But though poets, and particularly German poets, ranged widely through the fields in their search for blossoms which by their beauty or by their healing virtues were fit to symbolize the Virgin, the early artists painted very few. In those mystical Enclosed Gardens which so charmed the Germans of the fifteenth century, only a few plants appear. The lily, which is often the lily of the valley, the rose, the violet, and the strawberry, are the most usual. Later the iris, the royal lily, was added, and sometimes the seven-blossomed columbine. Occasionally in Italy the jasmine and the daisy are also found in the vase beside her, but all other flowers of the garden and field, the tulip, anemone, ranunculus, primrose, daffodil, dahlia, etc., were rigidly excluded.

It will be noticed that, with the exception of the rose, all the 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 Ghirlandaio252 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.

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 Franciabigio255 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 Signorelli259 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 compositions260 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.

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 Lochnar263 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 Wilhelm264 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 Gozzoli269 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 Lippi272 paints her kneeling to receive the crown from God the Father:

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 Antolines274 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 Seghers275 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