A child-angel holds a scroll with the words:
‘Is perfecit opus,’
and the archangel Gabriel with a lily, painted in a small lunette above the throne, recalls the first beginning of the work now perfected; while before the throne, and thick on either side, is a waving grove of large white lilies, each stalk held by an adoring angel.
The devotional figure of the Virgin known as the ‘Immaculate Conception’ is usually presented as the woman with ‘the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars;’ four or five attendant child-angels each carry a symbol of her virtues, and the lily is always prominent among them.
This particular aspect of the Virgin was especially popular in Spain, where Murillo was its finest exponent. The flowers of an Immaculate Conception are the rose, lily, olive and palm, signifying love, purity, peace and victory. Sometimes the iris, the royal lily, is added; sometimes it replaces the lilium candidum. José Antolines[274] paints the iris only.
In the chapter on ‘Garlands of Roses’ we remarked the thorns which in the mystic Enclosed Gardens of Germany illustrate the verse:
‘As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.’
With the closing of the fifteenth century these thorn trellises passed from Northern art, but the application of the metaphor to the Virgin still persisted in Northern theology, and since the Immaculate Conception had replaced the Hortus Conclusus as a devotional subject, it is as an attribute of the Virgin, risen to glory, that we find the thorns, and in an Immaculate Conception by Seghers[275] a child-angel flutters at the Madonna’s feet with a lily enclosed in branches of thorns.
In the 24th chapter of Ecclesiasticus there is a description of Wisdom with her attributes in which the Roman Catholic Church has seen a prefiguring of the Virgin Mary. Some pictorial renderings of the Immaculate Conception make special reference to this, notably the large altar-piece, of unknown authorship, but believed to date from the end of the fifteenth century, which was painted for the Church of S. Francesco in Lucca.[276]
In the upper part of the picture Christ is seen seated, and holding out above the kneeling Virgin the sceptre of His royal favour. Above the sceptre is a scroll with the words from the Book of Esther: ‘Not for thee was this law made, but for all mankind.’ She alone was immaculate. Around there is a wreath of angels. Below stand King David, King Solomon, Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm and Saint Anthony of Padua. Behind these figures stretches a charming garden. Against the horizon are the cypresses of Mount Zion, the cedar of Lebanon, the palm tree of Cades, and also a pomegranate laden with fruit. Midway there is a rose hedge thick with the roses of Jericho. A terrace runs across the garden, and upon the parapet are two stone vases, one labelled Mirra and the other Balsamum.