Divine love and divine passion, intermingled, may be what the roses indicate in many ‘Adorations’ of great beauty where the scene is laid in a rose-garden. In the ‘Adoration’ of Neri di Bicci[65] the Holy Child lies surrounded by lilies and red and pale roses. The lilies signify His sinlessness and the roses apparently His love and passion. The little Saint John stands behind with a scroll on which is inscribed ‘ECCE AGNUS DEI.’
There is a lovely picture[66] now ascribed to Botticini, where angels playfully sprinkle rose petals over the Infant Christ in a rose-trellised garden. ‘They worship here always alone, though there is no gate to the garden; the angels have relinquished high Heaven for these delights; for the scent of these roses which they pluck, and the Child has relinquished Heaven for these roses, and the thorns which he shall gather from them ... the season of their thorns is never over, and whilst it is the time of roses in this picture, there is the forecast of their thorns in it.’[67]
In the Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, a MS. of the fourteenth century,[68] the Holy Dove is depicted upon a rose. From the bosom of a seated figure, which represents David or Jesse, a rose tree issues. At the summit of the tree there is a five-petalled rose, in the centre of which, as in a nest, sits a dove, which represents the Holy Ghost.
The design is founded upon the text of Isaiah which has been paraphrased by Pope:
‘From Jesse’s root behold a branch arise,
Whose sacred flower with fragrance fills the skies;
Th’ ætherial Spirit o’er its leaves shall move
And on its top descends the sacred Dove.’
The rose represents Christ, the perfect flower of the human race, sprung from the root of Jesse, and the dove descends upon it as the Holy Ghost descended upon our Lord at His baptism in Jordan.
Saint Bernard, differing from Origen, identified the Virgin Mary with the flower of the field and also with the abstraction described as ‘Wisdom’ in Ecclesiasticus, ‘exalted like a palm tree in Engeddi and as a rose plant in Jericho.’