though the Netherlands, Germany and England adopted the symbolism of
Italy, Italy, though admiring greatly the technical excellence of the
Flemish, rarely assimilated the Northern conventions for the expression
of the intangible.
But the lily is usually reserved for virgin saints and martyrs, and
more particularly for her whom Chaucer names
‘Floure of Virgins all’
--that is, the Virgin Mary.
The Venerable Bede, writing in the early part of the eighth century,
declares ‘the great white lily’ to be a fit emblem of the resurrection
of the Virgin; the pure white petals signifying her body; the golden
anthers her soul within, shining with celestial light.
According to Petrus Cantius, cantor of the Cathedral School of Paris
in the early part of the thirteenth century, the lily represented the
daughter of Joachim herself, by reason of its whiteness, its aroma,
delectable above all others, its curative virtues, and finally because
it springs from uncultivated soil as the Virgin was the issue of Jewish
parents.
As to its curative virtues, it may be added that an anonymous English
monk, writing in the thirteenth century, prescribes the lily as a
sovereign remedy for burns; and for the reason that ‘it is a figure of
the Madonna, who also cures burns, that is, the vices or burns of the
soul.’[24]
But though theologians occasionally used the lily as a symbol of
virginity, before the eleventh century we do not find it associated
with the Mother of Christ pictorially, either as her emblem or her
attribute. There are no lilies in the Catacombs, and those in the
early mosaics are decorative, or symbols of the joy of Heaven. The
miniaturists occasionally used the flower as the attribute of virgin
martyrs, but not in representations of the Virgin.
It was by a Spanish king that the lily was first definitely, and in a
manner pictorially, associated with the Mother of Christ--as her own
flower. In the eleventh century Spaniards and Moors were each fighting
for their faith, and the Moslems instituted military orders called
_rábitos_, the members of which were vowed to perpetual warfare against
the ‘infidel.’
The Christian knights were not to be outdone, and in 1043 Garcias
of Navarre founded an order of chivalry vowed to the service of the
Virgin, which he named ‘the Order of the Lily of Navarre.’
Edmondson[25] writes: ‘The Order of “Our Lady of the Lily,” or “of
Navarre,” was instituted in the city of Nagera by Garcias, the sixth
King of Navarre, in the year 1043, on the occasion of a miraculous
image of the Virgin Mary issuing forth of a lily, and holding the
Infant Jesus in her arms, being then discovered in that city. This
order was composed of thirty knights, chosen out of the principal
ancient families in Navarre, Biscay and old Castile. Each of these
knights wore on his breast a lily embroidered in silver, and, on all
festivals and holy days, he wore about his neck a collar composed of
a double chain of gold interlaced with Gothic capital letters M; and
pendent thereunto an oval medal, whereon was enamelled, on a white
ground, a lily of gold springing out of a mount, supporting a Gothic
capital letter M, ducally crowned.’[26]
Thus the lily became the gage of the Virgin borne by her knights. She
was now gradually moving from the subordinate though glorious station
as Mother of the Incarnate Word to a position of her own as Queen of
Heaven. Saint Ferdinand, possibly unwilling to confront the Moslem with
the Christ whom they themselves revered as a prophet, bore upon his
saddle-bow the ivory _Virgen de las Batallas_,[27] and perhaps what
specially endeared her to the people of Spain was the knowledge that in
the fealty they paid her the infidel could have neither part nor lot.
The chosen knight of the Immaculate Virgin was, of course, _Santiago_,
Saint James, the patron saint of Spain, but every Spanish cavalier
acknowledged himself the servitor of the Lady of the Lily.
Rather more than fifty years after the founding of the Order of the
Lily of Navarre the poet-saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, was preaching
his famous series of Homilies on the Song of Solomon. The sermons were
eighty in number, each based on the text of the Canticles, and each
celebrating the perfections of the Virgin. Differing from Origen, he
found the Virgin Mary, not the Christ, to be the speaker of the words:
‘I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.’ Differing again
from the Church father, he further identified ‘the lily among thorns,’
she who is addressed as ‘my sister, my spouse,’ with the Virgin and not
with the Church of God upon Earth.
Saint Bernard was the most popular preacher of his time; his sermons
became known throughout the Christian world, and to his influence may
be traced the high position which the Mother of Christ now holds in
the Roman Catholic Church. But, so far, the lily had not appeared in
pictorial art in connection with the Virgin.
In the twelfth century, however, we find ecclesiastical seals which
bear the figure of the Virgin holding by the left hand (or right, as
it would appear on the impress) the Child, and in her right a branch
of lilies. Two of these seals, that of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln
and that of Thornholm Priory in Lincolnshire, are now in the British
Museum. It seems to have been the fashion in the eleventh, twelfth and
thirteenth centuries to engrave the owner’s figure on a seal with a
flower in the hand. On the seal of Capet Henri I he is shown with a
sceptre in one hand and a fleur-de-lys in the other, and the figures
on the seals of the Queens of France have a flower in either hand.
Therefore it was only natural, when cutting the Virgin’s figure on a
seal, that the craftsman should give her a flower too, and the Virgin’s
own flower, the lily.
The conservatism of churchmen and the traditions of Byzantine art
still kept lilies at the threshold of the Church till the Renaissance
came. It came like the spring, uncertainly at first, with puffs and
gusts and relapses, but every day the atmosphere grew more genial,
more life-giving, till at last every branch of human thought was alive
and growing. The old early Christian fear of beauty as a devil’s lure
was dying fast, and as scholars and artists studied with new interest
the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome, the old pagan joy of perfect
form in art as in literature revived once more. A representation of
the climax of the Christian tragedy could only be an awful thing, but
childhood and womanhood had the right to beauty. The old Byzantine
panels of the Child-Christ and His Mother were little more than a
formula; the lines and colour were not beautiful, though understood
to represent a thing of beauty. Now artists and people required that
she who, on the word of Scripture, was ‘the fairest among women,’[28]
should be adequately presented, and the Church gave consent. But it was
understood that the loveliness of the Virgin should be strictly the
beauty of holiness, for Saint Ambrose had affirmed[29] that, in the
Mother of God, corporeal beauty had been, as it were, the reflection
of the beauty of the soul, and the early artists, hampered by lack
of technical skill and confused by monkish ideals of asceticism, too
often rendered their Madonnas emaciated and bloodless, even languid and
fretful in expression, mistaking the outward signs of a subdued flesh
for those of a perfected spirit.
It was at this time that Saint Dominic came to Italy with his fiery
zeal, his devotion to the Virgin and his Spanish traditions of the
flower of Our Lady. For him, the quality which raised her so far above
all other women was her spotlessness; she was ‘_sin pecado_,’ ‘_Maria
Purissima_.’ Her other phases, as Mother of the Sorrowful, Refuge
of Sinners, or Consoler of the Afflicted, were to him of secondary
importance.
Already through the preaching of Saint Francis Italian intellect had
been rendered capable of appreciating the beauty of simplicity. Each
artist knew that the true beauty of the Queen of Heaven was not to be
expressed by jewels or wonderfully-wrought raiment, and as the words
of Saint Dominic passed from mouth to mouth, the people of Italy came
to understand that the most precious virtue of Christ’s Mother was her
purity, symbolized very fitly by the lily. The symbol, beautiful in
itself, and so suggestive of the quality it represented, impressed the
imagination clearly, and presently there was a bloom of pictured lilies.
The mosaicist Cavallini,[30] Duccio di Buoninsegna,[31] Giotto,[32]
Simone Martini,[33] and Orcagna[34] led the way, and the Christian
artists of the world have followed. The earliest lilies flowered in
Rome; but Siena, Umbria, Florence, Venice, and later the Netherlands
and Germany, all soon had their votaries of the mystic flower. The
French ivory workers of the fourteenth century, influenced doubtless
by the tradition of the seal-cutters, frequently placed flowers in the
hand of the Madonna. These little ivory statuettes are usually very
sweet in type and often exquisite in workmanship. The Child is held
on the left arm, and the right hand holds a large single lily cup, a
pear-like fruit, or, more generally, a natural stalk of lilies with
leaves and flowers. Always when placed beside the Virgin, or in her
hand, the lily is the symbol of her purity, and a lily standing alone,
as does the beautiful stem in _pietra-dura_ work, which decorates the
little oratory of ‘Our Lady of the Annunciation’ in the Church of
the Santissima Annunziata of Florence, is the emblem of the Madonna
herself, the ‘Lilium inter Spinas.’
Modern Biblical commentators are agreed that the ‘lily of the valleys’
of the Song of Solomon is not the white lily of Europe but the scarlet
anemone. The _lilium candidum_ appears never to have grown in Syria. In
the late spring and early summer, however, the anemones grow thickly
in every grassy patch around Jerusalem and throughout Palestine. That
the flower mentioned is red seems indicated by the comparison between
it and the lips of the ‘Beloved,’ and the anemone, which responds so
readily to the sun, throwing back its scarlet petals and baring its
heart to the warmth, might well stand for the passionate lover of the
Canticles.
But the fathers of the Church held the flower to be a _lilium_, and for
the Church and for sacred art it was and remains the _lilium candidum_.
[Illustration: _From French MS. of 14th Century_]
IV
THE IRIS
The only rival to the _lilium candidum_ as the lily of the Virgin
is the iris. Strictly speaking, it is not a lily at all, for the
_Iridacea_ and the _Liliacea_ are distinct botanical orders. But in
Germany it is known as the sword-lily, from its sword-shaped leaves; in
France it has always been identified with the ‘fleur-de-lys’; in Spain
it is a ‘lirio’--a lily--and Shakespeare writes:
‘... And lilies of all kinds
The Flower-de-luce being one.’
Its first appearance as a religious symbol is in the work of the early
Flemish masters, where it both accompanies and replaces the white lily
as the flower of the Virgin. Roger van der Weyden[35] paints both
flowers in a vase before the Virgin, and the iris alone in another
picture[36] of Mary with the Holy Child. In his ‘Annunciation’[37] the
vase holds only white lilies. There is iris growing among the roses in
Jan van Eyck’s ‘Virgin of the Fountain,’[38] but in his Annunciations
there is only the white lily. Memling, however, places an iris half
hidden below the lilies in one Annunciation,[39] while in a ‘Madonna
with the Child’[40] there is also a single iris, though in this case
the iris rises above the lilies.
The Master of Flémalle in his fine ‘Saint Barbara’[41] places an iris
in a vase beside the saint, where the white lily of a virgin martyr
might have been expected.
The symbolism of the iris and the lily at first sight appears to be
identical, and the substitution of the iris for the _lilium_ seems
to be the result of some confusion between ‘lys’ and ‘fleur-de-lys,’
accentuated by the likeness between the iris and the lilies of the
French royal standard with which the people of the Netherlands were
familiar, since they were emblazoned on the shield of the Dukes of
Burgundy.
In the mosaics of Ravenna, where the lily is used to indicate the
delights of Heaven, it is drawn in silhouette, showing three petals,
and very closely resembles the ‘fleur-de-lys’ of heraldry. The same
convention born of the extreme difficulty of giving modelled form in
utter whiteness, particularly in a medium unfitted to express fine
gradations of shade, is found in woven work, tooled leather, and
embroidery, and the common likeness of the imperfectly-rendered _lilium
candidum_ and the iris to the sacred lily of the French and English
royal standards, is sufficient to account for any indecision as to
which was precisely the Virgin’s lily. It is conceivable, too, that
the artists of the Netherlands, when they painted a Madonna for their
churches, set her in the midst of the iris which grew so thickly round
their doors rather than limit her patronage to the white lily, which
was still exotic and confined to some few convent gardens. For the iris
made their Lady more entirely their own--and so she would appeal more
strongly to the emotions of the simple.
But in the Netherlands, in the fifteenth century, symbolism was usually
very precise, and there does seem to be a slight difference in the
use of the two lilies. The _lilium candidum_ is used exclusively
as the symbol of virginal purity, more particularly in relation to
the fact that the Virgin Mary was a mother, but the iris, the royal
lily, appears to be the emblem or attribute of the incarnate Godhead.
Though Saint Bernard of Clairvaux had attributed the metaphor, ‘I am
... the lily of the valleys,’ to the Virgin, Origen, the older and,
in the North, weightier authority, held Christ to be the lily. In
the ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’[42] of Hugo van der Goes, where the
symbolism all refers to the Child, there is no white lily, but the
orange lily and the purple and white iris. In the Annunciation of
Memling, the single iris below the lilies may be the emblem of the
Prince of David’s house who was to be born of virginal innocence--and
it may have the same meaning where it rises above the lilies in the
picture where the royal Child sits upon His mother’s knee. It may also
indicate royal birth in the ‘Saint Barbara’ of the Prado. She was
the daughter of a King, but in this painting has no crown or other
attribute of royalty. It is noticeable, too, that had there been a
white lily in the vase it would have been difficult to distinguish
this Saint Barbara from a figure of the Virgin.
The idea of royalty in connection with the iris received support from
the constant recurrence of the ‘fleur-de-lys,’ accepted as an iris
(though some contend that the form, as a symbol of royalty, came
originally from Egypt and was founded on the lotus), on royal crowns
and sceptres. Memling and his school used such crowns as the symbol of
divine majesty, placing them upon the heads of God the Father,[43] of
God the Son,[44] and also on the head of the Virgin Mary.[45]
Dante also appears to use the ‘fleur-de-lys’ or ‘fiordaliso’ as a
symbol of honour:
‘... Beneath the sky
So beautiful, came four-and-twenty elders (signori)
By two and two, with flower-de-luces crown’d.’[46]
Some commentators, taking the four-and-twenty personages as the
four-and-twenty canonical books of the Old Testament, consider the
crowns of flowers to be symbolical of the purity of the doctrine found
within the books, holding a ‘fiordaliso’ to equal the white lily as a
symbol, but it is possible that the poet meant the formal fleur-de-lys
upon a golden crown or the fresh iris blooms which would also form a
crown of honour.
The iris is sometimes used symbolically in Italy, and there is in the
Church of S. Spirito in Florence an ‘Annunciation’ now usually ascribed
to Pesello. Between Mary and the angel stands a vase from which spring
three purple iris. This vase, on either side of which the figures
bend, is not merely a variation of the vase of white lilies indicating
the virginity of Mary which is seen in so many early Annunciations,
but it is the same symbol developed and enriched, till it represents
the dogma of the immaculate birth of Christ. The vase, in many cases
transparent, typifies Mary, and the upspringing flower is the emblem of
the incarnate Godhead.[47]
Ghirlandaio places the iris, violet and daisy, each growing up strongly
and freshly from the bare ground of the stableyard, in his ‘Adoration
of the Shepherds,’[48] and in a picture of the sixteenth century by
Palmezzano of Forlì,[49] the Child, seated on His Mother’s knee, holds
a stem of iris as a sceptre; but, on the whole, the iris was little
painted in Italy.
In art which is purely German the iris is very rarely used, though
Albert Dürer painted a ‘Madonna of the Sword-lily,’[50] but in Spain
it holds an important place. Spanish art is poor in symbolism,
though it recognized early and prized highly the white lilies of
the Annunciation. Except, perhaps, for the flame-tipped dart of
divine love, there seems to be no symbol of truly Spanish origin,
and those used by Spanish artists were mostly taken from the art of
the Netherlands. Flemish art was profoundly admired in Spain, and
the Spanish were well acquainted with it, for there was naturally
much intercourse between the two countries in the days before the
Netherlands established their independence. Also Jan van Eyck visited
Portugal and Spain in the train of his patron, Philip the Good of
Burgundy, and from the Hispano-Mauresque types in some of the later
work of the Master of Flémalle there is reason to think that he, too,
had been in the peninsula.
The symbol of the Flemish painters which particularly appealed to the
Spanish was the iris, which grew small and wild upon their own hills,
and with a freer, heavier growth in the palace gardens, whose admirable
water-works had been planned and executed by the despised Moors. They
adopted the iris as the royal lily of the Virgin, the attribute of the
Queen of Heaven, as the _lilium candidum_ was the attribute of the Maid
of Nazareth. The iris, therefore, was deemed particularly suitable as
a detail in that most favourite Spanish devotional representation of
the Virgin, an ‘Immaculate Conception.’ The Virgin, represented as the
woman ‘clothed with the sun and the moon beneath her feet,’ is usually
attended by child angels who carry roses, lilies, palm and olive. The
purple iris is generally added, and sometimes the white lily is omitted
and the iris only given. The Spaniards, therefore, attached the same
idea of royalty to the iris as did the Flemings, but transferred the
attributes from the royal Son to the crowned Mother, for in Spain it is
not found as the attribute or the emblem of the Infant Christ.
Later, the whole Catholic Church seems to have accepted both the iris
and the lily, and the mosaic altar-frontals of St Peter’s in Rome bear
a design in which the rose, the lily and the iris are united.
V
THE ROSE
Roses, among the Romans, were the symbol of victory, of triumphant
love, of the pride and pomp of life, and were by long association as
pagan as the lily is sacred. The Madonna lily (_lilium candidum_) was
the flower of the Virgin and of the virgin saints; the rose was the
flower of Venus.
‘And on hire hed, full semmly for to see
A rose gerlond fressh and wel smelling.’[51]
In the ‘Triumph of Venus,’ by Cosimo Tura,[52] the goddess, who is in
truth a modest-looking lady, fully draped and firmly girdled, wears
a crown of roses, red and white. Beneath her cockle-shell is another
picture,[53] the sea is ‘sucking in one by one the falling roses, each
severe in outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a
little as Botticelli’s roses always are.’[54]
But the Church grudged Venus the flower. Roses, said Wilfred Strabo,
were the flower of martyrdom. ‘_Rosæ martyres, rubore sanguinis_,’
wrote Saint Melitus, Bishop of Sardes, in the second century, and
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux found the rose to be a fitting symbol of
the Passion of our Lord. But though the rose was red to the colour of
blood, and fenced around with cruellest thorns, it had been so long
associated with the joys of life that the world refused to recognize
it as the flower of death. Only as the sign of the triumphant entry of
the departed soul to Heaven was the symbol acceptable. Roses sprang
from the blood of those who fell for their faith at Roncevaux (as
indeed they sprang from the spilt blood of Adonis), but they were also
the sign of victory over the pagan, and when the Virgin Mary was laid
within her tomb it was in rejoicing that ‘straightway there surrounded
her flowers of roses which are the blessed company of martyrs.’[55]
But the Church, always wise in matters æsthetic, did not insist upon
the tragic significance of the rose. It was allowed to be still the
symbol of love, but of divine love, and it is as the symbol of the love
of God that it now decorates our churches in carvings of wood or stone,
in the silver work of church ornaments and on embroidered vestments and
altar frontals.
The rose has never been especially associated with the person of
Christ. Origen, who held that the text which we render, ‘I am the rose
of Sharon,’ was a self-description of our Lord, read the verse, ‘I am
the flower of the field,’ so giving the Church no clear image. When in
art an emblem was required to represent our Lord, the ancient catacomb
devices of the lamb and the vine were employed. Any reference to Him
under the metaphor of a flower was rare and usually vague, as the
charming ‘gold flower’ of the Blickling Homilies. ‘Then the Queen of
all the maidens gave birth to the true Creator and Consoler of mankind,
when the gold-flower came unto this world and received a human body
from S. Mary, the spotless Virgin.’
Or again as a fruit rising from the mystical rose:
‘Now spring up flouris fra the rute
Revert you upward naturally
In honour of the blissit frute
That raiss up fro the rose Mary.’[56]
There are some mediæval Latin hymns for the Nativity in which Christ is
referred to as the rose springing from the lily. The simile, however,
was by no means applied to Him exclusively, for in a Visitation hymn
of the same period He is alluded to as the lily hidden in the rose.
But though the rose is not often the emblem of Jesus Christ, both in
literature and art it is used as the symbol of His love.
Saint Mectilda, in the discourse on the three perfumes of divine love,
tells us that ‘the first of these perfumes is the rose-water distilled
in the still of charity from the most beautiful of all roses, the heart
of our Lord,’[57] and repeatedly in ecclesiastical art, roses falling
or fallen from Heaven, signify divine love. The lovely angels in
Signorelli’s ‘Paradise’[58] carry roses in their looped draperies and
scatter them down upon the redeemed souls beneath, and in Botticelli’s
‘Coronation of the Virgin’[59] the air is also full of roses, symbols
of the love of God. And symbols of divine love are also the falling
roses in that vision of Saint Francis which was so often painted by
Spanish artists and called by them ‘La Portincula.’[60] The saint,
kneeling in his cell one winter’s night, was much troubled by the
memory of a fair woman. To overcome the temptation he went out and
threw himself among the briars of the wilderness. He was rewarded by a
vision of the Saviour, seated in glory, with the Virgin by His side,
and as a token that his penitences were accepted the thorns bloomed
with roses. In most renderings of the legend the mystical roses fall in
a shower around him, and in Murillo’s fine picture[61] the _putti_ are
energetically pelting the saint with blossoms. It was a subject painted
_con amore_ by the Spaniards, for--Assumptions apart--the traditions
of art in Spain were distinctly gloomy and they seized where they could
an excuse for colour. Even Zurburan succumbed to the roses.[62]