Then again, on that night when the angels sang of peace on earth and goodwill towards men—
... ‘the meek-eyed Peace,
She crown’d with Olive green, came softly sliding
Down through the turning sphear.’[123]
In one of the most naïve and fascinating of all Botticelli’s pictures[124] the angels crowned with olive hold up branches of it against the golden sky. Other angels, half distraught with joy, run with waving olive-sprays to greet the astonished shepherds.
The same subject is much more soberly treated by Sano di Pietro.[125] One angel, flying through the twilight, brings a twig of olive to the shepherd who is sleeping on the hillside.
There are many symbolical fruits placed in the hand of the Infant Christ. Botticelli paints a pomegranate, Mabuse a quince, Memling an apple, Il Moretto a pear, and each represents the individual artist’s conviction as to what really was the unnamed fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which grew in the midst of Eden. The placing of the olive, symbol of reconciliation, where it might be confused with the fatal fruit which made that reconciliation so imperative was carefully avoided, and we rarely find the olive branch in the hand of the Child when seated on His mother’s knee. And there was still another reason. He had Himself said: ‘I come not to bring peace upon earth, but the sword,’ therefore the earlier and more literal artists refused Him the symbol of peace, even as divine peace. There are, however, instances of the Christ-Child with the olive branch, of which the most important is the ‘Holy Family’ by Mantegna.[126] The Christ, a beautiful and dignified childish figure of three or four years old, stands on a sort of pedestal with the little Saint John. He holds a branch of olive in His right hand, upright like a sceptre, and in the other is the crystal orb which symbolizes sovereignty. Saint Joseph stands behind and the Virgin lays a rosebud at her Son’s feet.
The Bringer of Divine Peace was an aspect of the incarnate Son of God on which Mantegna laid emphasis. In the ‘Holy Family,’ now in Dresden, painted about the same period, the little Saint John holds a branch of olive (from which two tiny side-sprays grow naturally in the form of a cross) as an attribute of the Holy Child.
The olive branches of the ‘Entry into Jerusalem,’ like the olives of Gethsemane, were only accidentally allegorical. The villagers of the Mount of Olives cut down branches (presumably olive branches) ‘and strewed them in the way.’ With palm branches they would salute any popular leader, and it is scarcely to be believed that they definitely selected the olive and palm with the full understanding of the symbolism which the Christian Church attaches to them.
‘The olive branches signify his office as peace-bringer and the palms his victory over Satan.’[127]