And nearly two centuries later William Dunbar wrote:
‘Hevins distil your balmy showris:
For now is risen the bricht day-stir
Fro the rose Mary, flour of flowris.’
Therefore, in the decoration of churches dedicated to the Madonna, the rose frequently occurs. It does not supersede the lily, which was the flower especially consecrated to her, but it is found beside it. The Church of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome is ornamented along the aisles, above the side chapels, with a series of panels, gold on white, which show the floral emblems of the Virgin. The rose, the lily, the olive, the laurel and the vine alternate down the whole length of the church. The beautiful little chapel behind the shrine of the Santissima Annunziata, in the Church of the Annunziata in Florence, was decorated in the seventeenth century with inlaid and raised pietra-dura work. Each of the five onyx panels which form the walls has upon it an emblem of the Virgin—the sun, the moon, the Stella maris, the lily, and, most lovely of them all, the branch of roses below the words ‘Rosa Mystica.’ This rose is red, and, strangely enough, the red rose, rather than the white, was chosen to represent the Virgin. Wrote Guido Orlandi in 1292:
‘If thou hadst said, my friend, of Mary,
Loving and full of grace;
Thou art a red rose planted in the garden;
Thou wouldst have written fittingly.’
In the Sarum Book of Hours, by Philippe Pigouchet,[69] published in 1501, the huge rose held by the Virgin definitely illustrates her title of ‘Rosa Mystica,’ but those pictures of the early Florentine school, in which she holds a small red or white rose, show her as the ‘Madonna del Fiore,’ for as ‘Our Lady of the Flower’ she had been installed patroness of the city of Florence. It would have seemed natural, since the lily was upon the shield of Florence, to have placed a lily, her own flower, in the Madonna’s hand. But the city of Florence had passed through troubled times just before the revival of her art, and the silver lily on her shield had been replaced by one of crimson.