an unknown English painter are also symbols of divine love. The panels
show Richard II, who is presented to the Virgin by Saint John the
Baptist, Saint Edmund and Saint Edward the Confessor. The roses round
the Virgin’s feet are pink and yellow, and heavier, handsomer flowers
than those which are found in Italian pictures of the same period. For
the rest, this Heaven is especially remarkable for the politeness of
the blue-winged, blue-robed angels, who each, in compliment to their
royal visitor, wear his badge--a white hart couchant, collared and
chained or--upon the shoulder.
Red roses, said Saint Bernard, were symbolical of the Passion of our
Lord, but neither in Church observances nor in art have they been
generally adopted with that meaning. There is, however, a picture of
the Christ-Child in Cadiz. He holds the crown of thorns, and at His
feet are the globe and the apple. All around, filling the background,
are blood-red roses, symbol of the Passion which was to come.
This forecast of pain in the Spanish renderings of the Saviour’s
infancy is even more marked in a picture by Zurburan,[64] where in play
He plaits a crown of rose thorns, the flowers lying beside Him and at
His feet.
Divine love and divine passion, intermingled, may be what the roses
indicate in many ‘Adorations’ of great beauty where the scene is laid
in a rose-garden. In the ‘Adoration’ of Neri di Bicci[65] the Holy
Child lies surrounded by lilies and red and pale roses. The lilies
signify His sinlessness and the roses apparently His love and passion.
The little Saint John stands behind with a scroll on which is inscribed
‘_ECCE AGNUS DEI_.’
There is a lovely picture[66] now ascribed to Botticini, where
angels playfully sprinkle rose petals over the Infant Christ in a
rose-trellised garden. ‘They worship here always alone, though there
is no gate to the garden; the angels have relinquished high Heaven for
these delights; for the scent of these roses which they pluck, and the
Child has relinquished Heaven for these roses, and the thorns which
he shall gather from them ... the season of their thorns is never
over, and whilst it is the time of roses in this picture, there is the
forecast of their thorns in it.’[67]
In the _Speculum Humanæ Salvationis_, a MS. of the fourteenth
century,[68] the Holy Dove is depicted upon a rose. From the bosom of a
seated figure, which represents David or Jesse, a rose tree issues. At
the summit of the tree there is a five-petalled rose, in the centre of
which, as in a nest, sits a dove, which represents the Holy Ghost.
The design is founded upon the text of Isaiah which has been
paraphrased by Pope:
‘From Jesse’s root behold a branch arise,
Whose sacred flower with fragrance fills the skies;
Th’ ætherial Spirit o’er its leaves shall move
And on its top descends the sacred Dove.’
The rose represents Christ, the perfect flower of the human race,
sprung from the root of Jesse, and the dove descends upon it as the
Holy Ghost descended upon our Lord at His baptism in Jordan.
Saint Bernard, differing from Origen, identified the Virgin Mary with
the flower of the field and also with the abstraction described as
‘Wisdom’ in Ecclesiasticus, ‘exalted like a palm tree in Engeddi and as
a rose plant in Jericho.’
‘_Rosa Mystica, ora pro nobis!_’
prays the Church.
‘Here is the Rose
Wherein the Word Divine was made Incarnate,’
wrote Dante.
An English hymn composed about the year 1300 has the lines:
‘Lavedy (Lady), flower of alle thing
_Rosa sine spina_
Thu bere Jhesu, hevene king
_Gratia devina_.’
And nearly two centuries later William Dunbar wrote:
‘Hevins distil your balmy showris:
For now is risen the bricht day-stir
Fro the rose Mary, flour of flowris.’
Therefore, in the decoration of churches dedicated to the Madonna,
the rose frequently occurs. It does not supersede the lily, which
was the flower especially consecrated to her, but it is found beside
it. The Church of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome is ornamented along the
aisles, above the side chapels, with a series of panels, gold on white,
which show the floral emblems of the Virgin. The rose, the lily, the
olive, the laurel and the vine alternate down the whole length of the
church. The beautiful little chapel behind the shrine of the Santissima
Annunziata, in the Church of the Annunziata in Florence, was decorated
in the seventeenth century with inlaid and raised _pietra-dura_ work.
Each of the five onyx panels which form the walls has upon it an emblem
of the Virgin--the sun, the moon, the _Stella maris_, the lily, and,
most lovely of them all, the branch of roses below the words ‘Rosa
Mystica.’ This rose is red, and, strangely enough, the red rose, rather
than the white, was chosen to represent the Virgin. Wrote Guido Orlandi
in 1292:
‘If thou hadst said, my friend, of Mary,
Loving and full of grace;
Thou art a red rose planted in the garden;
Thou wouldst have written fittingly.’
In the _Sarum Book of Hours_, by Philippe Pigouchet,[69] published in
1501, the huge rose held by the Virgin definitely illustrates her title
of ‘Rosa Mystica,’ but those pictures of the early Florentine school,
in which she holds a small red or white rose, show her as the ‘_Madonna
del Fiore_,’ for as ‘Our Lady of the Flower’ she had been installed
patroness of the city of Florence. It would have seemed natural, since
the lily was upon the shield of Florence, to have placed a lily, her
own flower, in the Madonna’s hand. But the city of Florence had passed
through troubled times just before the revival of her art, and the
silver lily on her shield had been replaced by one of crimson.
‘Had through dissension been with vermeil dyed.’[70]
Rather than paint her with the crimson lily, Florentine artists gave
her the rose, and she holds a white leafless rose in the dainty little
picture by Fra Angelico which is now in the Vatican.[71]
There was an odd fancy about the beginning of the eighteenth century
to represent the Virgin Mary as _La Divina Pastora_ feeding her sheep
with roses. The original picture with this title was by Alfonso
da Tobar.[72] He found imitators both in Spain and France, and in
Southern Spain the popularity of the subject still persists. There is
a plastic group, nearly life-size, in the Church of S. Catalina in
Cadiz. The Virgin is dressed _à la Watteau_ with a beribboned crook
and a rose-wreathed hat. She feeds with roses and lilies the sheep and
lambs gambolling round her knees; an almond tree flowers above, and
the Christ-Child, dressed as a small shepherd boy, stands in front.
It is all pink and white, gay and dainty, in a corner of the austere
whitewashed convent chapel which has Murillo’s beautiful ‘Marriage of
Saint Catharine’ above the altar. A similar group, but more dignified
in type and less frivolous in detail, is in the Church of the Holy
Trinity at Cordova. They are strange artificial flowers of that gloomy
growth, Spanish Art.
VI
THE CARNATION
In early German devotional poems the _nelken_, the pink, carnation or
gillyflower, is occasionally used as the simile of the Virgin. Conrad
von Würtzburg writes:
‘Thou art a fragrant gillyflower sprig.’
But it has been given no definite and individual status as a symbol.
Very frequently, however, in ecclesiastical art, more particularly
that of Venice and Northern Italy, it is found where the rose might be
expected. It is placed with the lily in a vase beside the Virgin, with
the violet before the Infant Christ, and with the wild strawberries
among the grass of Paradise.
In Germany the carnation is seen falling from above with heavenly
roses, and occasionally, even, in spite of the written legend, it
replaces the roses in Saint Dorothea’s wreath.
It would appear, therefore, that the symbolism of the carnation is
identical with that of the rose, and when, for any reason, the artist
did not care to paint the rose, he substituted the carnation.
Each year thousands of carnation blossoms are brought to the Lateran
Church in Rome on the feast-day of Saint John, and the people bring
carnations, not roses, because by midsummer’s day the blooming time of
Roman roses is almost past. A scarcity of roses would seem one reason
at least in the Venetian pictures of the fifteenth century why the
carnation replaces the rose. Earth, even sufficient to grow a rose
bush, was scarce in the sea-washed city, but carnations then, as now,
must have grown in pots on every balcony. So the Venetians painted
their own familiar flower rather than draw the rose, as Carpaccio did
his camels, from descriptions furnished by observant travellers.
In the Netherlands and Germany artists probably preferred the
carnation to the rose. It is more precise in shape, neater in its
habit of growth, richer in colour than the rose, and therefore
more in the spirit of Northern art, which liked to express definite
and closely-reasoned symbolism with distinct bright colours and
sharply-realized form. In the South, the artists, more concerned with
the depicting of the soul than with the outer shell of things, more
poetical and also more vague and less accurate in their symbolism, were
better pleased with the more elusive charms of the loosely-petalled
rose.
In an ‘Adoration’ by Botticelli[73] the Holy Child lies among violets,
daisies and wild strawberries, and the background is filled with
freely-growing roses, drawn apparently from memory, not life. The roses
signify the divine love which impelled the Saviour of the world to be
born as a human Child. In the same subject by Hugo van der Goes[74]
three carefully-painted carnations are placed in a crystal vase, and
are symbols of the divine love of the Holy Trinity by which God the
Son became incarnate, the crystal vase in Northern art typifying the
Immaculate Conception.
But in the Sienese and Florentine schools also the carnation is
sometimes found, and very rarely in the same picture as the rose.[75]
Therefore it would seem conclusive that when the painter of the Church
did not care to use the rose because, probably, of its association
with Venus and scenes profane, he was free, if he chose, to use the
carnation as its substitute.
Strangely enough, the most famous carnations in the history of art,
those two which have given the name of ‘The Master with the Carnations’
to the anonymous Swiss painter of the fifteenth century, seem to have
no symbolical significance. The picture[76] shows Saint John the
Baptist preaching to King Herod from the text: ‘It is not lawful for
thee to have thy brother’s wife.’ The King is in his chair of state
and the ladies of his court are seated upon cushions on the tesselated
pavement before the pulpit. Directly below the pulpit lie the two
pinks; one is white and one red. Possibly, since roses, according to
Saint Melitus,[77] Walafrid Strabo[78] and Saint Mectilda,[79] are
the symbols of martyrdom, the carnation may foreshadow the approaching
death of the preacher, but they are more probably simply a detail to
give verisimilitude to the composition, as is the dog that worries a
bone in the ‘Dance of Salome’ by the same master.
VII
GARLANDS OF ROSES
‘Let us crown ourselves with rose-buds,’[80] cried the revellers in the
Book of Wisdom, and at Roman feasts host and guests alike wore roses on
their hair or in garlands round their necks.
So in the heavenly mansions, where life is a perpetual feast, unfading
roses crown the elect. Wreaths of roses are the symbol of heavenly joy
and are worn alike by angels and by the human souls who have entered
bliss.
An early Christian prisoner dreamt that he was already in Heaven:
‘Towards us ran one of the twin children who, three days before,
had been decapitated with their mother. A wreath of vermilion roses
encircled his neck and in his right hand he held a green and fresh
palm.’[81]
Beneath Byzantine influence the rosy wreaths turned to crowns of
jewels, and in the period between Constantine and Justinian crowns
were considered strictly necessary for the guests at the heavenly
feasts. But when the King of Heaven Himself was present all reverently
uncrowned, and it is with their crowns in their hands that the twelve
apostles stand, and the four-and-twenty elders in the mosaics of Rome
and Ravenna. In the Neapolitan mosaics in the Chapel of Santa Restituta
eight figures, apparently of martyrs, hold large crowns resembling
a victor’s wreath, and the graceful virgin saints on the wall of S.
Apollinare Nuova each carries her wreath.
The tall, grand angels of the mosaics have neither wreaths nor
garlands. They have gained no crown because no strife has ever troubled
their serenity. They stand tall and straight, haloed, with spear-like
wands in their hands.
After the twelfth century, however, the apostles and martyrs no longer
carry the crown of victory, but it is the angels who wear wreaths,
usually wreaths of roses, which are the symbol of heavenly joy. And,
alas! what a lowering in type there was from the grand, dignified
beings who guard the throne of Mary, on the wall of S. Apollinare
Nuova, to the childish, peeping, rose-crowned little attendants which
crowd behind her chair in pictures of the Sienese, Umbrian and early
Florentine schools. The archangels still keep some dignity, but the
sweet little doll-like creatures, rose-crowned and golden-winged, of
Fra Angelico seem an inadequate representation of the hosts of Heaven.
But a magnificent strong-limbed angel of the Byzantine type would have
overshadowed the slight, transparent-fleshed Madonna whose physique
showed traces of the asceticism which went towards the making of a
saint. So the angels, denied grand and vigorous frames, were decked
with dainty robes and crowns of roses. Paul Bourget writes:
‘Ce double et contradictoire Idéal, celui d’une extase monastique
conquise dans le martyre des sens et celui d’une beauté qui parle
au sens, semble avoir co-existé dans le Pérugin et dans les
peintres qui l’ont précédé ou accompagné, particulièrement dans
Benedetto Bonfigli, dans Eusebio da San Giorgio, dans Giannicola
Manni et quelques autres dont la Pinacothèque de Pérouse enferme
les œuvres. Ce rêve complexe a son symbole dans les anges de
Bonfigli, couronnés de roses, comme les impies dont parle
l’Ecriture “Couronnons-nous de roses avant qu’elles ne soient
flétries,” comme les convives aussi des banquets paiens “Respirons
les roses tant qu’elles ressemblent à tes joues. Embrassons tes
joues tant qu’elles ressemblent à tes roses.” Mais ces pauvres
anges aux cheveux fleuris tiennent dans leurs mains les instruments
de la Passion du Sauveur, et une pitié douloureuse noie de rouge
leurs douces prunelles où roulent de grosses larmes.’[82]
But blissful souls as well as angels wear roses. In the Paradise of
Simone Martini,[83] Saint Peter with his key has opened the gate of
Heaven and two angels standing by crown with roses each soul as it
enters.
And more particularly those souls are crowned who in their earthly
life could rejoice in their faith even when overwhelmed with troubles.
Symbol of holy joy is the crown of roses which Saint Cecilia wears. Her
legend, like other legends of the Early Church, is both more poetic and
more allegorical than those which originated in later times.
Saint Cecilia lived in virginity with her husband Valerian, who,
through love of her, became a Christian and was baptized.
‘And returning home he found Cecilia in her chamber conversing with a
glittering angel ... and he held in his hand two crowns of roses and
lilies, and he gave one of them to Cecilia and the other to Valerian.
‘And on the morrow, when Tibertius came to salute his sister-in-law
Cecilia, he perceived an excellent odour of lilies and roses, and asked
her, wondering, whence she had untimely roses in the winter season.’
(That is, whence came her holy joy during the season of persecution.)
‘And Valerian answered that God had sent them crowns of roses and
lilies but that he could not see them till his eyes were opened and his
body purified’ (by baptism).
Then follows the account of the conversion of Tibertius and the deaths
of all three martyrs.
The ‘Second Nonne’ told the legend of the saint very prettily to the
Canterbury pilgrims:
‘Thou with thy gerlond wrought of rose and lilie
Thee, mene I, maid and martir Seint Cecilie.’
And her story appears to have been popular, though strangely enough she
has never ranked in popularity with Saint Margaret, Saint Catharine
of Alexandria, or Saint Barbara, notwithstanding that her story is
certainly better authenticated than theirs, the historical details of
her martyrdom having been proved beyond dispute. But she is essentially
a Roman saint, her body lying in Trastevere on practically the spot
where she suffered martyrdom under Marcus Aurelius, and with the
strange jealousy of Italian cities she was almost ignored by Siena,
Florence and Venice till Raphael, Roman in all his sympathies, painted
the fine picture now in Bologna. In this picture, where she appears as
the patroness of Music, she has no roses, but Luini[84] dresses her
head charmingly with white roses and anemones.
More fortunate than Saint Cecilia, Saint Dorothea is beloved in almost
all Christian countries, for coming from Cappadocia there could be
neither vauntings nor heart-burnings on her account in the Christian
cities of Europe. She too wears the roses of her legend.
‘Send me then some roses from the Paradise of your Christ,’ scoffed
the noble youth, Theophilus, as she passed to execution. At the moment
of death an angel appeared with three roses and three apples. ‘Take
them to Theophilus,’ said the saint, and Theophilus, believing, died a
martyr.[85]
Saint Dorothea is usually painted with both apples and roses, symbols
of the good works of a Christian life and of the holy joy even in the
hour of death, which, reported to Theophilus, astonished and finally
converted him. She is very popular both in the Low Countries and in
Germany. There is a charming triptych at Palermo, the best picture
Sicily possesses, attributed usually to Mabuse. On one wing Saint
Dorothea is depicted seated on the ground with her lap full of red and
white roses, a quaint, compact little figure, not a slender Italian
maiden, supported by angelic visions, already half in Heaven, but of
the sturdy Flemish type, who, having with clear brain calculated the
cost, sets herself with stoicism to endure the pain which would be
rewarded by the martyr’s crown of unfading roses.
Curiously enough, the Virgin’s crown is usually of gold and precious
stones, though in one of Velasquez’s rare religious pictures, ‘The
Coronation of the Virgin,’[86] God the Father places upon her head a
wreath of red and white rose blooms. In the best period of Italian art
the Virgin wears no crown except at a ‘Coronation,’ when most often it
is of gold. In Germany the crowns are large and heavily jewelled, and
in the Netherlands a jewelled fillet was very generally placed upon her
hair. A notable and beautiful exception to these fillet-like coronets
is the magnificent symbolical crown of jewels and fresh flowers which
she wears as Queen of Heaven in Hubert van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the
Lamb.’[87] It was only in late art, that is, after the sixteenth
century, that representations of Mary with the Child in her arms, as
Queen of Heaven, or as ‘La Purissima,’ became common. Previously she
had been painted as a human mother with the sorrows of her motherhood
still upon her. As the mother, the greatest of whose seven sorrows has
not yet come, she would not yet carry the rose crown which symbolized
joy, even though it were heavenly joy, and by the time religious
sentiment demanded representations of Christ’s mother, risen to glory,
all sorrow past, the Church had decided to depict her as the woman
‘clothed with the sun and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’
Akin to the wreaths of roses worn by angels and saints are the hedges
and rose-trellises of Paradise.
Dante pictures Heaven as one great and marvellous rose-bloom:
‘How wide the leaves
Extended to the utmost, of this rose;[88]
...... which in bright expansiveness
Lays forth its gradual blooming, redolent
Of praises to the never wintering sun.’[89]
But the artists of the Church have usually depicted Heaven not as
a rose but as a rose-garden; and as a second and more perfect Eden
rather than as the Holy City, the stupendous piece of jeweller’s work
described in the Revelation of Saint John. A few Flemish and German
artists have attempted to realize the jasper wall, the ‘pure gold like
unto clear glass,’ and the ‘foundations garnished with all manner of
precious stones,’ but for the majority of artists on both sides of the
Alps Heaven was a paradise, a garden. The prophet Esdras describes it
in detail:
‘Twelve trees laden with divers fruits,
‘And as many fountains flowing with milk and honey, and seven mighty
mountains, whereupon there grow roses and lilies.’[90]
The Byzantine _Guide to Painting_[91] directs that Paradise be depicted
as ‘surrounded by a wall of crystal and pure gold, adorned with trees
filled with bright birds,’ so combining both visions of the home of the
blessed.
But Western art usually paints Heaven simply as a garden with twelve or
six fruit trees, little fertile mounts, and grass thick with flowers,
among which lilies and roses predominate.
The celestial meadow of Hubert van Eyck[92] has grouped trees as in
a park and bushes covered with roses, and there are roses on bushes
and trellises, crowns of roses and roses woven into swinging garlands
in that most alluring of all painted paradises set by Benozzo Gozzoli
upon the walls of the Palazzo Riccardi.[93] ‘Roses and pomegranates,
their leaves drawn to the last rib and vein, twine themselves in fair
and perfect order about delicate trellises; broad stone-pines and tall
cypresses overshadow them; bright birds hover here and there in the
serene sky; and groups of angels glide and float through the glades of
an entangled forest.’[94]
It is a paradise after the own heart of a Medici, in which no monotony,
no boredom need be apprehended, full of gay and witty folk and the most
gorgeous angels that were ever seen.
The roses of Paradise must not be confused with the rose hedge
or trellis so often placed behind the Virgin by the early German
schools. These hedges indicate the ‘Hortus Conclusus’ and identify
the Virgin with the bride of the Canticles by recalling the verse, ‘A
garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse.’ This enclosure is sometimes
fenced merely by a row of flowers, sometimes by a fortress-wall, and
is often an elaborate garden. An early instance by a master of the
Middle Rhine,[95] dating from about 1420, gives eighteen recognizable
species of flowers and ten varieties of birds. The Madonna sits reading
beneath a tree. One saint gathers cherries and another draws water
from a fountain. Saint George, Saint Michael and a young man chat
beneath a tree, and a pretty young saint with flowers in her hair
teaches the little Christ to play the psaltery. Other gardens contain
no flowers but the various objects used as similes of the Virgin--the
Tower of Ivory, the Closed Door, the Sealed Fountain, etc. Very often
there is merely a trellis with roses climbing up it, and the flowers
which express the virtues of Mary, the lily, violet and strawberry,
grow at her feet. The thorns on the roses are carefully drawn, even
accentuated, illustrating the verse, ‘As a lily among thorns, so is my
love among the daughters;’[96] but in spite of the thorns the general
significance of these roses also is joy and delight.
In the Netherlands, where theologians occupied themselves less with
this second chapter of the Song of Solomon, Madonnas set _en plein air_
are scarcely found. The van Eycks and Memling inaugurated the fashion
of arranging their devotional groups in chapel-like niches, or in
the aisle of some large church. Any garden there is seen in glimpses
between pillars or through windows, and has no mystical meaning.
[Illustration:
_Stefano da Zevio_ _Photo Anderson_
THE ‘ENCLOSED GARDEN’ OF THE VIRGIN
(Royal Museum, Verona)]