Since the earliest days of Christianity the Church has made use of emblems. The Early Church used them partly protectively to conceal their faith from the pagans, and partly because it lacked artists capable of worthily depicting the Godhead in human form. Even when the days of persecution had passed, the Church, restrained by reverential tradition, by poverty perhaps, and perhaps by the Eastern fear of the ‘graven image,’ continued to represent Christ as the True Vine and the Apostles as sheep or as doves.
But at the beginning of the fourth century the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the religion of the state. New, and often magnificent, churches were built in each town and the Emperor placed in the hands of the ecclesiastics a large portion of the royal revenues.
In these grand new basilicas the simple decoration of the Catacombs and tiny ancient chapels was not sufficient. The ample walls offered a splendid field for the mosaicist and Byzantine taste demanded elaborate pictorial effects. Representations of the Redeemer appeared surrounded by the Apostles, the prophets and the four-and-twenty elders of Revelation. Saints and martyrs were introduced, and later we find imperial personages, Justinian surrounded by his guards and Theodora followed by the ladies of her court. It became necessary to distinguish the figures one from another and therefore symbolism was largely introduced. The Deity was placed within the mandorla, symbol of perfect blessedness. The prophets were awarded broken wheels to denote their imperfect revelation, and the apostles books, to signify their fuller knowledge. Haloes were carefully differentiated. Virgin saints carried palms or laurel crowns, and martyrs had the instruments of their martyrdom placed beside them. Some figures carried scrolls on which were inscribed texts which gave the clue to their identity, others simply had their names written above their heads, but both these latter devices were useless to the ignorant.
At the Renaissance, when art had a fuller life and wider aims, it was not sufficient to thus merely label the persons represented. The traditions of Byzantine art once broken, the painter was free to set upon the panel all the beauty that his mind could conceive and that his hand could execute. He had no longer to paint a Christ or a Madonna correct to a formula, but none the less he was bound to depict figures which should be instantly recognizable as God incarnate and the meek Mother of Christ. So from his freedom sprang the problem which has occupied the religious painter ever since, the painting of a soul’s quality, the making visible to the world of the beauty of holiness.
During the great century of art, achievement came. Raphael, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Perugino required and used no symbol to express the majesty of Christ or the purity of the Virgin Mother. They had that power to make visible the intangible which, in art, is genius. But among the earlier artists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, he who was unable to show by the announcing angel’s attitude and mien that his message was one of peace and goodwill, placed a branch of olive in his hand, and he who despaired of adequately depicting the immaculate purity of the Virgin, emphasized his point by setting a pot of spotless lilies by her side. So was the intention of the least-accomplished of artists made clear, even to the unlettered.
After the first effervescence of the Renaissance had died down, the laws of sacred art became once more fixed, though never again (except in Spain beneath the Inquisition) with the strictness of the Byzantine school. Art as a teacher of religion required to be as conservative as the Catholic Church with which it was allied, and the symbolism of the fourteenth century has remained with few additions or modifications to our own day. When devotional pictures multiplied, emblems passed into what may be termed the heraldry of the Church. Though also used in decoration, their primary use upon altar vessels and Church furniture was to distinguish the object as sacred, or as the property of the Church, in the same way as the royal arms or a private crest indicated the ownership of secular things. They appeared on the banners used in processions of the Church and on the badges and insignia of religious orders, but were very seldom used in pictorial art. Indeed, it is in the early Flemish school alone that pictures similar to the van Eycks’ ‘Adoration of the Mystic Lamb’2 or to their ‘Fountain of Life’3 are found, where angels, prophets, saints and patriarchs bow down before the emblem, not the figure, of the Saviour.
During the first twelve centuries of Christianity the emblems and symbols of the Church were drawn from many sources; those that were introduced at the Renaissance were fruits and flowers. The Christ-Child holds the apple, symbol of the Fall, or a pomegranate showing the seeds, symbol of the Church. The lily typifies the spotless purity of the Virgin. Saint Dorothea is crowned with roses; Saint Joseph holds the flowering rod. There were, of course, other symbols used. Allegorical figures held the sword of justice or the scales of judgment; the mandorla, the halo, the orb of sovereignty and the book of knowledge survived from the Byzantine school; but those symbols which first appeared or came into fashion, as it were, at the Renaissance were fruits and flowers.
It was not strange that it should be so. The new interest in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome had revived the old classical love of nature, of running brooks and leafy forests, and of all the fresh unspoiled things which shoot up clean and fragrant from the earth. Saint Francis with his ‘jesters of the Lord’ had gone singing through the vineyards praising God for the light of the sun, for the birds, for the grass. His song was taken up by the troubadours, who also sang of the fair things of the fields, though their leit motif was earthly, rather than heavenly, love.
The minnesingers of Germany sang of roses, spring-tide, love and chivalry, and three of the sweetest-throated, Walther von der Vogelweide, Godfried von Strassburg and Conrad von Würtzburg, each before he died, composed a song in honour of the Virgin.
In Provence the Lady Clémence Isaure instituted the Jeux Floraux, and for those who excelled in song there were three awards, a violet, an eglantine and a marigold, all wrought in gold. Later a silver lily was added as the prize for the best sonnet celebrating the perfections of the Virgin. The rules of this Mayday tournament of song proclaimed that ‘these games are for the amusement of the people, for the honour of God as the giver of good gifts of trees and flowers, and to praise Him, because nature, which had been dead, now lives again.’
The world was now beginning to see the value of these ‘good gifts.’ Chaucer could find no higher emblem for the Virgin than a flower:
while Dante, who, more than any other single writer, has influenced sacred art, uses the same imagery:
The Churchmen of the day caught the spirit of the Humanists, and there sprang up a school of symbolists who concerned themselves largely with plants, fruits and flowers. The writings of the early symbolists, Origen, Saint Melitus, Bishop of Sardes, Saint Jerome, Saint Ambrose, Walafrid Strabo and Raban Maur, Archbishop of Mayence, were re-studied and their allusions to the plant world noted. Durandus, Bishop of Mende, whose Rationale, published in 1295, is still considered the supreme authority on the spiritual significance of Church architecture and Church ornament, held flowers in general to be the emblems of goodness. ‘They represent, like the trees, those good works which have the virtues for roots.’ Growing things, he considered, could very beautifully supplement the ritual of the Church, and he recommends that ‘on Palm Sunday the people should deck themselves with flowers, olive branches and palms, the flowers to signify the virtues of the Holy One, the olive branches His office as peace-bringer and the palms His victory over Satan.’
There were those symbolists who, like Durandus of Mende and the Cardinal Petrus of Capua, valued the symbol entirely as a means of interpreting the doctrines of the Church. Their definition was that of Hugues de Saint-Victor: ‘The symbol is the allegorical representation of a Christian principle under a material form’; and they simply searched for those objects which best suited their purpose. Then there were those symbolists who, like Saint Hildegarde, Abbess of Rupertsburg, mixed their symbolism strangely with herbalism and magic. A plant of healing virtues was a good plant, attributed to the Virgin or a saint, and typifying their virtues, and a harmful plant was evil, beneath the patronage of the Devil, typifying and inducing envy, hatred, or perhaps malice.
Lastly there were the mystic symbolists, and it is they who have had most influence on pictorial art. There were those who, like Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, could discern through the darkened glass of Old Testament metaphor the divine facts of New Testament revelation, and those who, like Saint Mectilda of Germany, were favoured by Heaven with clear and detailed visions, in which Christ Himself deigned to explain the complicated symbolism of His surroundings, His embroidered robes and jewelled ornaments. And there were those mystics who were not in holy orders, who did not claim direct communication with Heaven, yet who have, nevertheless, by giving shape and colour to the vague indications of Holy Writ as to the future state, and by materializing, as it were, the illusive inner vision of things invisible, profoundly influenced the religious sentiment, if not the theology, of the world. Chief among them is the poet Dante, the friend of Giotto and the spiritual father of both the poets and the artists of the Italian Renaissance. In Germany his place was taken by Conrad von Würtzburg, a poet of infinitely less genius but who equally influenced his native art, at least as far as devotional representations of the Virgin Mary were concerned. He was a minnesinger who consecrated the last effort of a long life to praising the virtues of her whom he terms ‘The Empress of Heaven.’ About the year 1286 he wrote ‘The Golden Forge,’ which he describes as:
It is an eulogy of the Virgin, close-packed with allegory, simile and metaphor, which are borrowed for the greater part from the Fathers of the Church, but some few are of his own finding.
His work was never to be compared with that of the great Italian, but it very strongly influenced the hymnology and the pictorial expression of the cult of the Virgin in both the Netherlands and Germany.
In England there was no great symbolist among the early poets. They were plain tales of love and war that Chaucer told in ‘English undefyled.’ But the Church in England produced some beautiful mystical hymns, notably the one to the Virgin, written, perhaps, about 1350, which begins:
Religious pictures are of two types: the historical, which aims at depicting a sacred scene exactly as it did occur; and the devotional, which presents a divine or holy figure in the attitude and with the surroundings best calculated to inflame the devotion of the worshipper.
To the first category belongs Rubens’ ‘Descent from the Cross.’4 The dead Figure, the sustained effort of the men who detach it from the Cross, the grief-stricken women, are all depicted with perfect realism and strict attention to historical detail. It merely depicts the scene as it might have occurred, and no attempt is made to guide or suggest the emotions of the beholder.
To the second category belong many of the early Crucifixions. The figure of the Saviour is emaciated to a painful degree. On each side of the Cross hover angels catching in a chalice the holy blood as it falls. At the summit a nesting pelican tears its breast; at the foot a skull is placed within a niche. Here a distinct emotional appeal is made—to man’s pity, for the sufferings of the Christ; to his gratitude, since the preciousness of the holy blood is so emphasized. The pelican in its piety is the symbol of Christ’s devotion to His Church, and the skull invites meditation upon the eternal death from which He saved us.
In pictures of the devotional type the spiritual cause or effect of the incident illustrated is usually indicated by symbols. The reason why the Godhead sits as a child upon His Mother’s knee is indicated by the apple which He holds in His hand. As the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil it is the symbol of Adam’s fault, which, through His incarnation, Christ repaired—and, thereby, to instructed Christians, it foretells the tragedy of the Crucifixion. So, in an Annunciation, the lily in the angel Gabriel’s hand indicates the quality by which Mary found favour in God’s sight, and it foreshadows also the sinless birth of the Saviour.
It should be clearly understood to which figure in a composition the symbols used refer. When a personage of mortal birth, prophet, apostle, martyr or saint, holds a symbol or attribute, it almost invariably refers to his own history. Archangels usually hold their own attribute, but the symbols or emblems which angels carry, or which are used decoratively, placed against the sky or laid upon the ground, are always to be referred to the principal figure in the scene represented. The sword and lily in a ‘Last Judgment’ represent the omnipotence and integrity of the Judge; the rose and lily in an ‘Assumption’ the love and the purity of the Madonna; the palm in a martyrdom the triumph of the martyr.