Thus the lily became the gage of the Virgin borne by her knights. She was now gradually moving from the subordinate though glorious station as Mother of the Incarnate Word to a position of her own as Queen of Heaven. Saint Ferdinand, possibly unwilling to confront the Moslem with the Christ whom they themselves revered as a prophet, bore upon his saddle-bow the ivory Virgen de las Batallas,[27] and perhaps what specially endeared her to the people of Spain was the knowledge that in the fealty they paid her the infidel could have neither part nor lot. The chosen knight of the Immaculate Virgin was, of course, Santiago, Saint James, the patron saint of Spain, but every Spanish cavalier acknowledged himself the servitor of the Lady of the Lily.
Rather more than fifty years after the founding of the Order of the Lily of Navarre the poet-saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, was preaching his famous series of Homilies on the Song of Solomon. The sermons were eighty in number, each based on the text of the Canticles, and each celebrating the perfections of the Virgin. Differing from Origen, he found the Virgin Mary, not the Christ, to be the speaker of the words: ‘I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.’ Differing again from the Church father, he further identified ‘the lily among thorns,’ she who is addressed as ‘my sister, my spouse,’ with the Virgin and not with the Church of God upon Earth.
Saint Bernard was the most popular preacher of his time; his sermons became known throughout the Christian world, and to his influence may be traced the high position which the Mother of Christ now holds in the Roman Catholic Church. But, so far, the lily had not appeared in pictorial art in connection with the Virgin.
In the twelfth century, however, we find ecclesiastical seals which bear the figure of the Virgin holding by the left hand (or right, as it would appear on the impress) the Child, and in her right a branch of lilies. Two of these seals, that of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln and that of Thornholm Priory in Lincolnshire, are now in the British Museum. It seems to have been the fashion in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries to engrave the owner’s figure on a seal with a flower in the hand. On the seal of Capet Henri I he is shown with a sceptre in one hand and a fleur-de-lys in the other, and the figures on the seals of the Queens of France have a flower in either hand. Therefore it was only natural, when cutting the Virgin’s figure on a seal, that the craftsman should give her a flower too, and the Virgin’s own flower, the lily.
The conservatism of churchmen and the traditions of Byzantine art still kept lilies at the threshold of the Church till the Renaissance came. It came like the spring, uncertainly at first, with puffs and gusts and relapses, but every day the atmosphere grew more genial, more life-giving, till at last every branch of human thought was alive and growing. The old early Christian fear of beauty as a devil’s lure was dying fast, and as scholars and artists studied with new interest the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome, the old pagan joy of perfect form in art as in literature revived once more. A representation of the climax of the Christian tragedy could only be an awful thing, but childhood and womanhood had the right to beauty. The old Byzantine panels of the Child-Christ and His Mother were little more than a formula; the lines and colour were not beautiful, though understood to represent a thing of beauty. Now artists and people required that she who, on the word of Scripture, was ‘the fairest among women,’[28] should be adequately presented, and the Church gave consent. But it was understood that the loveliness of the Virgin should be strictly the beauty of holiness, for Saint Ambrose had affirmed[29] that, in the Mother of God, corporeal beauty had been, as it were, the reflection of the beauty of the soul, and the early artists, hampered by lack of technical skill and confused by monkish ideals of asceticism, too often rendered their Madonnas emaciated and bloodless, even languid and fretful in expression, mistaking the outward signs of a subdued flesh for those of a perfected spirit.
It was at this time that Saint Dominic came to Italy with his fiery zeal, his devotion to the Virgin and his Spanish traditions of the flower of Our Lady. For him, the quality which raised her so far above all other women was her spotlessness; she was ‘sin pecado,’ ‘Maria Purissima.’ Her other phases, as Mother of the Sorrowful, Refuge of Sinners, or Consoler of the Afflicted, were to him of secondary importance.
Already through the preaching of Saint Francis Italian intellect had been rendered capable of appreciating the beauty of simplicity. 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 symbol, beautiful in itself, and so suggestive of the quality it represented, impressed the imagination clearly, and presently there was a bloom of pictured lilies.
The mosaicist Cavallini,[30] Duccio di Buoninsegna,[31] Giotto,[32] Simone Martini,[33] and Orcagna[34] led the way, and the Christian artists of the world have followed. The earliest lilies flowered in Rome; but Siena, Umbria, Florence, Venice, and later the Netherlands and Germany, all soon had their votaries of the mystic flower. The French ivory workers of the fourteenth century, influenced doubtless by the tradition of the seal-cutters, frequently placed flowers in the hand of the Madonna. These little ivory statuettes are usually very sweet in type and often exquisite in workmanship. The Child is held on the left arm, and the right hand holds a large single lily cup, a pear-like fruit, or, more generally, a natural stalk of lilies with leaves and flowers. Always when placed beside the Virgin, or in her hand, the lily is the symbol of her purity, and a lily standing alone, as does the beautiful stem in pietra-dura work, which decorates the little oratory of ‘Our Lady of the Annunciation’ in the Church of the Santissima Annunziata of Florence, is the emblem of the Madonna herself, the ‘Lilium inter Spinas.’
Modern Biblical commentators are agreed that the ‘lily of the valleys’ of the Song of Solomon is not the white lily of Europe but the scarlet anemone. The lilium candidum appears never to have grown in Syria. In the late spring and early summer, however, the anemones grow thickly in every grassy patch around Jerusalem and throughout Palestine. That the flower mentioned is red seems indicated by the comparison between it and the lips of the ‘Beloved,’ and the anemone, which responds so readily to the sun, throwing back its scarlet petals and baring its heart to the warmth, might well stand for the passionate lover of the Canticles.
But the fathers of the Church held the flower to be a lilium, and for the Church and for sacred art it was and remains the lilium candidum.