The floral symbolism of the great masters

by Elizabeth Haig

The two men not in holy orders, who are permitted to carry the lily, are Saint John the Baptist and Saint Joseph. The former, even if he took no formal vow of celibacy, is looked upon as the first of the Christian anchorites, and the lily of Saint Joseph is the symbol of the self-abnegation of his married life.

The history of the marriage of the Virgin Mary is found in the apocryphal ‘Gospel of the Birth of Mary,’ translated by Saint Jerome and abridged in the Catalogus Sanctorum of Peter de Natalibus.

‘And when Mary was fourteen years of age the High Priest commanded that the virgins brought up in the temple should return home and be wedded according to law. And all obeyed except Mary, who replied that she might not, as her parents had dedicated her to the Lord and she herself had vowed her virginity to God. And the High Priest, being perplexed by Mary’s vow (which ought to be kept) on the one hand, and the introduction of a new custom in Israel on the other, summoned the elders together to consult upon the matter. And as they prayed, a voice came from the sanctuary commanding that every man of the house of David, who was not wedded, should place his rod on the altar, and he whose rod should bud, and the Holy Spirit descend upon it in the form of a dove, according to the prophecy of Isaiah, should be the spouse of Mary.

‘And there was among the rest a certain Joseph of the House of David, an old man and a widower, and who had sons and grandsons. And thinking it unseemly that an aged man should marry a tender virgin, when the others presented their rods he withheld his own. And no miracle appearing, the High Priest inquired of the Lord, who answered that he only to whom the Virgin was to be espoused had not presented his rod. So Joseph was brought forward, and presented his rod, and straightway it budded, and the dove descended from heaven and settled upon it. And it was clear to all men that Mary was to be his wife.’

In one of the earliest representations[284] which we have of the ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ Joseph holds a stalk of lilium candidum with a single flower at its summit, on which is poised the holy dove. Thus Giotto, always thoughtful and original in his symbolism, modified the legendary flowering staff to the flower which should symbolize Saint Joseph’s wedded life with the Virgin.

But the great majority of artists have followed the legend more closely. Taddeo Gaddi[285] gives a bunch of leaves at the staff’s top, just such leaves as would sprout from a staff of ash. There is only one tiny bud upon the bare stick above which the dove hovers in the ‘Marriage’ attributed to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo,[286] and Gaudenzio Ferrari[287] paints a scarcely-budded staff.

Sometimes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the staff of Saint Joseph bears red or pink flowers resembling the oleander, and to-day the country people in Tuscany call the oleander Il Mazzo di San Giuseppe, that is, ‘The Staff of Saint Joseph.’

Northern art, uninfluenced by the Legenda Aurea, gives Saint Joseph no flowering staff. Lucas van Leyden[288] paints him as an entirely unidealized workman with tools upon his back but places the lily in his hand. And he has also a lily in the ‘Holy Family’ of Geertgen tot Sint Jans,[289] though in the many representations of ‘The Adoration of the Magi’ in North Germany and the Netherlands he is undistinguished by any attribute.

After the seventeenth century Saint Joseph began to have a status of his own as patron of married virtue. Single figures of him appear carrying a lily, not a staff, and in the ecclesiastical art of the present day he carries sometimes the Child-Christ and sometimes a book, but also invariably a lily. A large oleograph which hangs in the Church of the Angels at La Verna shows the Child-Christ crowning him with a wreath of lilies.

Occasionally the lily is given to young girls who are neither saints nor martyrs. There is an engraving from a gold medal in the royal library at Windsor of the Empress Leonora of Portugal. The portrait is half-length, standing, with long hair, beneath the arched imperial crown, and she holds in her hand a lily stem with two flowers and three buds. It is inscribed: