Modern art has adopted the tradition and in the ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ of Rossetti[229] the wingless angel carries a stalk of lilies. There is also a white lily embroidered upon the strip of material which is stretched upon an embroidery frame at the foot of Mary’s bed.
The angel brings the lily to the Virgin in recognition of her perfect purity, the transcendent quality by which alone she found favour with God. Through it tremendous honour came upon her, and by the marvellous nature of that honour she was eternally bound to her virginity. ‘Mary Virgin, ever a Virgin.’ In a very charming picture by Filippo Lippi,[230] Mary, with bent head, and fully understanding the grave significance of the gift, reverently accepts the lily which the angel Gabriel places in her hand.
In another Annunciation by Filippo Lippi,[231] a second angel, peeping through the entry behind Gabriel, also carries a lily, but it is a fancy which seems to have no particular significance and rather impairs the dignity of the subject.
So constantly did painters and sculptors of the Annunciation place a lily in the archangel Gabriel’s hand that it gradually became his special attribute, which he wore, as a knight did his crest, to distinguish him from other angels and archangels.
In the apocryphal Book of Tobit is the story of Tobias, who was accompanied by the angel Raphael on the famous journey which he took to recover his father’s money, a journey in which he not only caught the fish whose gall was to cure his father’s blindness, but also found a wife. It is the only subject from the Apocrypha which now decorates Christian churches, and owes this grace to the force with which the story, despite its fantastic details, illustrates the constant watchfulness of Heaven over those still on their earthly pilgrimage. In the fifteenth century it was a favourite subject for a votive picture on behalf of one about to take a journey. The young man, rather helpless in his youth and inexperience, protected by the strong, wise guardian angel, was a group painted with the greatest pleasure, and the fascination of ideal, sexless beauty, of curved, sweeping wings, tempted to an amplification of the subject, and though the Book of Tobit mentions one archangel only—
‘... The affable archangel
Raphael; the sociable spirit that deign’d
To travel with Tobias, and secured
His marriage with the seven-times wedded maid—’[232]
there suddenly sprang up in Florence a short-lived fashion for depicting Tobias with three archangels.