single bloom on each, an arrangement which was suggested, it is said, by the Dominican legend of the doubting Master.

A Master of the Dominicans, unable to believe in the stainlessness of the Blessed Virgin, went to ask help of the saintly brother Egidius.

‘O Master of the Preachers,’ said Egidius, on meeting him, ‘Virgo ante partum.’ He struck the ground with his staff and from the spot there immediately sprang a lily. ‘O doubting Master,’ he said again, ‘Virgo in partu.’ He struck the earth and again a lily sprang. He spoke a third time, ‘O my brother, Virgo post partum,’ a third lily bloomed, and the Master of the Dominicans doubted no more.

A detached vase holding three lily blooms occurs frequently as the motive of an architectural decoration executed in low relief, one beautiful example being above the door of the Badia Church of Florence. But it is not confined to buildings of Dominican origin, and the arrangement seems to owe its popularity more to its symmetry than to any supporting legend. In pictures, where greater freedom of treatment is desirable, the lilies are one, two, three or more--there is no rule.

XV

THE LILY OF THE ANGEL GABRIEL

In the majority of the Annunciations which were painted during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the archangel Gabriel carries a lily. In the earliest representations of the subject he has simply a herald’s wand, which in later Byzantine art usually terminated in a fleur-de-lys, the ancient symbol of royalty, or in a more or less elaborate cross. More rarely he carries a scroll on which are inscribed the words of his message.

In the early Sienese school he still holds the herald’s wand,[217] or brings to the Virgin a branch of olive,[218] the symbol of peace and goodwill. Once at least he holds a branch of laurel,[219] the meed of those who excel, and sometimes the palm[220] of victory over sin.

In the famous Annunciation of Simone Martini,[221] Gabriel, who carries a branch of olive, is also olive-crowned, and this seems to be the proper symbolism of the subject. The messenger of God, crowned with peace, brings the olive branch of reconciliation between God and man to the Virgin, beside whom stands a vase filled with the lilies which symbolize her purity. The dove hovers above.

It has not been decided which artist was the first to place the stalk of lilies in the angel Gabriel’s hand, and first had come the lovely symbol of the vase of lilies by the Virgin’s side. But in the Annunciation, which forms part of Simone Martini’s polyptych in the Museum of Antwerp, we find the herald’s wand just turning to a lily. Professor A. Venturi, in his magnificent _History of Italian Art_, describes it. The angel ‘holds a lily with a long stem, which is all white. Thus the stick or sceptre of ivory, which we have already seen in Duccio’s picture, has become partly stick, partly lily-stem. With Duccio it is still the sceptre with three points, that Gabriel, messenger of God, holds as sign of authority. But look how the three points change themselves to lily-buds, and open the corolla, as the archangel extends the candid flower towards the Virgin, who was saluted by David and the Fathers as “The lily of the valleys.” The poetry of Christian art thus overthrows mediæval materialism and lavishes flowers on fair likenesses of Mary.’

In this Annunciation we find the three types of lilies used in art--the lily growing freely and naturally in a vase beside the Virgin; the stiff lily, half conventionalized in the angel’s hand; and the fleurs-de-lys, wholly conventional, which ornament the arms of the Virgin’s seat.

Simone Martini died in 1344, and by 1359, the date of its completion, every Florentine artist must have seen the wonderful tabernacle raised by Orcagna in Or San Michele, and every artist in Italy must have heard descriptions of the shrine.

‘Che passa di bellezza, s’io ben recolo,
Tutti gli altri che son dentro del secolo.’[222]

On a panel of the Tabernacle there is an Annunciation which was the most beautiful representation of the subject so far given to the world, and the kneeling angel with the sweeping wings carries in his left hand a heavy stalk of _lilium candidum_.

It is interesting to trace the evolution of the straight smooth stick which the angel held in the earliest representations of the Annunciation into the natural branch of lilies carried by the typical Announcing Angel of Christian art. First we find upon the wand the three-pointed fleur-de-lys, which from the days of the Assyrians had ornamented the royal sceptre. The heavenly herald bore a wand ornamented with the royal symbol when he brought a message from the Lord of the Universe to the Maiden of the House of David, who was to be the Mother of His Son. Gradually the fleur-de-lys gained some likeness to the natural lily. The sceptre was made of ivory. It was white. Two leaves appeared wreathing the stick. Midway in the transformation are the lilies carried by the lovely choir of seated angels in a picture by Guariento.[223] Each angel holds in his left hand an orb and in the right a straight lily stem with leaves growing naturally up its whole length. At the top is a single flower, which, seen in profile, has the shape of the fleur-de-lys. Simone Martini indicates the blossom’s cup-like form. With Orcagna we find the fully-realized stem of lilies. One unidentified master of the fourteenth century[224] went even further in botanical fidelity, and paints the bulb and pendent rootlets, though, strangely enough, he at the same time keeps to the old convention and places a scroll in the hand of both Madonna and angel.

Meanwhile, in 1344, Ambrogio di Lorenzetti had painted an Annunciation[225] in which the angel, crowned with olive, holds the palm branch with which the ancient Romans were accustomed to salute a conqueror. The symbol of the palm was used also by Spinello Aretino,[226] a pupil of Giotto, and was supported by Dante, who describes the angel Gabriel as:

‘He that bore the palm
Down unto Mary, when the Son of God
Vouchsafed to clothe Him in terrestrial weeds.’

But it did not come into general use in this connection, and chiefly for the reason that the palm became consecrated to representations of the last scenes of the Virgin’s life. The _Legenda Aurea_, when recounting how the angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin her approaching death, states: ‘He (Gabriel) gave her a branch of palm from Paradise, which he commanded should be borne before her bier.’

The palm was, therefore, a necessary detail in this scene, and it was probably to avoid confusion between these two separate appearances of the angel to the Virgin that the palm has been reserved entirely for the last Annunciation. The religious sentiment of the age forbade the portrayal of any sign of decrepitude in the Virgin even at the hour of her death, and except for the substitution of the palm for the lily and the reversal of the usual places of the figures, the Virgin being placed on the left and the angel on the right, it would be difficult to distinguish the scene where the Virgin receives the news of her approaching death, from that in which her approaching motherhood is announced to her.

It became the general rule, then, for Gabriel, as the angel of the Annunciation of the Saviour’s birth, to carry a lily. But the rule was not invariable. The early Flemish artists, half painters, half craftsmen, loved to depict the delicately-chiselled gold of jewelled sceptres topped by an elaborate fleur-de-lys or the cross-surmounted orb which signified the sovereignty of Christ upon earth. These precious sceptres accorded well with the opulent and prosaic comfort of the surroundings in which they set the sacred drama, and reflect the spirit of the Northern mystics. The clear detailed visions of Saint Matilda, the inspired nun of Saxony, which occurred during the last half of the thirteenth century, and whose imagery has distinctly influenced Northern religious art, fairly scintillate with mystical gems. Even the roses and the lilies, symbols, she tells us, of divine love and innocence, which she saw in her glimpses of Heaven, were embroidered in gold and silver thread upon rich stuffs or cloth of gold.

Italian art had different traditions. It began with the utter simplicity of Giotto and Fra Angelico, though the Byzantine love of rich trappings still lingered in Siena. As Florentine art progressed it did indeed become more elaborate, till its inclination to magnificence was severely checked by Savonarola, whose influence on art has usually been wrongly estimated. He was no blind iconoclast, though without doubt objects of great artistic worth were burnt in his famous holocaust of ‘vanities,’ which finished the Carnival of 1497. On the contrary, as Senator Pasquale Villari points out, he was always surrounded by the best artists of his century. Fra Bartolommeo, for four years after his death, did not touch a brush, such was his grief. The Della Robbias were devoted to him; two received the habit from his hands. Lorenzo di Credi was his partisan; Cronaca ‘would speak of nothing but the things of Savonarola.’ Botticelli illustrated his works, and Michael Angelo was a most constant listener to his preaching.

He spoke plainly to the painters from his pulpit. The beauty of the Divinity, of the Virgin and the Saints was the beauty of holiness, not of outward adornment of fine raiment, gold and jewels, and ‘the beauty of man or woman in so far as it approaches to the primal beauty, so is it great and more perfect.’[227]

We read of the Virgin that by her great beauty the men who saw her were astonished (stupefatti).

... ‘Do you believe that she went about in the manner in which you paint her? I say to you that she went dressed as a poor woman!’[228]

But he who taught for choice beneath the damask rose in the centre of his cloister admitted roses and lilies where he denounced rubies and pearls. Flowers alone survived as emblems or as votive decoration even after the puritanical current towards the ideal set in motion by the great Dominican became merged in the over-sweeping wave of classicism--and even those late artists who dispensed with every other convention for the expression of the abstract, placed a lily in the angel Gabriel’s hand.

Modern art has adopted the tradition and in the ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ of Rossetti[229] the wingless angel carries a stalk of lilies. There is also a white lily embroidered upon the strip of material which is stretched upon an embroidery frame at the foot of Mary’s bed.

The angel brings the lily to the Virgin in recognition of her perfect purity, the transcendent quality by which alone she found favour with God. Through it tremendous honour came upon her, and by the marvellous nature of that honour she was eternally bound to her virginity. ‘Mary Virgin, ever a Virgin.’ In a very charming picture by Filippo Lippi,[230] Mary, with bent head, and fully understanding the grave significance of the gift, reverently accepts the lily which the angel Gabriel places in her hand.

In another Annunciation by Filippo Lippi,[231] a second angel, peeping through the entry behind Gabriel, also carries a lily, but it is a fancy which seems to have no particular significance and rather impairs the dignity of the subject.

So constantly did painters and sculptors of the Annunciation place a lily in the archangel Gabriel’s hand that it gradually became his special attribute, which he wore, as a knight did his crest, to distinguish him from other angels and archangels.

In the apocryphal Book of Tobit is the story of Tobias, who was accompanied by the angel Raphael on the famous journey which he took to recover his father’s money, a journey in which he not only caught the fish whose gall was to cure his father’s blindness, but also found a wife. It is the only subject from the Apocrypha which now decorates Christian churches, and owes this grace to the force with which the story, despite its fantastic details, illustrates the constant watchfulness of Heaven over those still on their earthly pilgrimage. In the fifteenth century it was a favourite subject for a votive picture on behalf of one about to take a journey. The young man, rather helpless in his youth and inexperience, protected by the strong, wise guardian angel, was a group painted with the greatest pleasure, and the fascination of ideal, sexless beauty, of curved, sweeping wings, tempted to an amplification of the subject, and though the Book of Tobit mentions one archangel only--

‘... The affable archangel
Raphael; the sociable spirit that deign’d
To travel with Tobias, and secured
His marriage with the seven-times wedded maid--’[232]

there suddenly sprang up in Florence a short-lived fashion for depicting Tobias with three archangels.

There are two of these pictures in Florence;[233] others at Verona,[234] Turin[235] and Munich.[236] In each Michael is armed, Raphael grasps Tobias by the hand, and Gabriel carries a branch of lilies.

But the four figures in a row make an awkward composition, and stiffness is avoided at the expense of dignity. A mincing angel, too conscious of his pretty wings and daintily-held lily, is the Gabriel of the best known of these pictures, attributed of late years to Botticini.

_Jörg Brue_

THE COLUMBINE OF THE SEVEN GIFTS

(Berlin)]

_The Master of Flémalle_ _Photo Hanfstängl_

SAINT BARBARA WITH THE ROYAL LILY

(Prado)]

The lily is, of course, here used non-symbolically, merely to distinguish one archangel from another, and for the same reason that Michael is given the sword and frequently the scales for the weighing of souls, Raphael the traveller’s staff and gourd, or, when with Tobias, a small box. The angel Gabriel’s primary function is to be the herald of God, as it is Michael’s to lead the hosts of Heaven, and Raphael’s to guide the straying. Therefore Gabriel carries the herald’s wand, now developed to a lily, Michael the sword, and Raphael the staff.

Thus Gabriel, when in company with other archangels and angels, carries the lily to establish his identity, but where, as in a Coronation[237] or an Enthroned Madonna, he stands with Saint Michael guarding the throne, he usually holds also a scroll with ‘AVE MARIA’ upon it, showing that the main function of the lily is to proclaim the spotlessness of the Virgin.

A rather charming treatment of the Annunciation lily, which originated in Germany, is to strew the lily heads upon the floor. They then have the appearance of having fallen from Heaven in a shower, like those falling roses, symbols of divine love, which were so often painted by the artists of Italy and Spain. ‘The Master of the Sterzinger Altar’[238] introduces seven of these lily blooms and buds, snapped off short, and with only an inch or two of stalk, into his fine Annunciation painted in 1458, and, satisfied with these, he uses lilies neither in a vase nor in the angel’s hand. Other artists of his day liked the fancy well, but wished to keep the mystic vase, so, to avoid doubling the symbol, they turned the fallen flowers to roses, or roses and carnations, symbols of the divine favour which had fallen upon the maid. It was a graceful exposition of the underlying meaning of the scene, symbolically right and delightful in pictorial effect.

XVI

THE FLOWERS OF THE DIVINITY

The only growing thing which is used to represent the Trinity in Unity is the trefoil or shamrock. Saint Patrick is said to have plucked from the ground a leaf of shamrock and by it illustrated to the heathen Irish the mystery of the Triune Godhead. Architectural details, and more especially windows, based upon the trefoil’s form, are common in Gothic churches. In pictorial art it is rather unusual as an emblem, but Michael Angelo, who so rarely used symbolical detail, paints the triple-leaved plant and no other leaf or flower in the foreground of his Holy Family.[239]

But though the trefoil is the only direct floral emblem of the Trinity, distinct reference to it is often found in the triple grouping of the flowers which are the attributes of the Saviour. For instance, the three carnations of divine love in the crystal vase before the Infant Christ in Hugo van der Goes’ ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’;[240] the three lilies (one in bud) which the angel holds in Crivelli’s ‘Annunciation’;[241] and the three irises in the Annunciation of Pesello.[242]

There is no plant or flower used as the emblem of God the Father. From time to time the Hebrew metaphor of the Burning Bush has been used pictorially to indicate His presence; but as early as the fifth century this image was appropriated to express the purity of the Virgin Mother, enveloped but not consumed by the divine love.

In the Catacombs and on many mediæval crucifixes the Person of God the Father is indicated by a hand issuing from the clouds and holding a wreath of laurel, palm or olive. But the wreath in this case is not the attribute of the Divine Father, but the attribute of him above whose head the wreath is held. In the Catacombs it is the martyr’s crown; on the crucifix it is Christ’s crown of victory over sin.

As already mentioned, the lily of purity and the olive branch of peace are occasionally used as the attributes of God the Holy Ghost. As His direct emblem the dove only is employed, since Scripture states that He descended in ‘the form of a dove.’ Sometimes in French manuscripts of the fourteenth century He is represented in human form, but such representations are seldom found elsewhere.

Poetry and art have enwreathed the entire life of Jesus Christ with flowers.

‘The Annunciation was the festival of early spring. Christ, whose birth was foretold by Gabriel, was a flower that blossomed from the stem of Jesse; His Mother, to whom the imagery of the Song of Solomon was applied, was a flower of the fields and a “lily of the valley.” And the place where the Annunciation occurred had a name, Nazareth, which in Hebrew, according to an old but incorrect interpretation, means flower. Such a meeting of associations was naturally not left unutilized by the theological authors. It was often set forth in sermons how the promise of the birth of God as man was connected with the spring’s promise of flowers and fruit. S. Bernard in particular worked out the flower symbolism of the Annunciation in poetic and ingenious conceits. The flower, he said, had been willing, at the time of flowering, to be born of a flower in a flower--_i.e._, Jesus permitted Himself to be announced to Mary at Nazareth in the spring: “Flos nasci voluit de flore, in flore, et floris tempore.”’[243]

So we find a stem of lilies or a vase of flowers as the symbol of His miraculous birth, and on the morning of His nativity rejoicing angels carried olive branches as they sang of peace on earth and goodwill towards men. A helpless Infant, He lay upon the ground to receive the Adoration of His Mother and of angels, among roses of love and lilies of purity, or in grass thick with the daisies, violets and strawberries which told of His innocence, humility and righteousness.

As a boy, growing perhaps to a consciousness of His mission, in Spain He is found with thorny roses, wounding Himself sometimes with the thorns of grief and suffering springing from His divine love itself.

Early devotional art left Christ’s life with its miracles and parables and passed to His Passion. For the entry into Jerusalem there is the palm of victory and the olive branch of peace. In the Ecce Homo He wears the Crown of Thorns, and the reed as a sceptre is placed in His hand. For the Crucifixion Signorelli painted below the Cross many pleasant flowers, among which are noticeable the violet and daisy. But the Northern schools reserved for this scene the bitter herbs and flowers, the willow, dandelion and thistle. These weeds, carefully chosen and painted with marvellous minuteness, fill the foreground in the Crucifixion by an unnamed German master in the National Gallery.

In the last scenes of all of the divine tragedy there is no symbol but the Crown of Thorns, and to the Resurrection no flower is specially dedicated. But in the Thomas Altar,[244] by the Master of the Bartholomew Altar, the newly-risen Christ is shown, and round His feet, upon the marble step, are lying blossoms of violets and daisies and seven heads of the holy columbine.

The passion flower does not appear in art before the seventeenth century. It was unknown in Europe before the Spanish conquest of South America, and it is said that when the Jesuits brought home reports of the miraculous flower bearing the insignia of the Passion, which grew from tree to tree in the forests of the new land, their tale was first received as a pious invention. But the plant itself at length arrived, and early in the eighteenth century Francesco Trevisani painted a delightful little picture[245] less noticed than it deserves to be. The Virgin, who is very sweet and gentle, both in pose and expression, sits sewing beside a table on which is a vase of roses and lilies. The little Christ, who has apparently just run in from the garden, points out to His Mother, with a most childlike gesture, the little thorny crown upon the passion flower which He holds in His hand. The picture, which is not unlike the work of Andrea del Sarto in miniature, is wonderfully attractive.

XVII

THE FLOWERS OF THE VIRGIN

There were many flowers used by the early writers as similes of the Virgin.

‘Thou art the myrtle and the blooming rose of Paradise,
Thou art the fairness of heaven, and
The feast-day of our hearts,’

wrote Saint Petrus Damiani in the eleventh century.

In Saint Bernard we read:

‘Mary is the violet of humility, the lily of chastity and the rose of charity.’

Conrad von Würtzburg compares her to the balsam of purest perfume, the fairest among flowers, the cedar of Lebanon, the cypress of Zion, fennel and mint, the white lily, the early flowering almond, the healing mandrake, the musk-flower, the evergreen myrtle, the low nard, the thornless rose in the dew of heaven, the noble frankincense and the hidden violet, and further addresses her as

‘A living Paradise
Of grandly coloured flowers.’[246]

But though poets, and particularly German poets, ranged widely through the fields in their search for blossoms which by their beauty or by their healing virtues were fit to symbolize the Virgin, the early artists painted very few. In those mystical Enclosed Gardens which so charmed the Germans of the fifteenth century, only a few plants appear. The lily, which is often the lily of the valley, the rose, the violet, and the strawberry, are the most usual. Later the iris, the royal lily, was added, and sometimes the seven-blossomed columbine. Occasionally in Italy the jasmine and the daisy are also found in the vase beside her, but all other flowers of the garden and field, the tulip, anemone, ranunculus, primrose, daffodil, dahlia, etc., were rigidly excluded.

It will be noticed that, with the exception of the rose, all the flowers of the Virgin are white or blue, her own colours. An exception, which is unique, is the golden sunflower springing from her halo on a twelfth-century window in the Church of St Rémi at Reims, and even that is not exclusively hers, since Saint John, on the other side, bears the same flower. White and blue are the two colours which are held most sacred in the Christian Church. White, symbol of the Supreme Being and of the Eternal Truth, is used in the ornaments for the feast of Our Lord and of the Virgin, for it announces loving-kindness, virginity and charity.[247] Blue is the symbol of chastity, innocence and candour. Only one yellow flower is used symbolically, and that only in scenes from the Passion, by artists of the early Flemish and German schools. It is the dandelion, and its significance is, apparently, bitterness of grief.

The white lily, which symbolizes purity, is found chiefly in pictures of the Annunciation, but it has been introduced in many other scenes from the life of the Virgin. In the first exhibited painting by Rossetti, entitled ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,’[248] the Virgin, in grey robes, is seated at a curiously-shaped frame embroidering a white lily upon a ground of red material. The flower she is copying grows in a vase beside her and an angel with rose-coloured wings waters it. St Anne stands near, and in the background Joachim trims a trellised vine upon which the Holy Dove is perched. In the ‘_Ecce Ancilla Domini_’[249] of Rossetti, this same strip of embroidery, now finished, hangs beside the bed.

The older artists paint no lily in the early scenes of the Virgin’s life; it first appears at the Annunciation, where it was used so repeatedly that it became in itself the symbol of the miraculous birth of Our Lord. Giotto brings it forward in the ‘Visitation.’[250] Elizabeth, hurrying from the house to meet the Virgin, passes beneath a portico on which blooms a large vase of lilies.

There are endless pictures representing the Virgin seated with the Holy Child, in which a vase of lilies is placed as a votive offering before her feet, or lilies are held by attendant angels. One of the earliest of these pictures is the ‘Enthroned Madonna’[251] of Giotto. Two angels offer golden vases filled with lilies and roses. The angels have searched Paradise for its most precious flowers and have chosen those which symbolize purity and divine love. As the symbol of divine love the roses are very appropriately mixed with the lilies in the vase which Ghirlandaio[252] places on the lowest step of the Madonna’s throne. He has also added the starry wild white campion which closely resembles jasmine, a flower never definitely accorded to the Queen of Heaven by the symbolists of the Church, but its clear starlike form bringing to mind both her title _Stella Maris_ and the starry crown described by Saint John, painters frequently use it, and white flowers of the same shape, as her attribute.

But the appearance of the jasmine in the Madonna pictures may in part be owing to some confusion between the jasmine and the myrtle, for the latter was quite definitely one of the Virgin’s flowers and is even used when addressing her in metaphor.

‘O myrtle tree of Paradise
So richly hung with fruit.’[253]

Dr Anselm Saltzer, O.S.B., writes: ‘The Greeks and Romans held the myrtle to be the symbol of beauty, youth and marriage, because of its delightful perfume, its evergreen leaves, white blossoms and aromatic berries. In connection with Mary, the myrtle serves as a figure of her purity and other virtues as well as of her influence over the unruly impulses of the human soul.’[254]

Francesco Franciabigio[255] places a vase of single white roses at the Virgin’s feet. Double roses, pink or red, are the symbol of divine love, the love of Christ for His Church upon earth, and the white single roses might be the symbol of the passionless love of the ‘_Mater Consolatrix_.’

These flowers, placed in vases before the Virgin, are usually significant and appropriate, but they are really more votive than symbolical. The Latins had brought to the shrine of Venus the myrtle and roses, the apples and poppies that were sacred to her, and painters of Central Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the same desire to present and sacrifice to their Lady the flowers which were by association peculiarly hers, painted roses and lilies carefully and beautifully in the foreground of her pictures. It was their gift to the Madonna, as the paper roses on so many modern altars and the wild flowers on the wayside shrines are also gifts.

In Northern Italy, particularly among those who studied in the school of Squarcione, fruit took the place of the votive flowers, and is laid before the Madonna and the Child, or hung in garlands across the upper part of the picture.

The painters of the Italian Renaissance, in spite of diligent classical study, were probably quite unconscious of this survival of paganism in their work. But the ancient traditions of the soil did crop up from time to time, in the same way that traces of the Norse conception of Heaven as a magnificent big-game hunt appear occasionally beneath the symbolism of Christian mediæval art in Germany.

North of the Alps, where the pre-Christian sacrifices had usually run with blood, there was no inherited love of floral offerings, and we seldom find these votive vases or wreaths.

The Madonna attributed to Mabuse in the Prado has a large vase of roses placed directly below her, but as a rule in Northern art the flowers are introduced strictly as symbols to recall some aspect or function of the Virgin or of her Divine Son.

In an ‘Adoration’ the surrounding angels bring their roses and their lilies in tribute to the sinless Child. As Saint Mectilda says:

‘The lily figures His innocence and the rose His invincible patience.’[256]

Where the Virgin is seated enthroned, surrounded by saints and angels, even though the Holy Child is upon her knee, all symbols except that which the Child holds in His hand refer again to her.

It is rare, however, that, when holding the Child, she carries her own attribute herself. Usually the symbols, flowers or fruit, are held by angels or laid beside her throne, but in the large ‘Enthroned Madonna’ of Signorelli,[257] a painter who showed some originality in his use of symbols, Mary encircles the Child with her right arm and in her left hand holds a handsome stalk of lilies. That the flower refers to the wonder of her own purity in conjunction with her motherhood, and not to the Child’s sinlessness, is proved by the words on the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah, who stands below gazing up at her with rapture:

‘Behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son.’

Vasari says of this work:[258] ‘In his old age he painted a picture for the brotherhood of San Girolamo in Arezzo, partly at the cost of Messer Niccolò Gamurrini, doctor of laws, and auditor of the Ruota, whose portrait, taken from life, is in the picture; he is kneeling before the Madonna, to whose protection he is recommended by Saint Nicholas. In the same work are figures of Saint Donatus and Saint Stephen, with that of Saint Jerome, undraped, beneath; there is likewise a figure of David singing to a psaltery with two prophets who are seen, by the written scrolls which they hold in their hands, to be engaged in a conference on the conception of the Virgin.’

In another altar-piece by Signorelli[259] it is the Infant Christ who carries the lily, the symbol of His own sinlessness. In this picture all the symbolism refers to the Holy Child, not to the Virgin, which is unusual in an ‘Enthroned Madonna.’ But the scroll upon the cross of the Baptist, with the words ‘_Ecce Agnus Dei_,’ directs the devotion of the worshipper to the Son.

In still another of Signorelli’s compositions[260] the archangel Michael stands on one side of the Madonna’s throne with his scales for the weighing of souls, and Gabriel upon the other side with a large stalk of lilies. The latter carries the lilies, not merely as his own attribute, to denote that he is Gabriel, but also in greeting to the Madonna, for in his other hand he holds a scroll with the words, ‘_Ave Maria, gratia plena_.’

There is a Madonna and Child by Fra Angelico,[261] where the Virgin, whose features are more strongly marked than is usual with the Master, holds in her right hand a vase in which are three roses and a stem of lilies. Her left arm is round the Child, whose little hand grasps a single lily cup. The composition is not pleasing, for the Mother is embarrassed and encumbered by the great vase; also the symbolism is not very clear, but apparently the roses and the lily in the vase are the attributes of Mary, while the flower in His hand refers to the Holy Child.

There are very few flowers which are placed within the hand of the Madonna. In Italy she sometimes holds the _lilium candidum_ of the virgin saints in her character of Queen of Virgins. In Germany and the Tyrol the large white lily is replaced by the native lily-of-the-valley; and in the ‘Madonna with the Siskin’[262] of Albert Dürer she accepts some sprays of the sweet-scented white bells from the hand of the tiny Saint John. In many pictures she holds a rose. Apart from symbolism, a flower was a fitting thing to grace a woman’s hand, and the rose was considered the fairest of flowers.

‘As the rose is the flower of flowers,
So is Thy House the House of Houses,’

says the ancient inscription within York Minster, and the rose was _the_ flower _par excellence_ in every European country.

But when Mary places the rose within the hand of the Infant Saviour, then it becomes His attribute with the full significance of divine love, and when she places a carnation between the little fingers, divine love is again expressed.

But, as already noticed, in pictures of Florentine origin, the rose in the Virgin’s hand has a special meaning, for it illustrates her title of ‘_Madonna del Fiori_,’ and the Cathedral of Florence was dedicated to ‘Our Lady of the Flower.’ Also in pictures painted for some charitable institution the rose or roses of the Virgin have still another meaning, for then, following the interpretation of Raban Maur, they are the symbol of charity. One picture with such roses is that painted by Giambono for the _Congregazione di Carità_ at Fano. That these roses are in no way the attribute of the Child is shown by His attitude, for His back is turned to the hand which holds the flowers.

One of the most beautiful things in the beautiful city of Lucca is the little chapel of Santa Maria della Rosa. It was originally dedicated to Saint Paul and fell into disuse, but in the very earliest years of the fourteenth century a fresco was discovered beneath the creepers which covered the walls. The fresco was even then considered to be extremely ancient, and represented the Virgin with the Child and holding three roses in her hand. In 1309 the Bishop of Lucca conceded to the _Università de’ Mercanti_ the power to erect on the spot a church dedicated to the Virgin of the Rose and the Apostles Peter and Paul, and the present exquisite little building was commenced.

The outside is ornamented with lovely arabesques of roses in low relief executed in 1333, and upon one angle is a statue of the Virgin with a rose in her hand, possibly by Giovanni Pisano. In the sacristry are the arms of the confraternity figuring Mary surrounded by an oval nimbus and supported by two bushes, which carry thirteen roses, and form a crown from which rise patriarchs and prophets. The original fresco has disappeared.

Very rarely the Virgin holds a violet. The flower is used in Christian art almost exclusively to indicate the humility of the Son of God in taking upon Himself our human form, and in the beautiful altar-piece by Stephen Lochnar[263] the Saviour stretches up His tiny hand to grasp the violet held by Mary, so making it His individual attribute. The panel is rich in colouring, but Mary is of the simple, placid type of the early German school. She is gravely, deeply happy in her motherhood, and not saddened, as in Italy, by painful forebodings. The Child reaches up His hand with a pretty gesture, accepting from her, who had given Him His tender little body, also the violet, symbol of His humility.

In a picture by Bruder Wilhelm[264] the Virgin holds a sweet-pea, bearing both the flower and ripened pods. The symbolism of the pea is obscure and is not to be traced in Christian iconography, though there is the legend of the _erbilia_, a species of pea which, springing first from the footsteps of Saint Columban, still grows upon the Tuscan mountains. Possibly the symbolism may lie in the simultaneous flowering and fruiting of the pea, for the palm was held by some writers to be an emblem of the Virgin, and for the reason that ‘it flowered and fruited at one and the same time.’[265]

There are three subjects, all connected with the Virgin’s death, where lilies are once more found. They are her Ascension, the Giving of her Girdle to Saint Thomas, and her Coronation. In each of these the flower-filled tomb, from which she has just arisen, is introduced, usually as the base of the composition.

But the lilies in these pictures do not refer to the immaculate purity of the Virgin Mother, but represent the souls of ‘angels, confessors and virgins.’ The legends which the _Legenda Aurea_ contains were collected by Jacobus de Voragine during the last half of the thirteenth century, while the lily was still the flower of virgin martyrs and was not yet the Madonna’s lily. He gives the following account of the burial of the Virgin:

‘The Lord commanded the Apostles that they should carry the body into the valley of Jehoshaphat and place it in a new tomb that had been dug there, and watch three days beside it, till He should return.

‘And straightway there surrounded her flowers of roses, which are the blessèd company of martyrs; and lilies of the valley, which are the bands of angels, confessors and virgins.’

But the _Byzantine Guide to Painting_, in the paragraph entitled ‘How to represent the Assumption of the Divine Mother,’ directs that in the lower part of the picture there should be ‘an open and empty tomb.’

There was therefore divergence of opinion, and the Church apparently left the artist free.

Jacobus de Voragine seems to have collected the many floating legends of the Virgin, and with that poetic judgment which was the peculiar gift of his generation, to have preserved those forms particularly marked by sweetness or distinction of incident. But some even of his own countrymen apparently preferred the legend in its balder form, for the astonished Apostles surround a bare and empty tomb. Beyond the Alps, where the _Legenda Aurea_ never had much influence, the tomb is almost invariably empty, and indeed all three subjects are rare in the North, though the death of the Virgin is frequently represented.

The majority of Italian painters, however, gladly seized the pretty detail, and the Virgin’s tomb is usually flower-filled. But the painters of the high Renaissance did not keep strictly to the symbolism of the legend. There is a beautiful fresco by Sodoma,[266] in which the Virgin, dignified and lovely, ascends from a tomb brimming over with roses, and from among them springs one mystic lily.

Raphael,[267] too, gives a single lily rising from among the roses, and both he and Sodoma seem to have adopted the later fashion of considering the lily as exclusively the Virgin Mary’s flower, and instead of serried lilies, representing bands of angels and virgin saints, they paint one only flower, emblem of the Queen of Virgins rising to Heaven attended by the glowing souls of martyrs.

Botticelli,[268] on the other hand, has left the roses and painted lilies only, lilies crowded together in such a mass of loveliness that the mourners seem blinded even to the gorgeous bow of angels in the sky and to the greater wonder in the opening heavens high above.

Benozzo Gozzoli[269] gives the flower-filled tomb, but neglects the symbolism of the legend, for to the roses he adds daisies and jasmine. It is simply a collection of the flowers sacred to the Virgin.

Giulio Romano,[270] in the _Madonna di Monteluce_, paints neither roses nor lilies, merely small, indeterminate blossoms, mauve, blue and yellow.

On one panel,[271] of the fifteenth century, which represents ‘The Giving of the Girdle to Saint Thomas,’ cut roses and lilies lie upon the top of the closed tomb, which seems a misapprehension of the legend, but possibly the artist merely intended to paint the flowers usually used as attributes of the Virgin--the rose of love and the lily of purity--without any reference to the story as told in the Golden Legend.

But though the lilies of the Virgin’s tomb represent angels and virgin saints, in those pictures of her Coronation or Assumption, where no tomb is shown, the flower is the symbol of her own purity. Through her perfect purity she has attained the crown, therefore it is with stems of white lilies that the rose-crowned angels hail her Queen.

Fra Filippo Lippi[272] paints her kneeling to receive the crown from God the Father:

‘Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
As puff on puff of grated orris-root.’[273]

A child-angel holds a scroll with the words:

‘_Is perfecit opus_,’

and the archangel Gabriel with a lily, painted in a small lunette above the throne, recalls the first beginning of the work now perfected; while before the throne, and thick on either side, is a waving grove of large white lilies, each stalk held by an adoring angel.

The devotional figure of the Virgin known as the ‘Immaculate Conception’ is usually presented as the woman with ‘the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars;’ four or five attendant child-angels each carry a symbol of her virtues, and the lily is always prominent among them.

This particular aspect of the Virgin was especially popular in Spain, where Murillo was its finest exponent. The flowers of an Immaculate Conception are the rose, lily, olive and palm, signifying love, purity, peace and victory. Sometimes the iris, the royal lily, is added; sometimes it replaces the _lilium candidum_. José Antolines[274] paints the iris only.

In the chapter on ‘Garlands of Roses’ we remarked the thorns which in the mystic Enclosed Gardens of Germany illustrate the verse:

‘As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.’

With the closing of the fifteenth century these thorn trellises passed from Northern art, but the application of the metaphor to the Virgin still persisted in Northern theology, and since the Immaculate Conception had replaced the _Hortus Conclusus_ as a devotional subject, it is as an attribute of the Virgin, risen to glory, that we find the thorns, and in an Immaculate Conception by Seghers[275] a child-angel flutters at the Madonna’s feet with a lily enclosed in branches of thorns.

In the 24th chapter of Ecclesiasticus there is a description of Wisdom with her attributes in which the Roman Catholic Church has seen a prefiguring of the Virgin Mary. Some pictorial renderings of the Immaculate Conception make special reference to this, notably the large altar-piece, of unknown authorship, but believed to date from the end of the fifteenth century, which was painted for the Church of S. Francesco in Lucca.[276]

In the upper part of the picture Christ is seen seated, and holding out above the kneeling Virgin the sceptre of His royal favour. Above the sceptre is a scroll with the words from the Book of Esther: ‘Not for thee was this law made, but for all mankind.’ She alone was immaculate. Around there is a wreath of angels. Below stand King David, King Solomon, Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm and Saint Anthony of Padua. Behind these figures stretches a charming garden. Against the horizon are the cypresses of Mount Zion, the cedar of Lebanon, the palm tree of Cades, and also a pomegranate laden with fruit. Midway there is a rose hedge thick with the roses of Jericho. A terrace runs across the garden, and upon the parapet are two stone vases, one labelled _Mirra_ and the other _Balsamum_.

These trees and plants are the trees and plants to which Wisdom, and therefore Mary, is likened in Ecclesiasticus, with the pomegranate of the Canticles.