In the early Sienese school he still holds the herald’s wand,217 or brings to the Virgin a branch of olive,218 the symbol of peace and goodwill. Once at least he holds a branch of laurel,219 the meed of those who excel, and sometimes the palm220 of victory over sin.

In the famous Annunciation of Simone Martini,221 Gabriel, who carries a branch of olive, is also olive-crowned, and this seems to be the proper symbolism of the subject. The messenger of God, crowned with peace, brings the olive branch of reconciliation between God and man to the Virgin, beside whom stands a vase filled with the lilies which symbolize her purity. The dove hovers above.

It has not been decided which artist was the first to place the stalk of lilies in the angel Gabriel’s hand, and first had come the lovely symbol of the vase of lilies by the Virgin’s side. But in the Annunciation, which forms part of Simone Martini’s polyptych in the Museum of Antwerp, we find the herald’s wand just turning to a lily. Professor A. Venturi, in his magnificent History of Italian Art, describes it. The angel ‘holds a lily with a long stem, which is all white. Thus the stick or sceptre of ivory, which we have already seen in Duccio’s picture, has become partly stick, partly lily-stem. With Duccio it is still the sceptre with three points, that Gabriel, messenger of God, holds as sign of authority. But look how the three points change themselves to lily-buds, and open the corolla, as the archangel extends the candid flower towards the Virgin, who was saluted by David and the Fathers as “The lily of the valleys.” The poetry of Christian art thus overthrows mediæval materialism and lavishes flowers on fair likenesses of Mary.’

In this Annunciation we find the three types of lilies used in art—the lily growing freely and naturally in a vase beside the Virgin; the stiff lily, half conventionalized in the angel’s hand; and the fleurs-de-lys, wholly conventional, which ornament the arms of the Virgin’s seat.

Simone Martini died in 1344, and by 1359, the date of its completion, every Florentine artist must have seen the wonderful tabernacle raised by Orcagna in Or San Michele, and every artist in Italy must have heard descriptions of the shrine.

On a panel of the Tabernacle there is an Annunciation which was the most beautiful representation of the subject so far given to the world, and the kneeling angel with the sweeping wings carries in his left hand a heavy stalk of lilium candidum.

It is interesting to trace the evolution of the straight smooth stick which the angel held in the earliest representations of the Annunciation into the natural branch of lilies carried by the typical Announcing Angel of Christian art. First we find upon the wand the three-pointed fleur-de-lys, which from the days of the Assyrians had ornamented the royal sceptre. The heavenly herald bore a wand ornamented with the royal symbol when he brought a message from the Lord of the Universe to the Maiden of the House of David, who was to be the Mother of His Son. Gradually the fleur-de-lys gained some likeness to the natural lily. The sceptre was made of ivory. It was white. Two leaves appeared wreathing the stick. Midway in the transformation are the lilies carried by the lovely choir of seated angels in a picture by Guariento.223 Each angel holds in his left hand an orb and in the right a straight lily stem with leaves growing naturally up its whole length. At the top is a single flower, which, seen in profile, has the shape of the fleur-de-lys. Simone Martini indicates the blossom’s cup-like form. With Orcagna we find the fully-realized stem of lilies. One unidentified master of the fourteenth century224 went even further in botanical fidelity, and paints the bulb and pendent rootlets, though, strangely enough, he at the same time keeps to the old convention and places a scroll in the hand of both Madonna and angel.

Meanwhile, in 1344, Ambrogio di Lorenzetti had painted an Annunciation225 in which the angel, crowned with olive, holds the palm branch with which the ancient Romans were accustomed to salute a conqueror. The symbol of the palm was used also by Spinello Aretino,226 a pupil of Giotto, and was supported by Dante, who describes the angel Gabriel as:

But it did not come into general use in this connection, and chiefly for the reason that the palm became consecrated to representations of the last scenes of the Virgin’s life. The Legenda Aurea, when recounting how the angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin her approaching death, states: ‘He (Gabriel) gave her a branch of palm from Paradise, which he commanded should be borne before her bier.’

The palm was, therefore, a necessary detail in this scene, and it was probably to avoid confusion between these two separate appearances of the angel to the Virgin that the palm has been reserved entirely for the last Annunciation. The religious sentiment of the age forbade the portrayal of any sign of decrepitude in the Virgin even at the hour of her death, and except for the substitution of the palm for the lily and the reversal of the usual places of the figures, the Virgin being placed on the left and the angel on the right, it would be difficult to distinguish the scene where the Virgin receives the news of her approaching death, from that in which her approaching motherhood is announced to her.

It became the general rule, then, for Gabriel, as the angel of the Annunciation of the Saviour’s birth, to carry a lily. But the rule was not invariable. The early Flemish artists, half painters, half craftsmen, loved to depict the delicately-chiselled gold of jewelled sceptres topped by an elaborate fleur-de-lys or the cross-surmounted orb which signified the sovereignty of Christ upon earth. These precious sceptres accorded well with the opulent and prosaic comfort of the surroundings in which they set the sacred drama, and reflect the spirit of the Northern mystics. The clear detailed visions of Saint Matilda, the inspired nun of Saxony, which occurred during the last half of the thirteenth century, and whose imagery has distinctly influenced Northern religious art, fairly scintillate with mystical gems. Even the roses and the lilies, symbols, she tells us, of divine love and innocence, which she saw in her glimpses of Heaven, were embroidered in gold and silver thread upon rich stuffs or cloth of gold.

Italian art had different traditions. It began with the utter simplicity of Giotto and Fra Angelico, though the Byzantine love of rich trappings still lingered in Siena. As Florentine art progressed it did indeed become more elaborate, till its inclination to magnificence was severely checked by Savonarola, whose influence on art has usually been wrongly estimated. He was no blind iconoclast, though without doubt objects of great artistic worth were burnt in his famous holocaust of ‘vanities,’ which finished the Carnival of 1497. On the contrary, as Senator Pasquale Villari points out, he was always surrounded by the best artists of his century. Fra Bartolommeo, for four years after his death, did not touch a brush, such was his grief. The Della Robbias were devoted to him; two received the habit from his hands. Lorenzo di Credi was his partisan; Cronaca ‘would speak of nothing but the things of Savonarola.’ Botticelli illustrated his works, and Michael Angelo was a most constant listener to his preaching.

He spoke plainly to the painters from his pulpit. The beauty of the Divinity, of the Virgin and the Saints was the beauty of holiness, not of outward adornment of fine raiment, gold and jewels, and ‘the beauty of man or woman in so far as it approaches to the primal beauty, so is it great and more perfect.’227

We read of the Virgin that by her great beauty the men who saw her were astonished (stupefatti).

... ‘Do you believe that she went about in the manner in which you paint her? I say to you that she went dressed as a poor woman!’228

But he who taught for choice beneath the damask rose in the centre of his cloister admitted roses and lilies where he denounced rubies and pearls. Flowers alone survived as emblems or as votive decoration even after the puritanical current towards the ideal set in motion by the great Dominican became merged in the over-sweeping wave of classicism—and even those late artists who dispensed with every other convention for the expression of the abstract, placed a lily in the angel Gabriel’s hand.

Modern art has adopted the tradition and in the ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ of Rossetti229 the wingless angel carries a stalk of lilies. There is also a white lily embroidered upon the strip of material which is stretched upon an embroidery frame at the foot of Mary’s bed.

The angel brings the lily to the Virgin in recognition of her perfect purity, the transcendent quality by which alone she found favour with God. Through it tremendous honour came upon her, and by the marvellous nature of that honour she was eternally bound to her virginity. ‘Mary Virgin, ever a Virgin.’ In a very charming picture by Filippo Lippi,230 Mary, with bent head, and fully understanding the grave significance of the gift, reverently accepts the lily which the angel Gabriel places in her hand.

In another Annunciation by Filippo Lippi,231 a second angel, peeping through the entry behind Gabriel, also carries a lily, but it is a fancy which seems to have no particular significance and rather impairs the dignity of the subject.

So constantly did painters and sculptors of the Annunciation place a lily in the archangel Gabriel’s hand that it gradually became his special attribute, which he wore, as a knight did his crest, to distinguish him from other angels and archangels.

In the apocryphal Book of Tobit is the story of Tobias, who was accompanied by the angel Raphael on the famous journey which he took to recover his father’s money, a journey in which he not only caught the fish whose gall was to cure his father’s blindness, but also found a wife. It is the only subject from the Apocrypha which now decorates Christian churches, and owes this grace to the force with which the story, despite its fantastic details, illustrates the constant watchfulness of Heaven over those still on their earthly pilgrimage. In the fifteenth century it was a favourite subject for a votive picture on behalf of one about to take a journey. The young man, rather helpless in his youth and inexperience, protected by the strong, wise guardian angel, was a group painted with the greatest pleasure, and the fascination of ideal, sexless beauty, of curved, sweeping wings, tempted to an amplification of the subject, and though the Book of Tobit mentions one archangel only—

there suddenly sprang up in Florence a short-lived fashion for depicting Tobias with three archangels.

There are two of these pictures in Florence;233 others at Verona,234 Turin235 and Munich.236 In each Michael is armed, Raphael grasps Tobias by the hand, and Gabriel carries a branch of lilies.

But the four figures in a row make an awkward composition, and stiffness is avoided at the expense of dignity. A mincing angel, too conscious of his pretty wings and daintily-held lily, is the Gabriel of the best known of these pictures, attributed of late years to Botticini.

The lily is, of course, here used non-symbolically, merely to distinguish one archangel from another, and for the same reason that Michael is given the sword and frequently the scales for the weighing of souls, Raphael the traveller’s staff and gourd, or, when with Tobias, a small box. The angel Gabriel’s primary function is to be the herald of God, as it is Michael’s to lead the hosts of Heaven, and Raphael’s to guide the straying. Therefore Gabriel carries the herald’s wand, now developed to a lily, Michael the sword, and Raphael the staff.

Thus Gabriel, when in company with other archangels and angels, carries the lily to establish his identity, but where, as in a Coronation237 or an Enthroned Madonna, he stands with Saint Michael guarding the throne, he usually holds also a scroll with ‘AVE MARIA’ upon it, showing that the main function of the lily is to proclaim the spotlessness of the Virgin.

A rather charming treatment of the Annunciation lily, which originated in Germany, is to strew the lily heads upon the floor. They then have the appearance of having fallen from Heaven in a shower, like those falling roses, symbols of divine love, which were so often painted by the artists of Italy and Spain. ‘The Master of the Sterzinger Altar’238 introduces seven of these lily blooms and buds, snapped off short, and with only an inch or two of stalk, into his fine Annunciation painted in 1458, and, satisfied with these, he uses lilies neither in a vase nor in the angel’s hand. Other artists of his day liked the fancy well, but wished to keep the mystic vase, so, to avoid doubling the symbol, they turned the fallen flowers to roses, or roses and carnations, symbols of the divine favour which had fallen upon the maid. It was a graceful exposition of the underlying meaning of the scene, symbolically right and delightful in pictorial effect.