‘This subject has frequently been portrayed by Christian artists. A tree springs from the bowels, the breast or the mouth of Jesse. The symbolic trunk spreads to the left and right, throwing forth branches bearing the Kings of Judah, the ancestors of Christ; at the top, seated on a throne, or the chalice of a gigantic flower, is the Son of God. Surrounding the Saviour, and forming as it were an oval aureole, seven doves are ranged one above the other, three on the left, three on the right, and one at the top.... These doves, which are of snowy whiteness, like the Holy Ghost, and adorned like him with a cruciform nimbus, are simply living manifestations of the seven gifts of the Spirit. The Holy Ghost is drawn under the form of a dove; each of the seven energies distinguishing Him is also figured under the same type.’[103]

These little doves surrounding the figure of Christ, as a man or as an infant, occur very frequently in the French miniatures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and are found upon the windows in the cathedrals of S. Denis, Chartres, Amiens and Beauvais, and in many other French churches.

It was an essentially French development of Christian symbolism, and it is in Flemish art, which drew its inspiration from the French Renaissance, that we first find, not the little white doves, but the columbine flower. The columbine grows wild in most countries of Europe and is usually dark blue in colour. Each of its five petals is so shaped that it is really very like a little long-necked dove. The little doves are only five in number, but the Flemish painters take each flower, not each petal, as the symbol, and give seven blooms upon each plant. There are six, and the edge of the seventh is just showing, in the mystical crown worn by Hubert van Eyck’s ‘Queen of Heaven.’[104]

Strictly speaking, however, Mary has no right to these symbols of the gifts of the Spirit, for it was to the expected Messiah that the divine gifts were promised. The columbine is more correctly used by Hugo van der Goes, who in his ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’[105] places a columbine, with seven flowers upon it, in a vase before the Infant Saviour.

The seven gifts of the Spirit are according to Isaiah:

And according to the Apocalypse:

But, at the Renaissance, Faith, Hope and Charity were taken as the theological virtues, and to them were added the four moral virtues exalted in pagan times above all others, namely, Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Strength.[106]

In a picture by Jörg Breu of the Virgin with the Child and two saints,[107] a vase of columbine, the only flowers introduced, is placed in the foreground just below the Child, who stands on His Mother’s knee.