Elizabeth Haig

“ So in Italian art, after its re-birth, we find a love of simple lines, of refined types, of flowers, and a striving at first unconscious, then definite, after classical ideals, while the Northern nations, less happy in their traditions, never quite conquered their love of barbaric splendour; a rose wrought in pure gold was to them more truly a symbol of divine love than a fresh rose of the field. ”

“ The burning bush, not particularly a thorn bush, but the ‘bush’ of our Authorized Version, is now the chosen emblem of the Church of Scotland.
There were neither thorns nor thistles in Eden. It was not till the day when Adam fell that God laid a curse upon the ground: ‘Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.’ Therefore thorns and thistles are in general the symbols of sin and death. A little German woodcut expresses eternal death with gruesome completeness: a skull, with the apple of damnation between its bare jaws, has round its brow a wreath of twisted thorns. ”

“ In Murillo’s masterpiece, ‘La Purissima’ of the Prado, the flowers indicate Mary’s virtues. The rose, symbol of love and mercy, show her as the Mater misericordiæ; the lily shows her purity—she is ‘La Purissima:’ the palm of triumph is hers as the Queen of Heaven and the olive tells of the healing she brings to mankind ”

“ Sometimes He holds a scroll, announcing His high mission, with the words ‘Ego sum lux mundi’ or ‘Ego sum via veritas et vita.’ More stress is laid upon His divinity than upon His humanity, and there is absolutely nothing to hint at or forecast His passion. He appears simply as the bringer of peace and blessing, and in His hand is still the flower of Paradise, the same lily which grows beside His throne in the mosaics. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A withered olive tree, without fruit or leaves, grows by the side of the foolish maidens, and a healthy olive tree, laden with fruit and ready with abundance of oil, is beside those maidens who were wise.
But on the whole the olive is an Italian, and more particularly a Sienese, symbol, though Botticelli also loved the silvery leaves. In his magnificent ‘Pallas taming the Centaur,’135 painted for Lorenzo de’ Medici, to commemorate his diplomatic victory over the King of Naples and the League in 1480, olive encircles the head of the lovely goddess and is wreathed about her dress. ”

“ In small, fierce Siena the olive was a very favourite symbol and found more frequently than any other. One of the most curious characteristics of religious art is the inexactitude with which it reflects a people’s mood, for the ideal upon the wall above the altar is often just precisely that to which they do not strive. When the Medici were in power and Florentine social life was at its worldliest, simplicity and purity, almost austerity, were demanded of the artist, and the lily was the favourite symbol. ”

“ FOOTNOTES
1 Dr March states very clearly the difference between a symbol and an emblem. ‘A symbol stands for an abstract idea, an emblem denotes a concrete thing, an attribute appears in apposition with the person it qualifies; for example, in a presentment of the Blessed Virgin, the lily that she holds in her hand or that flowers by her side is her attribute. When the lily appears alone it represents the Queen of Heaven and is her emblem, but if it indicates purity it is a symbol.’ ”

“ GARLANDS OF ROSES ‘Let us crown ourselves with rose-buds,’80 cried the revellers in the Book of Wisdom, and at Roman feasts host and guests alike wore roses on their hair or in garlands round their necks.
So in the heavenly mansions, where life is a perpetual feast, unfading roses crown the elect. Wreaths of roses are the symbol of heavenly joy and are worn alike by angels and by the human souls who have entered bliss. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Madonna sits reading beneath a tree. One saint gathers cherries and another draws water from a fountain. Saint George, Saint Michael and a young man chat beneath a tree, and a pretty young saint with flowers in her hair teaches the little Christ to play the psaltery. Other gardens contain no flowers but the various objects used as similes of the Virgin—the Tower of Ivory, the Closed Door, the Sealed Fountain, etc. Very often there is merely a trellis with roses climbing up it, and the flowers which express the virtues of Mary, the lily, violet and strawberry, grow at her feet. ”

“ THE LILY Gioacchino di Fiore, the mystical theologian who founded the community of ‘The Flower,’ and who is held by some to be the spiritual father of Saint Francis, writing in the last decade of the twelfth century, divided the life of humanity into three periods. In the first, during the reign of the Father, men lived under the rule of the law; in the second, reigned over by the Son, men live beneath the rule of grace; in the third the Spirit shall reign and men shall live in the plenitude of love. ”

“ Walafrid Strabo also considered them the symbols of martyrdom, but in the Golden Legend and in the pictures of the Renaissance, when plucked and falling, or when sent from Heaven, they are symbols of divine love; when they are woven into wreaths they symbolize heavenly joy.
The symbolism of the lesser flowers is not so clear, but the water lily and the saffron as well as the rose were held by Raban Maur to be symbols of charity; verdure, according to Durandus, was the emblem of beginners in the faith; the heath, hyssop, convolvulus and violet all represent humility ”

“ As a general rule, roses massed together, in garlands, in baskets, or thickly growing, are the symbols of heavenly joys, and single roses are the symbols of divine love. But there is one single rose which is also the symbol of joy—it is the golden rose which is the gift of the Popes. ”

“ The jasmine’s starry blooms recall the Heaven which He has left, the violet is a symbol of His humility, and the rose of His divine love. In the wreath behind the throne is jasmine again, with pendant trails of white convolvulus, which is also an emblem of humility.17
Occasionally the Infant Christ is represented offering a branch of lilies to a Saint,18 and then the lily represents the gift of chastity, which He bestows.
It is only in modern times that Christ, grown to manhood, has been represented with a lily in His hand. ”

“ The vine is the Christian Church, springing from the chalice of Christ’s blood; the fruit represents the good works of the righteous; the stars which shine through the branches Christian hope. The doves, by the convention of the Catacombs, signify departed Christian souls adoring Christ, who is represented by the ancient star monogram, formed of the two Greek letters, I = Iota, and X = Chi, enclosed in the circle which is the symbol of eternity. ”

“ Here herbalism and magic step very close to symbolism, for healing plants, or those which were useful as a charm against the devil, were good; those which were poisonous, or used for evil purpose, such as raising a spirit, were bad. Thus the nettle, which, when used with due ceremony, dissipates fear, becomes a symbol of courage, and myrrh, which is an antidote to love-philtres and drives away voluptuous thoughts, is held to be a plant of chastity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Already through the preaching of Saint Francis Italian intellect had been rendered capable of appreciating the beauty of simplicity.59 Each artist knew that the true beauty of the Queen of Heaven was not to be expressed by jewels or wonderfully-wrought raiment, and as the words of Saint Dominic passed from mouth to mouth, the people of Italy came to understand that the most precious virtue of Christ’s Mother was her purity, symbolized very fitly by the lily. ”

“ The apple is the most usual fruit in the hand of the Infant Christ, but some Flemish painters of the early sixteenth century give Him grapes instead. The grapes symbolize the divine blood by which souls lost through Adam’s fall are redeemed. ”

“ In the Neapolitan mosaics in the Chapel of Santa Restituta eight figures, apparently of martyrs, hold large crowns resembling a victor’s wreath, and the graceful virgin saints on the wall of S. Apollinare Nuova each carries her wreath.
The tall, grand angels of the mosaics have neither wreaths nor garlands. They have gained no crown because no strife has ever troubled their serenity. They stand tall and straight, haloed, with spear-like wands in their hands. ”

“ The snowdrop is rare as a symbol (though by no means misplaced in a Madonna picture, having all the qualities, except the perfume, of the lily of the valley) , and it was probably the individual fancy of the donor.
The strawberry is not mentioned in Scripture, neither does it seem to have been remarked by those Fathers of the Church who concerned themselves with symbolism, but it was very successful in its appeal to the artists of the Renaissance. It is a very perfect fruit, with neither thorns nor stone, but sweet, soft and delicious through and through. ”

“ THE IRIS The only rival to the lilium candidum as the lily of the Virgin is the iris. Strictly speaking, it is not a lily at all, for the Iridacea and the Liliacea are distinct botanical orders. But in Germany it is known as the sword-lily, from its sword-shaped leaves; in France it has always been identified with the ‘fleur-de-lys’; in Spain it is a ‘lirio’—a lily—and Shakespeare writes ”

“ Curiously enough, the Virgin’s crown is usually of gold and precious stones, though in one of Velasquez’s rare religious pictures, ‘The Coronation of the Virgin,’86 God the Father places upon her head a wreath of red and white rose blooms. In the best period of Italian art the Virgin wears no crown except at a ‘Coronation,’ when most often it is of gold. ”

“ Each year thousands of carnation blossoms are brought to the Lateran Church in Rome on the feast-day of Saint John, and the people bring carnations, not roses, because by midsummer’s day the blooming time of Roman roses is almost past. A scarcity of roses would seem one reason at least in the Venetian pictures of the fifteenth century why the carnation replaces the rose. Earth, even sufficient to grow a rose bush, was scarce in the sea-washed city, but carnations then, as now, must have grown in pots on every balcony. ”

“ In art which is purely German the iris is very rarely used, though Albert Dürer painted a ‘Madonna of the Sword-lily,’50 but in Spain it holds an important place. Spanish art is poor in symbolism, though it recognized early and prized highly the white lilies of the Annunciation. Except, perhaps, for the flame-tipped dart of divine love, there seems to be no symbol of truly Spanish origin, and those used by Spanish artists were mostly taken from the art of the Netherlands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Northern art the pomegranate is very rare. The Flemish artists ignore it, and those few German artists who paint it are those who had come under Italian influence. And it does not seem entirely clear whether those German artists who, like Hans Burgkmair,339 paint it in the Infant Christ’s hand, give to the Southern fruit the Southern significance, or if for them it becomes the fruit of Eden in the hand of the second Adam. ”

“ In the Madonna pictures the only faint reminder of the tragedy for which the Child was born into the world is the rosy-cheeked apple in the tiny hand. The mother is satisfied and untroubled, the Child smiling happily, and an apple is a natural, pleasant thing to place within a baby’s hand. ”

“ She was the patron of the order, and their famous saint, Bernard of Clairvaux—‘her own faithful Bernard’—devoted his life to praising the ‘lily of the valley.’ Her impress is upon the stone of the Cistercian abbeys of England and of France, where repeatedly we find the ‘carved work of open lilies.’ But the Cistercians had no monopoly of the symbol. Almost naturally the stone work of French Gothic architecture seems to bud and break into the formal flower. In the great Church of Albi each upspringing slender shaft ends in a fleur, alternating with shields along the screen. ”

“ There is the poisonous hemlock, the ivy which kills the tree that it embraces, thorns denoting the lesser sins, and the brambles which are the emblems of the greater ones. According to Raban Maur the bramble is also an emblem of the riches which destroy the soul. ”