The Annunciation was not often depicted before the twelfth century, though there are instances of it on some early ivories, on a sarcophagus at Ravenna of the fifth century, in the famous sixth-century Syrian MS. of the Laurentian Library,187 and among the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore.188 During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while the veneration of the Virgin within the Catholic Church steadily grew greater, the story of her life, as apart from that of her Divine Son, appeared in sculpture and stained glass, but still the Annunciation was a comparatively rare subject and simply treated. Early in the fourteenth century, however, a whole flight of announcing angels settled down over Italy, some drifting as far north as Holland. We find them kneeling, standing, just alighting, often with the wind of swift movement still in their garments and almost always on the left hand of the picture, with the Virgin in the place of honour on the right. The Annunciation, the announcing of the near approach of ‘the dayspring from on high,’ which was to bring light and joy and freedom to a world groping in the twilight of an imperfect revelation, was an incident which particularly appealed to minds rejoicing in the intellectual liberation of the Renaissance. It appealed, too, to the joyous nature of the Florentines, who hated the sad and tragic aspects of life, loving fresh and spring-like things and rather elaborate simplicity. Pictures of the Annunciation multiplied, particularly in Florence, which was just then evolving the school which was to influence so powerfully the Western world’s pictorial conceptions of the divine mysteries. And in the great majority of Annunciations we find lilies, for in this incident of the Virgin’s life above all others it was necessary to emphasize the purity which made the wonder of the angel’s salutation.

The most characteristic treatment of the lily, as the lily of the Annunciation, was to place it in a pot or vase. About the year 1291, Cavallini, the mosaicist, was in Rome decorating the Church of S. Maria in Trastevere, and beneath the great centre mosaic of the apse he placed a series of scenes from the life of the Virgin. In the Annunciation the Virgin is seated on a marble throne, which has broad, table-like arms. On one arm there is a dish, apparently of fruit, and on the other a vase filled with lilies. The vase may or may not have been placed there definitely as a symbol, but as a detail—in vulgar English phraseology—it caught on. We find it on the famous carved candlestick of Gaeta,189 worked by an unknown contemporary of Niccola d’Apulia. It appears on an embroidered book-cover of English work190 attributed to the end of the thirteenth century, and is cleverly squared out of the chequered background of a Netherlandish music-book191 of 1330.

The vase of lilies soon became a more or less elaborate detail in numerous illuminations, carvings and paintings. The earliest of the Flemish masters, Jan van Eyck,192 Roger van der Weyden193 and the Master of Flémalle,194 make use of it. It was particularly popular in Florence.

The Florentines loved the Annunciation as a subject and were charmed by the easy, graceful symbolism of the lilies. They were also, doubtless, deeply gratified, as citizens and as churchmen, to identify the lily, their city’s badge, as the flower of the Virgin.

In Spain, even before there was any native school of painting, the vase of lilies passed from being a detail to be an almost essential factor in every representation of the Annunciation, and early in the fifteenth century we find it standing detached as the special and distinguishing attribute of the Virgin. In the insignia of the Order of the Lily of Aragon, founded in 1410 by Ferdinand, Duke of Pegnafiel, the chain was composed of alternate griffins and pots of three lilies, and Ford mentions that when the Regent Fernando recovered Antequera from the Moors he gave the city for arms the badge of his military order, which was La Terraza, ‘the vase,’ the pot of lilies of the Virgin.195

The symbol of the vase had come to the Netherlands and Germany while they were still pictorially inarticulate; but when they at length found means of expression, the Germans slowly, the Flemings in a splendid burst with the van Eycks, it was their earliest and their favourite symbol. Memling places it also beside his enthroned Madonnas, and it is never omitted from an Annunciation except on the occasions, comparatively rare in the North, when Gabriel holds a branch of lilies in his hand instead of the herald’s wand. Then there is no vase, for there is no necessity to repeat the symbol.

But in Italy itself the vase of lilies, though popular, was never considered essential. No vase decorates the loggias where sit the Virgins of Giotto,196 Botticelli,197 Melozzo da Forlì,198 or Leonardo da Vinci,199 though Giotto introduces it with identical symbolism in the Visitation. Indeed many of the most typical painters of both the early and the high Renaissance, Taddeo di Bartolo,200 Spinello Aretino,201 Fra Angelico,202 Lorenzo di Credi203 and Raphael,204 banish lilies entirely, both from the vase and from the angel’s hand. Ghirlandaio places a vase beside the Virgin’s reading-desk, but alters its significance by filling it with roses, daisies and jasmine, the flowers of love, innocence and divine hope.205

On the other hand, some of the Florentine artists who had a special fondness for the flower, notably Fra Filippo Lippi,206 and the Della Robbias,207 use both, so doubling the symbolism; but it was more correct, where there was a vase of lilies, to show the angel with folded hands or with a branch of olive, or, as in the beautiful Annunciation of Jan van Eyck at St Petersburg, holding the herald’s wand. In Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation at Berlin, where Gabriel carries a magnificent bunch of lilies, there is no vase.

According to Northern tradition the true Annunciation lily should have no stamens, but this was a refinement of symbolism largely ignored by artists, who were discouraged probably by the insipid appearance of the flower when deprived of its gold-dusted centre. In Italy it was entirely neglected, but some painters of the sixteenth century have placed a tiny flame in the centre of each lily-cup; a burning flame, according to Vasari,208 signifying eternal love.

There seems to have been sometimes a doubt in the minds of the Northern artists as to which was really the Madonna’s flower, the lilium candidum or the iris, which so closely resembled in form the golden lilies on the royal shields of France and England.

Memling, who had painted the fleur-de-lys heraldically for the Duke of Burgundy,209 seemed unable to decide, and in the vase of the Annunciation,210 as well as in the vase which stands beside the enthroned Madonna,211 he has placed an iris among the white lilies. Or possibly, with a deeper symbolism, taking the iris as the fleur-de-lys, the ancient symbol of royalty, which, with its three united petals, recalls also the nature of the Holy Trinity, he has striven to interpret florally the message of the angel, that God incarnate would spring from a lily-like virginity. It may not be without design that the iris in the Annunciation is overshadowed by the lilies, while in the picture where the Holy Child sits upon His Mother’s lap, the iris in the vase (in this case marked with the sacred monogram) has sprung upwards beyond the white lilies.

In the Church of S. Spirito in Florence there is an altar-piece of the Annunciation which was at one time attributed to Botticelli and is now usually ascribed to Pesello. The vase, placed midway between the two figures, holds three purple irises. Perhaps the artist saw a symbol of the Holy Trinity in the three royal lilies growing on one stalk (though the Church held a belief in the incarnation of the Trinity in unity to be heresy), in which case the colour, the purple of humility, would be appropriate.

More difficult to explain is the symbolism of the vase of lilies in the Annunciation upon the cover of a psalter, in fine English needlework of the thirteenth century.212 The book belonged to Anne, daughter of Sir Simon Felbrigge, and if the date given, the end of the thirteenth century, is correct, it is a very early instance of the Virgin’s vase of lilies. The figures have much dignity and sweep of line, but the lily, which is a fleur-de-lys in form, is red! Possibly in the garden of the country convent where embroidery was worked no liliums grew. The nun would therefore take the only lilies she knew, those of the royal standard. For colour she would remember that they surpassed Solomon in his glory. But, even so, the red lily argues an insensitiveness to symbolic values scarcely to be found among the Latins.

The original symbolism of the vase of lilies was simple. It signified the purity of the Maid of Nazareth, she of whom it was prophesied ‘A Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son.’ She does not hold the flower in her hand as do the virgin martyrs who preserved their purity through storm and stress, but it grows naturally beside her and merely typifies her girlhood. In the first half of the fifteenth century this seems to have been the invariable intention. But in the later half of that century the meaning was developed and amplified. Distinction was made between the vase and the flower it contained. In France and in Spain, where religious iconography is found in architectural detail rather than in pictorial decoration, the favourite arrangement of the Annunciation was to place the vase midway between the Virgin and the angel, a composition which from its equal balance was most decorative. The Virgin with drooping head and falling veil, Gabriel with curved wings, both leaning forward towards the central vase of lilies, formed an ideal filling for a lunette or the spandrels of an arch, and the simplicity of the group made it particularly suitable for sculpture, both in wood and stone. It is the central motive of many of the great carved and gilded reredos in Spain and of the simpler stone altars of France. The central vase of lilies had, however, a tendency to become ever larger, till, from being a detail, it became the important centre-point, and in some French Annunciations of the sixteenth century the uninstructed heathen would merely see two figures worshipping, apparently, a large vase of flowers.

In two Italian pictures, that of doubtful origin already mentioned which is in S. Spirito, and the Annunciation of Pinturicchio in the Vatican, where the large vase is placed exactly in the centre of the composition, the flowers within the vase are not white lilies; they are iris, the royal lily, in one case, and roses, the flower of divine love, in the other. Therefore the flower-filled vase was no longer strictly the symbol of the Virgin’s purity. A change, hinted at when Memling placed the iris among the lilies, had come about, for the flower which was the attribute of Jesus Christ was now rising from the vase and distinction had been made between the vase and the flower which it contained. Christ is the mystic flower springing from a lowly vessel. He is the flower, Mary the vase. The royal purple lily or the rose of love are, therefore, as appropriate a filling for the vase as was the lily, and there is no incongruity in any attitude of homage towards the vase on the part of the Virgin. But since the compound emblem was the emblem of the Immaculate Conception, naturally it is most often the lily of purity which fills the vase.

In the Annunciation of Albert Dürer’s ‘Smaller Passion’213 the lily growing in its humble earthen pot undeniably refers to the perfect sinlessness of the soul which was yet to be born, for the flowers are still each tightly folded in its bud, while in the culminating scene of the series, where the Saviour sits in judgment, the lily, with each calyx fully expanded, is shown with the sword of justice behind His head.

Northern symbolism, always deeper and more complicated than that of the South, required that the vase which contained the lilies should be transparent, thus indicating the perfect purity of the body which enshrined the soul of perfect innocence. ‘In so far that the glass allows all surroundings to shine through without being itself harmed, it has become the symbol of the Immaculate Conception. Therefore in pictures of the Annunciation a blossoming lily stalk in a transparent glass is placed at the feet of the Virgin.’214

The same idea is traced in the thirteenth-century Christmas carol:

And somewhat akin is the mirror which occasionally appears, held by an attendant putto in a Spanish ‘Immaculate Conception.’

The transparent vase is not often seen in Italian Annunciations, for it was usual in Italy to place the stalk of lilies, a complete symbol in itself of virginity, in the angel’s hand, and there was no need to double the symbolism; but the painters of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in pictures of Mary with the Child or in a Holy Family, use the crystal vase frequently as an attribute of the Infant Saviour, filling it with those flowers which express His virtues, the violet of humility, the rose or carnation of divine love, the daisy of innocence, or the jasmine of heavenly hope.216

The actual number of blooms upon the lily stalk has also its significance. Some think they should be three in number, two fully opened flowers and one in bud, forming what Rossetti terms the ‘Tripoint.’

Several of the masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries painted the two flowers with the bud or three fully-opened blooms, but more often, arguing possibly that this lily was the emblem of God the Son when made Man, and not of the Holy Trinity, they painted simply a natural lily plant with clustering buds and one or many blossoms, taking the whole plant as the symbol.

Sometimes the vase holds three distinct stalks of lilies with a single bloom on each, an arrangement which was suggested, it is said, by the Dominican legend of the doubting Master.

A Master of the Dominicans, unable to believe in the stainlessness of the Blessed Virgin, went to ask help of the saintly brother Egidius.

‘O Master of the Preachers,’ said Egidius, on meeting him, ‘Virgo ante partum.’ He struck the ground with his staff and from the spot there immediately sprang a lily. ‘O doubting Master,’ he said again, ‘Virgo in partu.’ He struck the earth and again a lily sprang. He spoke a third time, ‘O my brother, Virgo post partum,’ a third lily bloomed, and the Master of the Dominicans doubted no more.

A detached vase holding three lily blooms occurs frequently as the motive of an architectural decoration executed in low relief, one beautiful example being above the door of the Badia Church of Florence. But it is not confined to buildings of Dominican origin, and the arrangement seems to owe its popularity more to its symmetry than to any supporting legend. In pictures, where greater freedom of treatment is desirable, the lilies are one, two, three or more—there is no rule.