Thou art the fairness of heaven, and
The feast-day of our hearts,’
wrote Saint Petrus Damiani in the eleventh century.
In Saint Bernard we read:
‘Mary is the violet of humility, the lily of chastity and the rose of charity.’
Conrad von Würtzburg compares her to the balsam of purest perfume, the fairest among flowers, the cedar of Lebanon, the cypress of Zion, fennel and mint, the white lily, the early flowering almond, the healing mandrake, the musk-flower, the evergreen myrtle, the low nard, the thornless rose in the dew of heaven, the noble frankincense and the hidden violet, and further addresses her as
‘A living Paradise
Of grandly coloured flowers.’[246]
But though poets, and particularly German poets, ranged widely through the fields in their search for blossoms which by their beauty or by their healing virtues were fit to symbolize the Virgin, the early artists painted very few. In those mystical Enclosed Gardens which so charmed the Germans of the fifteenth century, only a few plants appear. The lily, which is often the lily of the valley, the rose, the violet, and the strawberry, are the most usual. Later the iris, the royal lily, was added, and sometimes the seven-blossomed columbine. Occasionally in Italy the jasmine and the daisy are also found in the vase beside her, but all other flowers of the garden and field, the tulip, anemone, ranunculus, primrose, daffodil, dahlia, etc., were rigidly excluded.
It will be noticed that, with the exception of the rose, all the flowers of the Virgin are white or blue, her own colours. An exception, which is unique, is the golden sunflower springing from her halo on a twelfth-century window in the Church of St Rémi at Reims, and even that is not exclusively hers, since Saint John, on the other side, bears the same flower. White and blue are the two colours which are held most sacred in the Christian Church. White, symbol of the Supreme Being and of the Eternal Truth, is used in the ornaments for the feast of Our Lord and of the Virgin, for it announces loving-kindness, virginity and charity.[247] Blue is the symbol of chastity, innocence and candour. Only one yellow flower is used symbolically, and that only in scenes from the Passion, by artists of the early Flemish and German schools. It is the dandelion, and its significance is, apparently, bitterness of grief.