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.
[Illustration:
_Hugo van der Goes_ _Photo Brogi_
THE FRUIT OF DAMNATION EXCHANGED FOR THE FRUIT OF REDEMPTION]
[Illustration:
_Memling_ _Photo Brogi_
THE FRUIT OF HEAVEN RELINQUISHED FOR THE APPLE OF EDEN]