Or again as a fruit rising from the mystical rose:
‘Now spring up flouris fra the rute
Revert you upward naturally
In honour of the blissit frute
That raiss up fro the rose Mary.’[56]
There are some mediæval Latin hymns for the Nativity in which Christ is referred to as the rose springing from the lily. The simile, however, was by no means applied to Him exclusively, for in a Visitation hymn of the same period He is alluded to as the lily hidden in the rose. But though the rose is not often the emblem of Jesus Christ, both in literature and art it is used as the symbol of His love.
Saint Mectilda, in the discourse on the three perfumes of divine love, tells us that ‘the first of these perfumes is the rose-water distilled in the still of charity from the most beautiful of all roses, the heart of our Lord,’[57] and repeatedly in ecclesiastical art, roses falling or fallen from Heaven, signify divine love. The lovely angels in Signorelli’s ‘Paradise’[58] carry roses in their looped draperies and scatter them down upon the redeemed souls beneath, and in Botticelli’s ‘Coronation of the Virgin’[59] the air is also full of roses, symbols of the love of God. And symbols of divine love are also the falling roses in that vision of Saint Francis which was so often painted by Spanish artists and called by them ‘La Portincula.’[60] The saint, kneeling in his cell one winter’s night, was much troubled by the memory of a fair woman. To overcome the temptation he went out and threw himself among the briars of the wilderness. He was rewarded by a vision of the Saviour, seated in glory, with the Virgin by His side, and as a token that his penitences were accepted the thorns bloomed with roses. In most renderings of the legend the mystical roses fall in a shower around him, and in Murillo’s fine picture[61] the putti are energetically pelting the saint with blossoms. It was a subject painted con amore by the Spaniards, for—Assumptions apart—the traditions of art in Spain were distinctly gloomy and they seized where they could an excuse for colour. Even Zurburan succumbed to the roses.[62]
The roses which strew the floor of Heaven in a famous diptych[63] by an unknown English painter are also symbols of divine love. The panels show Richard II, who is presented to the Virgin by Saint John the Baptist, Saint Edmund and Saint Edward the Confessor. The roses round the Virgin’s feet are pink and yellow, and heavier, handsomer flowers than those which are found in Italian pictures of the same period. For the rest, this Heaven is especially remarkable for the politeness of the blue-winged, blue-robed angels, who each, in compliment to their royal visitor, wear his badge—a white hart couchant, collared and chained or—upon the shoulder.
Red roses, said Saint Bernard, were symbolical of the Passion of our Lord, but neither in Church observances nor in art have they been generally adopted with that meaning. There is, however, a picture of the Christ-Child in Cadiz. He holds the crown of thorns, and at His feet are the globe and the apple. All around, filling the background, are blood-red roses, symbol of the Passion which was to come.
This forecast of pain in the Spanish renderings of the Saviour’s infancy is even more marked in a picture by Zurburan,[64] where in play He plaits a crown of rose thorns, the flowers lying beside Him and at His feet.