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:

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 picture61 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

The roses which strew the floor of Heaven in a famous diptych63 by 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 Bicci65 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 picture66 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:

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.

wrote Dante.

An English hymn composed about the year 1300 has the lines:

And nearly two centuries later William Dunbar wrote:

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:

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.