The white lily, which symbolizes purity, is found chiefly in pictures of the Annunciation, but it has been introduced in many other scenes from the life of the Virgin. In the first exhibited painting by Rossetti, entitled ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,’[248] the Virgin, in grey robes, is seated at a curiously-shaped frame embroidering a white lily upon a ground of red material. The flower she is copying grows in a vase beside her and an angel with rose-coloured wings waters it. St Anne stands near, and in the background Joachim trims a trellised vine upon which the Holy Dove is perched. In the ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’[249] of Rossetti, this same strip of embroidery, now finished, hangs beside the bed.
The older artists paint no lily in the early scenes of the Virgin’s life; it first appears at the Annunciation, where it was used so repeatedly that it became in itself the symbol of the miraculous birth of Our Lord. Giotto brings it forward in the ‘Visitation.’[250] Elizabeth, hurrying from the house to meet the Virgin, passes beneath a portico on which blooms a large vase of lilies.
There are endless pictures representing the Virgin seated with the Holy Child, in which a vase of lilies is placed as a votive offering before her feet, or lilies are held by attendant angels. One of the earliest of these pictures is the ‘Enthroned Madonna’[251] of Giotto. Two angels offer golden vases filled with lilies and roses. The angels have searched Paradise for its most precious flowers and have chosen those which symbolize purity and divine love. As the symbol of divine love the roses are very appropriately mixed with the lilies in the vase which Ghirlandaio[252] places on the lowest step of the Madonna’s throne. He has also added the starry wild white campion which closely resembles jasmine, a flower never definitely accorded to the Queen of Heaven by the symbolists of the Church, but its clear starlike form bringing to mind both her title Stella Maris and the starry crown described by Saint John, painters frequently use it, and white flowers of the same shape, as her attribute.
But the appearance of the jasmine in the Madonna pictures may in part be owing to some confusion between the jasmine and the myrtle, for the latter was quite definitely one of the Virgin’s flowers and is even used when addressing her in metaphor.
‘O myrtle tree of Paradise
So richly hung with fruit.’[253]
Dr Anselm Saltzer, O.S.B., writes: ‘The Greeks and Romans held the myrtle to be the symbol of beauty, youth and marriage, because of its delightful perfume, its evergreen leaves, white blossoms and aromatic berries. In connection with Mary, the myrtle serves as a figure of her purity and other virtues as well as of her influence over the unruly impulses of the human soul.’[254]
Francesco Franciabigio[255] places a vase of single white roses at the Virgin’s feet. Double roses, pink or red, are the symbol of divine love, the love of Christ for His Church upon earth, and the white single roses might be the symbol of the passionless love of the ‘Mater Consolatrix.’
These flowers, placed in vases before the Virgin, are usually significant and appropriate, but they are really more votive than symbolical. The Latins had brought to the shrine of Venus the myrtle and roses, the apples and poppies that were sacred to her, and painters of Central Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the same desire to present and sacrifice to their Lady the flowers which were by association peculiarly hers, painted roses and lilies carefully and beautifully in the foreground of her pictures. It was their gift to the Madonna, as the paper roses on so many modern altars and the wild flowers on the wayside shrines are also gifts.
In Northern Italy, particularly among those who studied in the school of Squarcione, fruit took the place of the votive flowers, and is laid before the Madonna and the Child, or hung in garlands across the upper part of the picture.