Very rarely the Virgin holds a violet. The flower is used in Christian art almost exclusively to indicate the humility of the Son of God in taking upon Himself our human form, and in the beautiful altar-piece by Stephen Lochnar[263] the Saviour stretches up His tiny hand to grasp the violet held by Mary, so making it His individual attribute. The panel is rich in colouring, but Mary is of the simple, placid type of the early German school. She is gravely, deeply happy in her motherhood, and not saddened, as in Italy, by painful forebodings. The Child reaches up His hand with a pretty gesture, accepting from her, who had given Him His tender little body, also the violet, symbol of His humility.
In a picture by Bruder Wilhelm[264] the Virgin holds a sweet-pea, bearing both the flower and ripened pods. The symbolism of the pea is obscure and is not to be traced in Christian iconography, though there is the legend of the erbilia, a species of pea which, springing first from the footsteps of Saint Columban, still grows upon the Tuscan mountains. Possibly the symbolism may lie in the simultaneous flowering and fruiting of the pea, for the palm was held by some writers to be an emblem of the Virgin, and for the reason that ‘it flowered and fruited at one and the same time.’[265]
There are three subjects, all connected with the Virgin’s death, where lilies are once more found. They are her Ascension, the Giving of her Girdle to Saint Thomas, and her Coronation. In each of these the flower-filled tomb, from which she has just arisen, is introduced, usually as the base of the composition.
But the lilies in these pictures do not refer to the immaculate purity of the Virgin Mother, but represent the souls of ‘angels, confessors and virgins.’ The legends which the Legenda Aurea contains were collected by Jacobus de Voragine during the last half of the thirteenth century, while the lily was still the flower of virgin martyrs and was not yet the Madonna’s lily. He gives the following account of the burial of the Virgin:
‘The Lord commanded the Apostles that they should carry the body into the valley of Jehoshaphat and place it in a new tomb that had been dug there, and watch three days beside it, till He should return.
‘And straightway there surrounded her flowers of roses, which are the blessèd company of martyrs; and lilies of the valley, which are the bands of angels, confessors and virgins.’
But the Byzantine Guide to Painting, in the paragraph entitled ‘How to represent the Assumption of the Divine Mother,’ directs that in the lower part of the picture there should be ‘an open and empty tomb.’
There was therefore divergence of opinion, and the Church apparently left the artist free.
Jacobus de Voragine seems to have collected the many floating legends of the Virgin, and with that poetic judgment which was the peculiar gift of his generation, to have preserved those forms particularly marked by sweetness or distinction of incident. But some even of his own countrymen apparently preferred the legend in its balder form, for the astonished Apostles surround a bare and empty tomb. Beyond the Alps, where the Legenda Aurea never had much influence, the tomb is almost invariably empty, and indeed all three subjects are rare in the North, though the death of the Virgin is frequently represented.
The majority of Italian painters, however, gladly seized the pretty detail, and the Virgin’s tomb is usually flower-filled. But the painters of the high Renaissance did not keep strictly to the symbolism of the legend. There is a beautiful fresco by Sodoma,[266] in which the Virgin, dignified and lovely, ascends from a tomb brimming over with roses, and from among them springs one mystic lily.