flowers of the Virgin are white or blue, her own colours. An
exception, which is unique, is the golden sunflower springing from her
halo on a twelfth-century window in the Church of St Rémi at Reims, and
even that is not exclusively hers, since Saint John, on the other side,
bears the same flower. White and blue are the two colours which are
held most sacred in the Christian Church. White, symbol of the Supreme
Being and of the Eternal Truth, is used in the ornaments for the feast
of Our Lord and of the Virgin, for it announces loving-kindness,
virginity and charity.[247] Blue is the symbol of chastity, innocence
and candour. Only one yellow flower is used symbolically, and that only
in scenes from the Passion, by artists of the early Flemish and German
schools. It is the dandelion, and its significance is, apparently,
bitterness of grief.
The white lily, which symbolizes purity, is found chiefly in pictures
of the Annunciation, but it has been introduced in many other scenes
from the life of the Virgin. In the first exhibited painting by
Rossetti, entitled ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,’[248] the Virgin, in
grey robes, is seated at a curiously-shaped frame embroidering a white
lily upon a ground of red material. The flower she is copying grows
in a vase beside her and an angel with rose-coloured wings waters it.
St Anne stands near, and in the background Joachim trims a trellised
vine upon which the Holy Dove is perched. In the ‘_Ecce Ancilla
Domini_’[249] of Rossetti, this same strip of embroidery, now finished,
hangs beside the bed.
The older artists paint no lily in the early scenes of the Virgin’s
life; it first appears at the Annunciation, where it was used so
repeatedly that it became in itself the symbol of the miraculous
birth of Our Lord. Giotto brings it forward in the ‘Visitation.’[250]
Elizabeth, hurrying from the house to meet the Virgin, passes beneath a
portico on which blooms a large vase of lilies.
There are endless pictures representing the Virgin seated with the
Holy Child, in which a vase of lilies is placed as a votive offering
before her feet, or lilies are held by attendant angels. One of the
earliest of these pictures is the ‘Enthroned Madonna’[251] of Giotto.
Two angels offer golden vases filled with lilies and roses. The angels
have searched Paradise for its most precious flowers and have chosen
those which symbolize purity and divine love. As the symbol of divine
love the roses are very appropriately mixed with the lilies in the
vase which Ghirlandaio[252] places on the lowest step of the Madonna’s
throne. He has also added the starry wild white campion which closely
resembles jasmine, a flower never definitely accorded to the Queen of
Heaven by the symbolists of the Church, but its clear starlike form
bringing to mind both her title _Stella Maris_ and the starry crown
described by Saint John, painters frequently use it, and white flowers
of the same shape, as her attribute.
But the appearance of the jasmine in the Madonna pictures may in part
be owing to some confusion between the jasmine and the myrtle, for the
latter was quite definitely one of the Virgin’s flowers and is even
used when addressing her in metaphor.
‘O myrtle tree of Paradise
So richly hung with fruit.’[253]
Dr Anselm Saltzer, O.S.B., writes: ‘The Greeks and Romans held the
myrtle to be the symbol of beauty, youth and marriage, because of its
delightful perfume, its evergreen leaves, white blossoms and aromatic
berries. In connection with Mary, the myrtle serves as a figure of her
purity and other virtues as well as of her influence over the unruly
impulses of the human soul.’[254]
Francesco Franciabigio[255] places a vase of single white roses at the
Virgin’s feet. Double roses, pink or red, are the symbol of divine
love, the love of Christ for His Church upon earth, and the white
single roses might be the symbol of the passionless love of the ‘_Mater
Consolatrix_.’
These flowers, placed in vases before the Virgin, are usually
significant and appropriate, but they are really more votive than
symbolical. The Latins had brought to the shrine of Venus the myrtle
and roses, the apples and poppies that were sacred to her, and painters
of Central Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the
same desire to present and sacrifice to their Lady the flowers which
were by association peculiarly hers, painted roses and lilies carefully
and beautifully in the foreground of her pictures. It was their gift to
the Madonna, as the paper roses on so many modern altars and the wild
flowers on the wayside shrines are also gifts.
In Northern Italy, particularly among those who studied in the school
of Squarcione, fruit took the place of the votive flowers, and is laid
before the Madonna and the Child, or hung in garlands across the upper
part of the picture.
The painters of the Italian Renaissance, in spite of diligent classical
study, were probably quite unconscious of this survival of paganism in
their work. But the ancient traditions of the soil did crop up from
time to time, in the same way that traces of the Norse conception of
Heaven as a magnificent big-game hunt appear occasionally beneath the
symbolism of Christian mediæval art in Germany.
North of the Alps, where the pre-Christian sacrifices had usually run
with blood, there was no inherited love of floral offerings, and we
seldom find these votive vases or wreaths.
The Madonna attributed to Mabuse in the Prado has a large vase of roses
placed directly below her, but as a rule in Northern art the flowers
are introduced strictly as symbols to recall some aspect or function of
the Virgin or of her Divine Son.
In an ‘Adoration’ the surrounding angels bring their roses and their
lilies in tribute to the sinless Child. As Saint Mectilda says:
‘The lily figures His innocence and the rose His invincible
patience.’[256]
Where the Virgin is seated enthroned, surrounded by saints and angels,
even though the Holy Child is upon her knee, all symbols except that
which the Child holds in His hand refer again to her.
It is rare, however, that, when holding the Child, she carries her own
attribute herself. Usually the symbols, flowers or fruit, are held by
angels or laid beside her throne, but in the large ‘Enthroned Madonna’
of Signorelli,[257] a painter who showed some originality in his use
of symbols, Mary encircles the Child with her right arm and in her left
hand holds a handsome stalk of lilies. That the flower refers to the
wonder of her own purity in conjunction with her motherhood, and not to
the Child’s sinlessness, is proved by the words on the scroll of the
Prophet Isaiah, who stands below gazing up at her with rapture:
‘Behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son.’
Vasari says of this work:[258] ‘In his old age he painted a picture for
the brotherhood of San Girolamo in Arezzo, partly at the cost of Messer
Niccolò Gamurrini, doctor of laws, and auditor of the Ruota, whose
portrait, taken from life, is in the picture; he is kneeling before the
Madonna, to whose protection he is recommended by Saint Nicholas. In
the same work are figures of Saint Donatus and Saint Stephen, with that
of Saint Jerome, undraped, beneath; there is likewise a figure of David
singing to a psaltery with two prophets who are seen, by the written
scrolls which they hold in their hands, to be engaged in a conference
on the conception of the Virgin.’
In another altar-piece by Signorelli[259] it is the Infant Christ who
carries the lily, the symbol of His own sinlessness. In this picture
all the symbolism refers to the Holy Child, not to the Virgin, which is
unusual in an ‘Enthroned Madonna.’ But the scroll upon the cross of the
Baptist, with the words ‘_Ecce Agnus Dei_,’ directs the devotion of the
worshipper to the Son.
In still another of Signorelli’s compositions[260] the archangel
Michael stands on one side of the Madonna’s throne with his scales for
the weighing of souls, and Gabriel upon the other side with a large
stalk of lilies. The latter carries the lilies, not merely as his own
attribute, to denote that he is Gabriel, but also in greeting to the
Madonna, for in his other hand he holds a scroll with the words, ‘_Ave
Maria, gratia plena_.’
There is a Madonna and Child by Fra Angelico,[261] where the Virgin,
whose features are more strongly marked than is usual with the Master,
holds in her right hand a vase in which are three roses and a stem of
lilies. Her left arm is round the Child, whose little hand grasps a
single lily cup. The composition is not pleasing, for the Mother is
embarrassed and encumbered by the great vase; also the symbolism is not
very clear, but apparently the roses and the lily in the vase are the
attributes of Mary, while the flower in His hand refers to the Holy
Child.
There are very few flowers which are placed within the hand of the
Madonna. In Italy she sometimes holds the _lilium candidum_ of the
virgin saints in her character of Queen of Virgins. In Germany
and the Tyrol the large white lily is replaced by the native
lily-of-the-valley; and in the ‘Madonna with the Siskin’[262] of Albert
Dürer she accepts some sprays of the sweet-scented white bells from the
hand of the tiny Saint John. In many pictures she holds a rose. Apart
from symbolism, a flower was a fitting thing to grace a woman’s hand,
and the rose was considered the fairest of flowers.
‘As the rose is the flower of flowers,
So is Thy House the House of Houses,’
says the ancient inscription within York Minster, and the rose was
_the_ flower _par excellence_ in every European country.
But when Mary places the rose within the hand of the Infant Saviour,
then it becomes His attribute with the full significance of divine
love, and when she places a carnation between the little fingers,
divine love is again expressed.
But, as already noticed, in pictures of Florentine origin, the rose
in the Virgin’s hand has a special meaning, for it illustrates her
title of ‘_Madonna del Fiori_,’ and the Cathedral of Florence was
dedicated to ‘Our Lady of the Flower.’ Also in pictures painted for
some charitable institution the rose or roses of the Virgin have still
another meaning, for then, following the interpretation of Raban Maur,
they are the symbol of charity. One picture with such roses is that
painted by Giambono for the _Congregazione di Carità_ at Fano. That
these roses are in no way the attribute of the Child is shown by His
attitude, for His back is turned to the hand which holds the flowers.
One of the most beautiful things in the beautiful city of Lucca is the
little chapel of Santa Maria della Rosa. It was originally dedicated to
Saint Paul and fell into disuse, but in the very earliest years of the
fourteenth century a fresco was discovered beneath the creepers which
covered the walls. The fresco was even then considered to be extremely
ancient, and represented the Virgin with the Child and holding three
roses in her hand. In 1309 the Bishop of Lucca conceded to the
_Università de’ Mercanti_ the power to erect on the spot a church
dedicated to the Virgin of the Rose and the Apostles Peter and Paul,
and the present exquisite little building was commenced.
The outside is ornamented with lovely arabesques of roses in low relief
executed in 1333, and upon one angle is a statue of the Virgin with a
rose in her hand, possibly by Giovanni Pisano. In the sacristry are the
arms of the confraternity figuring Mary surrounded by an oval nimbus
and supported by two bushes, which carry thirteen roses, and form a
crown from which rise patriarchs and prophets. The original fresco has
disappeared.
Very rarely the Virgin holds a violet. The flower is used in Christian
art almost exclusively to indicate the humility of the Son of God in
taking upon Himself our human form, and in the beautiful altar-piece
by Stephen Lochnar[263] the Saviour stretches up His tiny hand to
grasp the violet held by Mary, so making it His individual attribute.
The panel is rich in colouring, but Mary is of the simple, placid
type of the early German school. She is gravely, deeply happy in her
motherhood, and not saddened, as in Italy, by painful forebodings. The
Child reaches up His hand with a pretty gesture, accepting from her,
who had given Him His tender little body, also the violet, symbol of
His humility.
In a picture by Bruder Wilhelm[264] the Virgin holds a sweet-pea,
bearing both the flower and ripened pods. The symbolism of the pea is
obscure and is not to be traced in Christian iconography, though there
is the legend of the _erbilia_, a species of pea which, springing first
from the footsteps of Saint Columban, still grows upon the Tuscan
mountains. Possibly the symbolism may lie in the simultaneous flowering
and fruiting of the pea, for the palm was held by some writers to be an
emblem of the Virgin, and for the reason that ‘it flowered and fruited
at one and the same time.’[265]
There are three subjects, all connected with the Virgin’s death, where
lilies are once more found. They are her Ascension, the Giving of
her Girdle to Saint Thomas, and her Coronation. In each of these the
flower-filled tomb, from which she has just arisen, is introduced,
usually as the base of the composition.
But the lilies in these pictures do not refer to the immaculate purity
of the Virgin Mother, but represent the souls of ‘angels, confessors
and virgins.’ The legends which the _Legenda Aurea_ contains were
collected by Jacobus de Voragine during the last half of the thirteenth
century, while the lily was still the flower of virgin martyrs and
was not yet the Madonna’s lily. He gives the following account of the
burial of the Virgin:
‘The Lord commanded the Apostles that they should carry the body into
the valley of Jehoshaphat and place it in a new tomb that had been dug
there, and watch three days beside it, till He should return.
‘And straightway there surrounded her flowers of roses, which are the
blessèd company of martyrs; and lilies of the valley, which are the
bands of angels, confessors and virgins.’
But the _Byzantine Guide to Painting_, in the paragraph entitled ‘How
to represent the Assumption of the Divine Mother,’ directs that in the
lower part of the picture there should be ‘an open and empty tomb.’
There was therefore divergence of opinion, and the Church apparently
left the artist free.
Jacobus de Voragine seems to have collected the many floating legends
of the Virgin, and with that poetic judgment which was the peculiar
gift of his generation, to have preserved those forms particularly
marked by sweetness or distinction of incident. But some even of his
own countrymen apparently preferred the legend in its balder form, for
the astonished Apostles surround a bare and empty tomb. Beyond the
Alps, where the _Legenda Aurea_ never had much influence, the tomb is
almost invariably empty, and indeed all three subjects are rare in the
North, though the death of the Virgin is frequently represented.
The majority of Italian painters, however, gladly seized the pretty
detail, and the Virgin’s tomb is usually flower-filled. But the
painters of the high Renaissance did not keep strictly to the symbolism
of the legend. There is a beautiful fresco by Sodoma,[266] in which the
Virgin, dignified and lovely, ascends from a tomb brimming over with
roses, and from among them springs one mystic lily.
Raphael,[267] too, gives a single lily rising from among the roses,
and both he and Sodoma seem to have adopted the later fashion of
considering the lily as exclusively the Virgin Mary’s flower, and
instead of serried lilies, representing bands of angels and virgin
saints, they paint one only flower, emblem of the Queen of Virgins
rising to Heaven attended by the glowing souls of martyrs.
Botticelli,[268] on the other hand, has left the roses and painted
lilies only, lilies crowded together in such a mass of loveliness that
the mourners seem blinded even to the gorgeous bow of angels in the sky
and to the greater wonder in the opening heavens high above.
Benozzo Gozzoli[269] gives the flower-filled tomb, but neglects the
symbolism of the legend, for to the roses he adds daisies and jasmine.
It is simply a collection of the flowers sacred to the Virgin.
Giulio Romano,[270] in the _Madonna di Monteluce_, paints neither roses
nor lilies, merely small, indeterminate blossoms, mauve, blue and
yellow.
On one panel,[271] of the fifteenth century, which represents ‘The
Giving of the Girdle to Saint Thomas,’ cut roses and lilies lie upon
the top of the closed tomb, which seems a misapprehension of the
legend, but possibly the artist merely intended to paint the flowers
usually used as attributes of the Virgin--the rose of love and the lily
of purity--without any reference to the story as told in the Golden
Legend.
But though the lilies of the Virgin’s tomb represent angels and virgin
saints, in those pictures of her Coronation or Assumption, where no
tomb is shown, the flower is the symbol of her own purity. Through her
perfect purity she has attained the crown, therefore it is with stems
of white lilies that the rose-crowned angels hail her Queen.
Fra Filippo Lippi[272] paints her kneeling to receive the crown from
God the Father:
‘Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
As puff on puff of grated orris-root.’[273]
A child-angel holds a scroll with the words:
‘_Is perfecit opus_,’
and the archangel Gabriel with a lily, painted in a small lunette above
the throne, recalls the first beginning of the work now perfected;
while before the throne, and thick on either side, is a waving grove of
large white lilies, each stalk held by an adoring angel.
The devotional figure of the Virgin known as the ‘Immaculate
Conception’ is usually presented as the woman with ‘the moon under
her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars;’ four or five
attendant child-angels each carry a symbol of her virtues, and the
lily is always prominent among them.
This particular aspect of the Virgin was especially popular in Spain,
where Murillo was its finest exponent. The flowers of an Immaculate
Conception are the rose, lily, olive and palm, signifying love, purity,
peace and victory. Sometimes the iris, the royal lily, is added;
sometimes it replaces the _lilium candidum_. José Antolines[274] paints
the iris only.
In the chapter on ‘Garlands of Roses’ we remarked the thorns which in
the mystic Enclosed Gardens of Germany illustrate the verse:
‘As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.’
With the closing of the fifteenth century these thorn trellises
passed from Northern art, but the application of the metaphor to the
Virgin still persisted in Northern theology, and since the Immaculate
Conception had replaced the _Hortus Conclusus_ as a devotional subject,
it is as an attribute of the Virgin, risen to glory, that we find the
thorns, and in an Immaculate Conception by Seghers[275] a child-angel
flutters at the Madonna’s feet with a lily enclosed in branches of
thorns.
In the 24th chapter of Ecclesiasticus there is a description of
Wisdom with her attributes in which the Roman Catholic Church has
seen a prefiguring of the Virgin Mary. Some pictorial renderings of
the Immaculate Conception make special reference to this, notably the
large altar-piece, of unknown authorship, but believed to date from the
end of the fifteenth century, which was painted for the Church of S.
Francesco in Lucca.[276]
In the upper part of the picture Christ is seen seated, and holding out
above the kneeling Virgin the sceptre of His royal favour. Above the
sceptre is a scroll with the words from the Book of Esther: ‘Not for
thee was this law made, but for all mankind.’ She alone was immaculate.
Around there is a wreath of angels. Below stand King David, King
Solomon, Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm and Saint Anthony of Padua.
Behind these figures stretches a charming garden. Against the horizon
are the cypresses of Mount Zion, the cedar of Lebanon, the palm tree
of Cades, and also a pomegranate laden with fruit. Midway there is a
rose hedge thick with the roses of Jericho. A terrace runs across the
garden, and upon the parapet are two stone vases, one labelled _Mirra_
and the other _Balsamum_.
These trees and plants are the trees and plants to which Wisdom, and
therefore Mary, is likened in Ecclesiasticus, with the pomegranate of
the Canticles.
‘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.