Chapter XX: THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY, VIRGIN (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) 286 (5)

‘Quasi cedrus exaltata sum in Libano, et quasi cypressus in Monte Sion: quasi palma exaltata sum in Cades, et quasi plantatio rosae in Jericho: ... Sicut cinnamomum et balsamum aromatizans odorem dedi: quasi myrrha electa dedi suavitatem odoris.[277]

‘Emissiones tuae paradisus malorum punicorum cum pomorum fructibus.’[278]

XVIII

THE LILY OF THE SAINTS

The ancient Hebrews took the lily as the symbol of chastity. The name of the chaste woman of the apocryphal story was Susannah, in Hebrew Shusan, which signifies a lily. The derivation was not forgotten by German artists, for a lily is usually conspicuous in the elaborate garden scenes in which they set this subject, though the Italians reserved the flower for the Madonna and the saints of the monastic orders.

Originally the lily was given to all virgin saints, and it was considered their special attribute before the flower was particularly associated with the Virgin Mary.

‘Jesus, corona virginum
Qui pergis inter lilia
Septis choreis virginum
Sponsus decorus gloria.’

In the Catacombs there are no virgin martyrs depicted, and the few lilies found there represent merely the flora of Heaven with the general significance of celestial bliss. In the early mosaics, too, both in Ravenna and Rome, the lilies are decorative and the virgins carry crowns of victory.

But as early as the ninth century the lily is used pictorially as the indication of virginity in the famous Beneditional of Saint Ethelwold of Winchester.[279] The Saxon queen, Saint Ethelreda (Saint Audry), who leads the choir of virgin saints, wears the Benedictine habit, is crowned, and holds in one hand the gospel and in the other a lily. She founded Ely Cathedral and, at least after her second marriage, lived as a nun. The miniature was executed in 980.

In the Church of S. Chiara in Naples there is a picture executed in mosaic of the early Christian martyr, Saint Reparata. The mosaic, which is of the thirteenth century, is attributed to Cavallini, and the saint has a lily by her side.

But after the thirteenth century the lily is given almost exclusively to saints of the monastic orders, the higher distinction of the palm being awarded to the martyrs. ‘For,’ says Durandus, ‘the Martyrdom taketh precedence of the Virginity; because it is a sign of the more perfect love: according as the Truth saith, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”

Occasionally these early saints are given the lily in addition to the palm. Mantegna paints Saint Euphemia with a lily in the right hand and a palm in the left.[280] But usually they have the palm alone. The lilies of Saint Cecilia allude to the celestial lilies of her legend.

_À propos_ of Saint Cecilia, Chaucer’s very charming, if fanciful, derivation of her name may be recalled:

‘First wol I you the name of Sainte Cecilie
Expoune as men may in hire storie see:
It is to sayn in English, Hevens lilie,
For pure chasteness of virginitee,
Or for she whitnesse had of honestee,
And grene of conscience, and of good fame
The swote savour, lilie was her name.’

Since the lily was appropriated by the celibates of the Church another symbol had to be found for the chastity of those still in the world, and for the virtue of the secular the unicorn was chosen. The mediæval legend ran that the unicorn was of all created beasts the fiercest and most difficult to capture. But should a maid be in his path he would lie down with his head upon her lap and then the hunter could take him with great ease.

‘The Triumph of Chastity’ with the ‘Triumph of Love’ as a pendant were rather favourite subjects in the fifteenth century in Italy, particularly as a decoration of the elaborate bridal chests or _cassoni_, then in vogue. ‘The Triumph of Chastity’ of Liberale da Verona[281] is typical. The white-clothed figure of a young woman stands upon a car drawn by unicorns, while behind follows a rejoicing crowd. She holds a cornucopia but no lily appears.

On the shutters in the Hall of Heliodorus, in the Vatican, there is a very beautiful Renaissance design in which the lily and the unicorn are united, but usually in Italy the lily was kept as an ecclesiastical and the unicorn as a secular symbol.

In German art both lily and unicorn are held to be symbols of the Virgin’s purity, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were many tapestries and embroideries executed in the convents illustrating that strange allegorical version of the Annunciation known as ‘The Hunting of the Unicorn.’ But the unicorn is never associated with the monastic saints, and indeed, in Northern art, monastic saints themselves are rather rare.

The lily was, therefore, latterly the symbol of monastic celibacy. There is a curious allegorical picture of Saint Francis by Sassetta. The present owner, Mr B. Behrenson, describes it thus:

‘Over the sea and the land, into the golden heavens, towers the figure of the blessed Francis, his face transfigured with ecstasy, his arms held out in his favourite attitude of the cross, his feet firmly planted on a prostrate warrior in golden panoply. Cherubim and Seraphim, with fiery wings and deep crescent halos, form behind the saint a nimbus framing a glory of gold and azure, as dazzling as the sky and as radiant as the sun. Overhead, on opalescent cloudlets, float Poverty in her patched dress, looking up with grateful devotion, Obedience in her rose-red robe with a yoke about her neck and her hands crossed on her breast, and Chastity in white, holding a lily.’[282]

All three maidens are attractive, and Chastity the prettiest of the three, unlike the immured ‘Castitas’ of Giotto,[283] whose guards, with surely unnecessary vigour, drive off ‘Amor’ with pitch-forks.

The two men not in holy orders, who are permitted to carry the lily, are Saint John the Baptist and Saint Joseph. The former, even if he took no formal vow of celibacy, is looked upon as the first of the Christian anchorites, and the lily of Saint Joseph is the symbol of the self-abnegation of his married life.

The history of the marriage of the Virgin Mary is found in the apocryphal ‘Gospel of the Birth of Mary,’ translated by Saint Jerome and abridged in the _Catalogus Sanctorum_ of Peter de Natalibus.

‘And when Mary was fourteen years of age the High Priest commanded that the virgins brought up in the temple should return home and be wedded according to law. And all obeyed except Mary, who replied that she might not, as her parents had dedicated her to the Lord and she herself had vowed her virginity to God. And the High Priest, being perplexed by Mary’s vow (which ought to be kept) on the one hand, and the introduction of a new custom in Israel on the other, summoned the elders together to consult upon the matter. And as they prayed, a voice came from the sanctuary commanding that every man of the house of David, who was not wedded, should place his rod on the altar, and he whose rod should bud, and the Holy Spirit descend upon it in the form of a dove, according to the prophecy of Isaiah, should be the spouse of Mary.

‘And there was among the rest a certain Joseph of the House of David, an old man and a widower, and who had sons and grandsons. And thinking it unseemly that an aged man should marry a tender virgin, when the others presented their rods he withheld his own. And no miracle appearing, the High Priest inquired of the Lord, who answered that he only to whom the Virgin was to be espoused had not presented his rod. So Joseph was brought forward, and presented his rod, and straightway it budded, and the dove descended from heaven and settled upon it. And it was clear to all men that Mary was to be his wife.’

In one of the earliest representations[284] which we have of the ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ Joseph holds a stalk of _lilium candidum_ with a single flower at its summit, on which is poised the holy dove. Thus Giotto, always thoughtful and original in his symbolism, modified the legendary flowering staff to the flower which should symbolize Saint Joseph’s wedded life with the Virgin.

But the great majority of artists have followed the legend more closely. Taddeo Gaddi[285] gives a bunch of leaves at the staff’s top, just such leaves as would sprout from a staff of ash. There is only one tiny bud upon the bare stick above which the dove hovers in the ‘Marriage’ attributed to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo,[286] and Gaudenzio Ferrari[287] paints a scarcely-budded staff.

Sometimes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the staff of Saint Joseph bears red or pink flowers resembling the oleander, and to-day the country people in Tuscany call the oleander _Il Mazzo di San Giuseppe_, that is, ‘The Staff of Saint Joseph.’

Northern art, uninfluenced by the _Legenda Aurea_, gives Saint Joseph no flowering staff. Lucas van Leyden[288] paints him as an entirely unidealized workman with tools upon his back but places the lily in his hand. And he has also a lily in the ‘Holy Family’ of Geertgen tot Sint Jans,[289] though in the many representations of ‘The Adoration of the Magi’ in North Germany and the Netherlands he is undistinguished by any attribute.

After the seventeenth century Saint Joseph began to have a status of his own as patron of married virtue. Single figures of him appear carrying a lily, not a staff, and in the ecclesiastical art of the present day he carries sometimes the Child-Christ and sometimes a book, but also invariably a lily. A large oleograph which hangs in the Church of the Angels at La Verna shows the Child-Christ crowning him with a wreath of lilies.

Occasionally the lily is given to young girls who are neither saints nor martyrs. There is an engraving from a gold medal in the royal library at Windsor of the Empress Leonora of Portugal. The portrait is half-length, standing, with long hair, beneath the arched imperial crown, and she holds in her hand a lily stem with two flowers and three buds. It is inscribed:

‘Leonora Augusta Frederici Imp. Uxor.’

She was the daughter of King Edward of Portugal and wife of Frederick of Austria, also great-grand-daughter of John of Gaunt. It is a pretty figure, childish but dignified. The long hair, Mr Augustus Franks points out,[290] is generally looked upon as the mark of a virgin bride, and it is explained by her coronation having taken place before the consummation of the marriage. The lily also, like the flowing hair, proclaims her maidenhood.

But, as a rule, the _lilium candidum_ is strictly a flower of the church. Paul Veronese[291] painted a Juno with a white lily, but the flower has sharply turned-back petals resembling the turn-cap variety and gracefully curving stems.

It was not till the eighteenth century that Cipriani and Bartolozzi, both members of the English Royal Academy, could design and engrave a heathen goddess, who, with one hand caressing a peacock, held in the other the traditional symbol of virginal innocence.

Lilies are proper to all virgin saints.

‘Liliis Sponsus recubat, rosisque;
Tu, tuo semper bene fida Sponso
Et rosas Martyr simil et dedisti
Lilia Virgo.’

But some carry them as a special distinction.

Among them Saint Catharine of Siena comes first. She was still merely one of the many children of a working tanner of Siena, her sanctity unrecognized, when she was sent a dream from Heaven. In her dream she saw Saint Dominic, who held in one hand a lily which, like the burning bush of Moses, burned but was not consumed. With his other hand he offered her the black and white habit of the Dominican Tertiaries. Saint Catharine regarded the dream as a definite call and later joined the third Order of Saint Dominic. She was a woman not only of most saintly life but of wonderful force of character, and intervened with altruistic motives and plain common sense in the complicated politics of her day. She experienced the mystical trances which were the crown of holiness to the mediæval mind, and was remarkable also for the austerities and good works which her devoted friend and biographer, Raimondo da Capua, likens to lilies.

‘Taught, nay rather compelled, by her supreme Teacher, she learned every day more and more both to enjoy the embraces of the Celestial Bridegroom in the bed of flowers, and to descend into the valley of lilies to make herself more fruitful, nor ever to leave or lessen the one for the sake of the other.’

The most interesting of the pictures of Saint Catharine is that by her friend and disciple, Andrea Vanni,[292] and which is therefore a portrait from memory, if not from life. It was probably painted at the time of her canonization, thirteen years after her death, and shows her as a tall, slight woman with a refined enthusiastic face. In her left hand she holds the lilies[293] which represent the austere virtues of a monastic life. She is the most distinguished woman who wore the veil, and since she is almost invariably represented with a lily, the _lilium candidum_ is sometimes called Saint Catharine’s lily.

Saint Scholastica of the Benedictines[294] and Saint Clare of the Franciscans are also usually depicted with lilies. The last, who styled herself the Little Flower of Saint Francis, has met with great good fortune at the hands of the painters, for two at least, Simone Martini[295] and Luca Signorelli,[296] have very beautifully materialized her sweetness and humility.

Pictures which represent the mystic espousals of any nun usually have the lily as a detail.

Chief among the monks who carry the flower is Saint Dominic. He was a Spaniard and had all the chivalrous Spanish devotion to the person of the Virgin. It was he who arranged the rosary and instituted it as a religious exercise. He founded a community of preachers for the conversion of heretics, which afterwards developed into the great Dominican order. The great aim of his life was to guard the purity of the Catholic faith, and to this end he hunted forth the Albigenses with his hounds of the Lord--the _Domini canes_. He is rewarded with the lily which, in his picture by Bellini,[297] has a singularly rigid stem.

During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sainted monks were comparatively rarely painted, preference being given to the more picturesque figures of the early martyrs who suffered under Roman persecutions. But the earliest to appear, and the most frequently seen, is Saint Dominic. Duccio di Buoninsegna puts him beside the Madonna; Orcagna painted him among the happy souls in the Paradise of Santa Maria Novella. And the reason why he, rather than the other great founders, should appear in heavenly groups is not the fine relief of his black habit among the gay gowns of the angels, but because his order spent their gold on painted decorations at a time when the Franciscans, vowed to poverty, and the Benedictines, devoted to the making and collecting of books, had less to spend on the encouragement of art. Later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and more particularly in Spain, saints in all habits constantly appear.

Saint Dominic almost always carries a lily. Saint Francis was sufficiently distinguished by the stigmata, Saint Benedict by the chalice; but Saint Dominic has a lily white as the austerity of his faith.

Saint Anthony of Padua is to-day the most popular of all the monastic saints. His sane and gentle piety and his reputation for granting little ordinary boons has endeared him to simple folk. There seems no particular reason why he, above other saintly monks, should be so distinguished, but when he is not represented with the Infant Christ in his arms he invariably has a lily. In the very beautiful ‘Vision of Saint Anthony,’ by Murillo,[298] where the Holy Child appears in a ray of light, a vase of lilies stands upon the table. In another picture, by Annibale Caracci, the Child-Christ Himself holds the lily.

Another bearer of the lily is he

‘Whom Mary’s charms
Embellish’d, as the sun the morning star’--

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.

Though opposing the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, he had a very special devotion to the Mother of Christ.

Many of his sermons, called by Henault _Chefs d’œuvre de sentiment et de force_, celebrate her perfections, and, in particular, the famous series of sermons upon the Bride of the Song of Solomon.

It is said that it was his love for the ‘lily of the valleys’ which so impressed the lily form upon the architecture of his order, for again and again in the Gothic stone-work of the Cistercian abbeys ‘lily work’ is found.

The lily, it may be remarked, is given to those saints in holy orders who were pious from their earliest youth and not to those who had passed a gay time in the world before conversion.

XIX

THE VINE

The principal of the allegorical fruits is the vine. It is one of the most ancient emblems of Christ, and is founded upon His own words, ‘I am the vine, ye are the branches.’

It is seen in the Catacombs, on early Christian sarcophagi, and in the early mosaics, always as the emblem of Christ or of His Church. A fruiting vine very beautifully expresses a perfect life rich with the fruits of the spirit, and even were the analogy not suggested by Christ’s own words, it is possible that Christians would have seen in the tree whence comes the sacramental wine, emblem of the holy blood, a likeness to Him who shed that blood.

Where the cross, the sacred monogram or the figure of Christ Himself is introduced, the vine takes a secondary place as emblem of the Christian Church, and taken in this sense the symbolism admits of some complication, twelve bunches of grapes typifying the twelve Apostles, and birds among the branches Christian souls.

One example among many of its decorative and symbolical use is on the gravestone of Saint Cummian, an Irish bishop, who died a monk at Bobbio about the middle of the eighth century. Two vine branches spring from the holy chalice and form a border of oval arabesques, one oval enclosing fruit and leaves, the next framing a star alternately. At the top, where the two branches almost meet, are two doves standing on either side of the holy monogram.

The vine is the Christian Church, springing from the chalice of Christ’s blood; the fruit represents the good works of the righteous; the stars which shine through the branches Christian hope. The doves, by the convention of the Catacombs, signify departed Christian souls adoring Christ, who is represented by the ancient star monogram, formed of the two Greek letters, I = Iota, and X = Chi, enclosed in the circle which is the symbol of eternity. The gravestone was executed by order of King Luitprand, and, by an oversight not unique among Christian marbles before the twelfth century, the border has been placed reversed round the inscription--the doves, with their feet in the air, being at the bottom.

As directly emblematical of Christ Himself the vine received the place of honour in all Christian churches, and, even when our Lord was represented in His own person, it was often there by right of its secondary significance as the Church of God--‘Ye are the branches.’ A mosaic in the Church of Saint Prisca[299] shows a half-length figure of Christ framed in branches of vine, and the golden branches, often intricately wreathed against a dark-blue ground, occur repeatedly in the early mosaics.

But when it grew more usual not only to represent Christ in His own person but also the martyrs, saints and prophets of the Church, the use of the vine became decorative rather than devotional, and was chiefly applied to the ornamentation of vestments, altar-cloths and the vessels used in the celebration of the Eucharist. When, in a painting, the vine is introduced as the emblem of Christ or His Church, it is usually in some detail, as in the very beautiful design of the Pelican in its Piety among grapes and vine leaves behind the figure of God the Father, King of Heaven, in Hubert van Eyck’s magnificent altar, ‘The Adoration of the Lamb.’[300]

Botticelli, who handled symbols with a depth of sentiment unknown to art before, paints grapes with a different significance. For him grapes, like the Eucharistic wine, are the symbol of the Holy Blood, and in one of the most beautiful and unaffected of all his pictures[301] an angel, standing beside the Infant Christ, holds grapes and corn ears, symbols of the sacrifice of His death.

The Northern symbolists, also, took clustering grapes to have the same value as the Eucharistic wine as an emblem of Christ’s blood. This is clearly seen in a tapestry of the fourteenth century, formerly in the Spitzer Collection. The Infant Christ, seated between the Virgin and Saint Joseph, presses with His hands the juice of a bunch of purple grapes into a chalice.

Another Flemish tapestry of the same period, which was also in the same collection, depicts the Holy Family with Saint Anne. Mary, from whom the Saviour received His human blood, hands to her Son the grapes which He crushes till the wine drops down into the cup.

But the cluster of grapes which several of the Flemish artists place in the hand of the Infant Christ seems to be not only the emblem of the holy blood, but also, in some sort, the antithesis of the apple as the fruit of redemption, which in the hand of the second Adam replaces the fruit of the Fall.

In a picture by Mabuse, inscribed ‘Verus Deus et Homo: casta mater et Virgo,’[302] the Virgin offers a bunch of grapes to the Infant Christ, who holds a quince, foreshadowing that He should exchange the fruit of Eden, by which all men died, for the fruit of redemption, by which they shall be saved, and this substitution of the fruit of the vine for the apple of Eden became in the North a rather favourite variation of the symbolism of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

XX

THE FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

The Scriptures give no indication whatever as to the size, shape or colour of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which grew in the midst of Eden, and it has been variously interpreted. Adam is depicted with an apple, a pear, a quince, a fig, according to the individual opinion of the painter. Milton took the tree to be an apple:

‘A goodly tree....
Laden with fruit of fairest colours mixt
Ruddie and gold ...
Sharp desire I had
Of tasting those fair apples.’[303]

And the majority of artists have chosen that fruit. It grew in every part of Europe, and, except the cherry, it was almost the only cultivated fruit in Germany and the Netherlands. Besides grapes, figs and pomegranates it is the only fruit mentioned in Scripture, and it is also possible that some found reason for identifying it with the fruit which brought sin into the world in the apparent similarity of the two Latin words, ‘mălum’ = evil, and ‘mālum’ = an apple.

And as the fruit varies in the hand of Adam so it varies in the hand of the Infant Christ, the second Adam. Memling and the painters of Cologne depict Him with an apple. Il Moretto paints a pear,[304] Giovanni Bellini a quince,[305] and Botticelli a pomegranate.[306] The Eve of Jan van Eyck holds a lemon,[307] but he keeps to the older convention in the symbols which he places in the hand of the Infant Saviour: the bird, emblem of the human soul, the inscribed scroll or the cross-surmounted orb.

The apple, when in the hand of Adam, is always the symbol of the Fall; when in the hand of Christ, it is the symbol of the sin of the world which He took upon Himself. ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.’

But in the early instances of a fruit in the Christ-Child’s hand it does not appear to be definitely the death-giving apple of Eden. It is fruit of Paradise, a delight promised to the blessed which the King of Heaven brings down with Him to earth.

In the early school of Siena, as we have already seen, the little Christ was still the Royal Infant, still ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ untouched by shadow of suffering, and usually bearing in His hand some indication of His high estate. Often His hand was raised in blessing, sometimes He held a lily of Paradise.

On an early fourteenth-century panel in the manner of the Lorenzetti, in Siena Academy, the Child holds a fruit, but it is not clearly defined. In one of Sano di Pietro’s most attractive works,[308] however, which is dated 1444, the Child, seated on the Virgin’s knee, holds a golden orange with its foliage. To His right and left are saints, and close around there are six angels crowned with blue corn-flowers and carrying roses and lilies. No attempt is made to realize earthly conditions; the glowing scene is set in Heaven, and the little Lord of Heaven holds in His hand a celestial fruit, just one of such fruits as hang upon the trees in Giovanni di Paolo’s ‘Paradise.’[309]

In another picture by Sano di Pietro,[310] the Child (perhaps the most charming ‘_Bambino_’ ever painted in Siena) holds in His hand a bunch of cherries.

Cherries, painted more than once within the tiny hand by Sano di Pietro, are always taken as the delicious fruit. Like the lilies of the earlier Paradises they typify the delights of the blessed, and in German art particularly they are painted often as the peculiar fruit of Heaven. They are never taken as the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and therefore, at least in the early Sienese school, this fruit held by the Infant Christ would seem to be the fruit of Paradise.

In Northern art, in the work of the French ivory cutters, and particularly in the work of Memling and of those artists influenced by him, the apple takes precedence of all other symbols in the Christ-Child’s hand. Northern theologians, studying the Old Testament carefully, and deeply interested in types and anti-types, saw in Adam the type of Christ. The _Biblia Pauperum_, originally designed with the intention of teaching the faith to the unlettered, served as a pattern-book for stained glass and other ecclesiastical decoration from the ninth century onwards. Each page is divided into three sections. In the centre is a scene from the life of Christ; in the sections on either side is a scene from Old Testament History, showing some incident in the lives of those men who are considered to be types of Christ, which foreshadowed some act of the Redeemer. And chief of these types is Adam. Therefore in the Northern Church the idea of Jesus Christ as the second Adam was familiar, and the fruit in His hand was perfectly understood as a symbol. Memling, who, if he did not originate the symbolism of the apple of Eden, made it famous by constant repetition on his magnificently executed panels, usually treats it quite simply. The apple is the symbol of the Fall, and therefore of the world’s sin, which Christ accepts as His own. In the fine example at Chatsworth, the Infant Christ, with one hand pointing to the book of prophecy, takes with the other the apple held by an attendant angel. But one painting by Memling[311] is especially interesting, since it links together the two symbols, the fruit of heavenly bliss and the fruit of Man’s redemption. The Child sits upon His mother’s knee, and in one hand clutches cherries, the fruit of Paradise. He seems, however, on the point of relinquishing them to take the apple from the angel’s hand, as He relinquished heavenly joy to take upon Himself the sin of the world.

_Hugo van der Goes_ _Photo Brogi_

THE FRUIT OF DAMNATION EXCHANGED FOR THE FRUIT OF REDEMPTION]

_Memling_ _Photo Brogi_

THE FRUIT OF HEAVEN RELINQUISHED FOR THE APPLE OF EDEN]

Meanwhile the painters of Florence, Fra Angelico, Neri di Bicci, Filippo Lippi and Botticelli, had painted the Child with the pomegranate, and it is not very clear whether they held to the Sienese symbolism or sympathized with the Northern tradition. But it was probably the fruit of Eden, for in all other points the Florentines had broken with the Byzantine conventions, and the Child was for them no longer the Royal Child, richly clothed and dignified in gesture, but He was a little naked human baby, born into the world to repair, as the second Adam, the old Adam’s fault. That He is the Saviour, rather than the King, is particularly emphasized by Botticelli, who seldom fails, even though it be only by the foreboding in the grey eyes of the angels, to give some hint of the coming tragedy.

On the other hand it may be possible that the painters of Florence in the fifteenth century had harked back to another source for their symbolism and had taken the imagery of Saint Gregory the Great, who used the pomegranate as the emblem of the Christian Church ‘because of the inner unity of countless seeds in one and the same fruit.’ But in later Italian art, as in all the Northern countries and in modern Church symbolism, the fruit, most usually the apple, which is in the hand of the Infant Christ, is the fruit of redemption, as the apple of Adam was the fruit of damnation.

Following the same analogy, the Virgin is regarded as the second Eve, the second universal mother, who, through her Son, is to repair the fault of the first.

The symbolists of the thirteenth century found what they considered proof of this in the word of Scripture.

Conrad von Würztburg writes:

‘Let a man take three letters:
When these straightforward are read,
The little word “Ave” stands out,
The new word of salutation (or healing).
Let him begin at the end,
And read to the beginning,
And “Eva” is found written.

* * * * *

That one may thereby know,
It is thou who fulfillest,
The old and the new Covenants.
The greeting from the angel’s mouth
Greeting thee, O royal spotless maid,
Hath told me this.’[312]

Therefore the apple, which masters of the Flemish and early German schools sometimes introduced into Annunciations, laying it, for instance, upon the window-sill, is the apple of redemption.

The apple in the hand of Eve is always the apple of damnation. There is a curious drawing by Martin Schöngauer of the ‘Descent into Hell.’ Adam and Eve come forth first of the released souls, Eve holding the apple, which has the marks of her teeth still upon it.

In the hand of Mary it is again the apple of redemption, but it is the fruit of the Fall when it is between the jaws of the serpent or dragon, which she, at her Assumption, treads under foot.

_Martin Schöngauer_

ADAM AND EVE DELIVERED FROM HELL

(Print Room, Alte Pinakothek, Munich)]

In Italian art the apple is less often found in the Madonna pictures, but the ancient analogy was not forgotten. On the predella of Lorenzo di Credi’s ‘Annunciation’[313] there are three exquisite little scenes from the life of Eve, and Vasari introduces the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil into his ‘Conception of the Virgin,’ painted in 1540. Vasari describes it himself:

‘The Tree of the Original Sin was represented in the centre of the painting, and at the roots thereof were placed nude figures of Adam and Eve bound, as being the first transgressors of God’s commands. To the principal branches there were also bound Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, David and the rest of the kings, law-givers, etc., according to their seniority, all fastened by both arms, excepting only Samuel and Saint John the Baptist, who are bound by one arm only, to intimate that they were sanctified before their birth. At the trunk of the tree, and with the lower part turning around it, is the Old Serpent, but the upper part of the form has the shape of Man, and the hands are confined behind the back; on his head is one foot of the glorious Virgin, which is trampling down the horns of the demon, while the other foot is fixed on a moon. Our Lady is clothed with the sun and crowned with twelve stars, being sustained in the air within a splendour of numerous angels, nude, and illuminated by the rays which proceed from the Madonna herself. These same rays, moreover, passing amidst the foliage of the tree, give light to the figures bound to the branches; nay, they seem to be gradually loosening their bonds, by the power and grace which they derive from her out of whom they proceed. In Heaven, meanwhile, that is, at the highest point of the picture, are two children bearing a scroll, on which are the following words:

‘“_Quos Eva culpa damnavit, Mariæ gratia solvit._”’[314]

It was thus that Vasari united in one picture the two universal mothers, the physical and the spiritual, and his allegory was typical of the mysticism of his day, for he tells us that, being doubtful as to the due treatment of the subject, he and his patron, Messer Bindo, ‘took counsel with such of our common friends as were men of letters,’ and Vasari’s friends included the fine flower of Italian intellect.

The picture, which is a good deal darkened by time, and less interesting than the description leads one to expect, is still in its original place in the Church of SS. Apostoli in Florence.

In some pictures, particularly those showing the influence of Memling, an attendant angel holds the apple, holding it ready till the time shall come when the Infant Saviour, with growing consciousness of His mission, holds forth His hand to take it.

But there are various ‘Holy Families’[315] of the early German school in which Saint Anne sits holding the apple. It seems strange that she should, but it is to be remembered that in German popular religion and in German art Saint Anne holds an important place. Altars were often dedicated to her, and the holy family might, in a manner, be called her attribute. Frequently Saint Anne and the Virgin are depicted seated on one seat, apparently with equal possessive rights over the Holy Child, who stands between them. There is also that strange allegorical conception usually styled ‘_Mutter Anna selb-dritt_,’ where Saint Anne sits with the Infant Christ on one knee and the Child-Virgin on the other. She was the Virgin’s nearest blood-relation, and if the Virgin was without sin, it was Anne, born in sin but the Mother of His Mother, who most nearly connected the incarnate Godhead with the erring human race. It was perhaps fitting, therefore, that she, representing sinful humanity, should offer to the Saviour the fruit of the Fall, which in His hand would become the fruit of Redemption. At other times it is Mary who holds the fruit, but offering it to the Saviour, who raises His hand to take it. She, as the second Eve, places in His hand the apple by which mankind is to be redeemed, not lost, since she, by giving Him a human body, had made that redemption possible.

In the Corsini Gallery[316] there is a picture, attributed to Hugo van der Goes, in which Mother and Child hold each a fruit. At first sight it seems as if it were a presentment in one picture of Christ as the second Adam, and Mary as the second Eve, with a doubling of the symbolism of the apple which would be illogical. But the fruit held by Mary is distinctly a pear, that held by Christ apparently an apple. The artist has, therefore, discriminated between the apple of damnation and the sweeter, mellower fruit, which may be the symbol of Redemption, for the Holy Child seems to be in the act of exchanging one for the other.

This may possibly also explain the thought in the mind of the French ivory-cutters of the fourteenth century, for they, too, not infrequently, placed a small round fruit resembling an apple in the hand of the Infant Christ and a larger pear-shaped fruit in that of His mother, though they give little indication of any action of exchange.

Northern art, though realistic, was very placid, and, except in scenes from the Passion, quite unmarked by the sometimes painful pathos of the Italian and Spanish schools. In the Madonna pictures the only faint reminder of the tragedy for which the Child was born into the world is the rosy-cheeked apple in the tiny hand. The mother is satisfied and untroubled, the Child smiling happily, and an apple is a natural, pleasant thing to place within a baby’s hand. Rubens painted a delightful ‘Holy Family beneath an Apple Tree’[317]--a little scene of idyllic happiness; and scarcely noticeable is the pathetic suggestion of the branch of apples which Zacharias holds towards the little Christ.

The shifting of theological and artistic standpoints at the Reformation in no way disturbed the Northern love of Old Testament analogies or the affection for this particular symbol, and in Germany one of its most charming developments was the Christmas tree, the evergreen tree laden with golden and silver apples, set up in every home to commemorate the birth of Christ. It is the Tree of Eden, which Christ by His birth and death transmuted into a tree of Paradise.

The apple is the most usual fruit in the hand of the Infant Christ, but some Flemish painters of the early sixteenth century give Him grapes instead. The grapes symbolize the divine blood by which souls lost through Adam’s fall are redeemed. Gerard David[318] puts a cluster of white grapes in the tiny hand; Lucas van Leyden[319] white grapes also with leaves and tendrils; and in another picture Lucas van Leyden[320] places the apple and the grapes together upon the broad ledge in the foreground. In this last there is the same idea of exchange which is found more clearly expressed in the picture by Mabuse at Berlin.

This substitution of the fruit of the vine for the apple of Eden seems only to be found in the Netherlands. In a very beautiful picture by Botticelli, the grapes held by the angel have a simpler meaning. They, with the corn, are the direct emblems of the body and the blood of the Saviour, and foretell the coming sacrifice of His death; the symbolism is identical with that of the embroidered vine-leaves and wheat-ears of so many modern altar frontals.[321]

Very often, as upon the façade of Orvieto Cathedral, the fig-tree is taken as the Tree of Temptation, for, it might be argued, our first parents would take to make themselves garments the leaves of the tree nearest to their hand, the leaves of that same tree of whose fruit they had just eaten. ‘It is possible that the erotic significance which the fig had among the ancients was also considered in this connection,’[322] and it is probably because of its classical associations that the fig was never placed in the hand of the Infant Saviour.

Except as the forbidden fruit the fig is not found in Italian or Flemish ecclesiastical art, but in Germany there appears to have been no prejudice against it. It is painted frequently in the Madonna pictures. A small fig-tree overshadows the cot of the Infant Christ in a picture by Matthias Grünewald;[323] Hans Burgkmair[324] paints it with the rose, the iris, the columbine and other attributes of the Virgin; Hans Holbein[325] the Younger sets his Saint Ursula against a fig-tree; and it is the only growing thing introduced in his best-known work, the beautiful Madonna of the Bürgomeister Meyer.[326]

These fig-trees, unlike the barren fig-tree of Scripture, always bear fruit and appear to be the symbols of a holy life rich with the fruits of the Spirit.

XXI

THE GOURD

In the works of Crivelli, who painted in the cities of the Marches between 1468 and 1493, the apple repeatedly occurs with a gourd laid close beside it. In the ‘Annunciation’[327] they are together upon the foreground’s edge. In ‘The Infant Christ giving the Keys to Saint Peter’[328] the apple lies on the ground and the gourd is suspended on the right hand of the throne. In the triptych in the Brera they hang forward prominently from the wreath above the Madonna’s head. They are again suspended, singly, each side of the head of Saint Giacomo della Marca[329] (sometimes taken to be Saint Bernadine), toning with the colour scheme, which has all the subdued richness of old Cordova leather; and exactly the same apple and gourd lie on a ledge before the ‘Madonna with the Child’ by Francia,[330] and have the identical position in an ‘Enthroned Madonna’ by Lorenzo da San Severino.[331]

As the grouping of these two fruits is so insistently repeated there is reason to think that it was no chance arrangement. The painter seems to attach some definite meaning to their juxtaposition, and since not Crivelli only, but also Francia and Lorenzo da San Severino, place them together, and well forward in the picture where the eye cannot miss them, they are apparently recognized symbols, not the whim of a single painter.

The apple is, probably, here as elsewhere, the fatal fruit of Eden, and the gourd may represent the fruit which is to be the antidote, in the same sense that the grape is occasionally used by painters of the early Flemish school. In this case the gourd would represent the Resurrection and be the revival of a very ancient symbol which has an interesting history. Among the wall paintings of the Catacombs the story of Jonah is very repeatedly found. He is taken as the type of the risen Christ,[332] since Christ Himself, answering the Pharisees, made the comparison. He is represented both as being cast up by the fish and, in the ensuing incident of his history, reposing under the gourd on the east side of the city of Nineveh. The first subject being certainly grotesque, it became more usual to depict him beneath the booth covered with long-shaped gourds, and his sleeping figure (usually with the legs crossed) is found constantly both among the Catacomb paintings and on fragments of the early Christian gilded glass. Above him there is always the same pergola-like booth with the hanging gourds. One small disk of gold-ornamented Catacomb glass[333] has upon it the usual gourd, but below, in place of Jonah, there is a large fish (Ichthys), an emblem of Christ dating from the second century. Thus the type of Christ has been replaced by His emblem, but the gourd, by association symbol of His Resurrection, remains.

Therefore in these pictures by Crivelli the apple would be the symbol of our death by the act of Adam, and the gourd of our Resurrection by the act of the second Adam, Jesus Christ.

In a picture of the Fall, painted in 1570 by Floris Francesco of Antwerp,[334] Adam sits upon the ground while Eve offers him an apple from the tree. On the earth beside Adam lies a very large gourd. This gourd may only exemplify the fruitfulness of Eden, or it may be another example of the antithetical use of this symbol.

XXII

THE POMEGRANATE

Neri di Bicci,[335] Fra Angelico,[336] Filippo Lippi[337] and other artists of the fifteenth century painted the Infant Saviour with a pomegranate in His hand.

On the wall of the Bargello,[338] in the Chapel of the Podestà, is a frescoed Paradise, which contains a figure long believed to be a portrait of Dante by Giotto. He is seen in profile, wearing the characteristic hood, and holds in his hand a small branch on which are two ripe pomegranates. The fresco is not now considered to be by Giotto, nor the portrait contemporaneous, but that would not materially affect the meaning of the pomegranates, if they be a symbol, since the painting dates from the last half of the fourteenth century.

Were it not for Dante’s pomegranate there would be no particular reason to think that the artists of the ‘Quattrocento’ meant more than simply to indicate some heavenly fruit when they placed the pomegranate in the hand of the Child Christ. In accordance with the Byzantine tradition to which Siena held, they regarded Him as the Royal Child come to earth with Heavenly gifts in His hand; they had not yet adopted the symbolism of the North, which saw in the Infant Christ the second Adam, holding the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, though indeed Botticelli, who almost always gives some indication of coming sorrow in Christ’s childhood, seems to have found some sad inner meaning in the symbol.

But in Dante’s hand the fruit could not be the fruit of Paradise, and it may therefore have some further meaning even when held by the Infant Saviour.

_Botticelli_ _Photo Brogi_

THE CHILD WITH THE POMEGRANATE SURROUNDED BY ANGELS WITH LILIES AND ROSE-GARLANDS

(Uffizi Gallery, Florence)]

Walter Pater writes: ‘The mystical fruit, which because of the multitude of its seeds was to the Romans a symbol of fecundity ... to the middle age became a symbol of the fruitful earth itself; and then of that other seed sown in the dark underworld; and at last of the whole hidden region, which Dante visited.... Botticelli putting it into the childish hands of Him, who, if men went down into hell, is there also.’

So, as the symbol of the life on the other side of death, the pomegranate is exceedingly well placed when given to the writer of the _Divina Commedia_, and it is even more appropriate in the hand of the incarnate Godhead--He who holds our future destinies in the hollow of His palm.

But it is difficult to ascertain if this was really the thought in the minds of the Florentine artists.

Mrs Jameson considers the pomegranate to be the symbol of immortality, or, showing the seeds, of hope in eternity.

But it would scarcely be the symbol of immortality in the Infant Saviour’s hand, since the symbol so placed is never His exclusive attribute, but the indication of some relationship with humanity. But showing the seeds--and the seeds are usually shown--it might be the symbol of a hope in eternity which He gives to man, the parallel lying in the unexpected sweetness of the fruit within the hard rind.

But possibly the authority followed by the masters of the ‘Quattrocento,’ or by those churchmen who gave them their commissions, was Gregory the Great, for he says: ‘The pomegranate is the emblem of congregations because of its many seeds: also emblem of the Christian Church because of the inner unity of countless seeds in one and the same fruit.

Following this interpretation, the pomegranate, when carried by Dante or any other being of mortal birth, would indicate his faith in the Holy Catholic Church.

In Northern art the pomegranate is very rare. The Flemish artists ignore it, and those few German artists who paint it are those who had come under Italian influence. And it does not seem entirely clear whether those German artists who, like Hans Burgkmair,[339] paint it in the Infant Christ’s hand, give to the Southern fruit the Southern significance, or if for them it becomes the fruit of Eden in the hand of the second Adam.

In scenes representing different events in the life of Christ, trees of pomegranates are occasionally introduced. Giovanni di Paolo sets the ‘Nativity’[340] in an orchard of pomegranates, and in a Florentine picture of the fourteenth century[341] the newly-risen Christ is surrounded by palms, pomegranates and flowers. These pomegranates, however, do not seem to be used attributively but merely to give some slight geographical indication. Bethlehem was an Eastern city; the tomb of Christ was in an Eastern garden.

The pomegranate is also, theoretically, the emblem of the Virgin. ‘In the symbolism of the cult of Mary, the ripe pomegranate, because of its pleasant fragrance and its numerous seeds, represents her beauty and many virtues, but the gradually-developing fruit refers to her life.’[342]

‘The pomegranate with its crowned top is her as queen, and typifies also hope and fruitfulness, the “Virginitas fecunda” of the octave of Christmas.’[343]

Jeremy Taylor, in a beautiful passage, describes Mary as the pomegranate tree and Christ as the fruit.

‘When the Holy Virgin now perceived that the expectation of the nations was arrived at the very doors of revelation and entrance into the world, she brought forth the _Holy Jesus_, who, like light through a transparent glass, past through, or a ripe pomegranate from a fruitful tree, fell to the earth, without doing violence to its nurse and parent.’

In art, however, the pomegranate is very seldom used as the attribute of the Virgin. Occasionally the Florentine masters ornament the Virgin’s throne with knobs which more or less resemble the fruit, and Flemish artists, Memling in particular, place behind her a brocaded panel of the well-known pomegranate design. But these pomegranate knobs were a very usual detail in carved work, and the pomegranate pattern, which still persists, was a standard design of the silk-weavers of France and Italy.

The fruit itself is not used by the older masters. Even Crivelli, who lavishes fruit of almost every sort upon his slender, long-figured Madonnas, leaves the pomegranate aside.

In modern work, Podesti, in his vast fresco of the Immaculate Conception,[344] has placed a large single pomegranate upon a book arranged prominently in the foreground. It is the symbol, apparently, of the fruitfulness of the Virgin.

The ancient Jews ornamented their temple with the pomegranate, and their high priest’s robes were bordered with alternate bells and pomegranates. In the Christian Church, too, they have been admitted as decoration, though not with any very clear and definite symbolical significance. There is a very handsome seventeenth-century altar-rail of marble on which rest candlesticks and huge brass pomegranates before the high altar in the ancient church of S. Cecilia in Rome; and a great bronze pomegranate, worn by much caressing, is on the balustrade in the tiny chapel which was once the bathroom of the saint.

XXIII

THE STRAWBERRY

The strawberry stands apart from all other symbolical fruits. It is found in Italian, Flemish and German art, and also in the English miniatures. There is a finely-executed Spanish miniature of the sixteenth century in South Kensington Museum. The Pelican in her Piety is in the centre and the border is formed of roses alternating with strawberries. As a symbol it is not only widespread, but of comparatively early origin. In Siena it appears as a flower of Heaven, growing with lilies, violets and carnations, in the ‘Paradise’ of Giovanni di Paolo painted in 1445;[345] and, almost at the same time, a master of the Upper Rhine painted the well-known ‘Madonna of the Strawberries,’[346] which represents the Virgin sitting upon the edge of a raised bed filled with exquisitely-rendered strawberries. Behind is a hedge of roses, and at her feet violets and lilies of the valley. In the foreground is a small figure of the donor kneeling among tufts of snowdrops. The snowdrop is rare as a symbol (though by no means misplaced in a Madonna picture, having all the qualities, except the perfume, of the lily of the valley), and it was probably the individual fancy of the donor.

The strawberry is not mentioned in Scripture, neither does it seem to have been remarked by those Fathers of the Church who concerned themselves with symbolism, but it was very successful in its appeal to the artists of the Renaissance. It is a very perfect fruit, with neither thorns nor stone, but sweet, soft and delicious through and through. Its flowers are of the whiteness of innocence and its leaves almost of the sacred trefoil form, and since it grows upon the ground, not on a tree, there is no possibility of its being the dread fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Its meaning always appears to be the same; it is the symbol of perfect righteousness, or the emblem of the righteous man whose fruits are good works.

As the symbol of perfect righteousness, in Italy it is chiefly used in ‘Adorations,’ where the Infant Christ is laid upon the ground among the grass. Botticelli seems to have been the first to have placed it among the violets and daisies, but he had many followers, and a very charming picture, with the little scarlet berries in the foreground, is the ‘Adoration’ by Perugino, now in Munich. Botticelli may, however, have borrowed the symbol from Giovanni di Paolo,[347] who painted a small minutely-finished picture of the Virgin, seated on a cushion, with the Holy Child in her arms. Behind are fruit trees and strawberries, violets and carnations are at her feet, and since it was usual in Siena, in pictures where the Infant Saviour appears, to refer all symbols to Him, they are His attributes. In German art of the fifteenth century, on the other hand, the symbolical plants, including the strawberry, which appears in the mystical ‘Enclosed Gardens,’ express the virtues of Mary.