Memling
Photo Brogi
THE FRUIT OF HEAVEN RELINQUISHED FOR THE APPLE OF EDEN
Meanwhile the painters of Florence, Fra Angelico, Neri di Bicci, Filippo Lippi and Botticelli, had painted the Child with the pomegranate, and it is not very clear whether they held to the Sienese symbolism or sympathized with the Northern tradition. But it was probably the fruit of Eden, for in all other points the Florentines had broken with the Byzantine conventions, and the Child was for them no longer the Royal Child, richly clothed and dignified in gesture, but He was a little naked human baby, born into the world to repair, as the second Adam, the old Adam’s fault. That He is the Saviour, rather than the King, is particularly emphasized by Botticelli, who seldom fails, even though it be only by the foreboding in the grey eyes of the angels, to give some hint of the coming tragedy.
On the other hand it may be possible that the painters of Florence in the fifteenth century had harked back to another source for their symbolism and had taken the imagery of Saint Gregory the Great, who used the pomegranate as the emblem of the Christian Church ‘because of the inner unity of countless seeds in one and the same fruit.’ But in later Italian art, as in all the Northern countries and in modern Church symbolism, the fruit, most usually the apple, which is in the hand of the Infant Christ, is the fruit of redemption, as the apple of Adam was the fruit of damnation.
Following the same analogy, the Virgin is regarded as the second Eve, the second universal mother, who, through her Son, is to repair the fault of the first.
The symbolists of the thirteenth century found what they considered proof of this in the word of Scripture.
Conrad von Würztburg writes:
‘Let a man take three letters: