The floral symbolism of the great masters

by Elizabeth Haig

Some symbols were of pagan origin, for the palm of victory and the olive branch of peace were borrowed from the Romans, who had themselves inherited them from older civilizations. Their significance was not changed but simply limited and sanctified; the victory, for Christians, was the victory over sin, and the peace, the peace of God.

These various methods of determining the value of different plants as symbols did not always accord. M. Huysman, in La Cathédrale, a very complete study in Christian symbolism, instances the sycamore: ‘Saint Melitus proclaims that the sycamore stands for cupidity.... Raban Maur and L’anonyme de Clairvaux qualify it as the unbelieving Jew; Petrus of Capua compares it to the Cross, Saint Eucher to wisdom.’

Even the sifting of the text of Scripture did not always lead to identical conclusions. ‘I am the rose of Sharon’ (or ‘the flower of the field’) ‘and the lily of the valleys,’ sings the lover of the Canticles, who prefigures, according to Origen, Jesus Christ. But Saint Bernard of Clairvaux found that the words veiled the personality of the Virgin Mary, and other writers consider that they refer to the Church of God upon earth.

There were, in fact, two schools of symbolists though they did not differ greatly. There were those who wrote before the eleventh century and whose influence is traced in the mosaics of Rome, Ravenna and the Baptistery of Florence, and those later ones whose authority was accepted by the painters of the Italian Renaissance and through them spread throughout the Christian world. Durandus, standing midway between the two schools of symbolism, held chiefly to the more ancient, though he also recognized the newer, usage.

But after the twelfth century the painters of Siena alone kept to the ancient meaning of the symbols; Florence and the later schools broke away entirely.

As far as flower-symbols were concerned the chief difference was in the use of the lily, which from being the flower indicative of heavenly bliss became the especial flower of the Virgin, typifying her purity. Also the rose, the flower of martyrdom, became the symbol of divine love, and the palm tree and the acanthus dropped out of devotional representations altogether.

In the main, after the twelfth century, symbolists were agreed. There were certain fruits and flowers about which there never had been any doubt. The vine had been the emblem of Jesus Christ from the beginning of Christian theology. The white lily, as a symbol of chastity, came perhaps from the Hebrews, but all Christian writers were agreed as to its fitness as a symbol of purity and as an emblem or attribute of the Virgin Mary. The violet was the symbol of humility, and therefore, say Petrus of Capua and Saint Mectilda, the emblem of Christ when on earth. Saint Mectilda and Bishop Durandus, for the same reason, consider it the emblem of confessors.

The rose was long in disgrace as the flower of Venus. But even saints could not exclude it from their lives, and gradually it crept into Christian hagiology. Roses decorate some of the most poetical of the histories in the Legenda Aurea, which was compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, during the last half of the thirteenth century, and there are roses in plenty in the pictures of the fifteenth century. Their meaning, at first sight, is not so clearly defined as is that of some other flowers. Raban Maur and L’anonyme de Clairvaux had used them as the type of charity; Durandus had explained them, red and white, as emblems of martyrs and virgins. Walafrid Strabo also considered them the symbols of martyrdom, but in the Golden Legend and in the pictures of the Renaissance, when plucked and falling, or when sent from Heaven, they are symbols of divine love; when they are woven into wreaths they symbolize heavenly joy.

The symbolism of the lesser flowers is not so clear, but the water lily and the saffron as well as the rose were held by Raban Maur to be symbols of charity; verdure, according to Durandus, was the emblem of beginners in the faith; the heath, hyssop, convolvulus and violet all represent humility; the lettuce temperance; the elder, zeal; and the thyme, activity. Of these, however, with the exception of the violet, Christian art has taken little note.

There are certain flowers which appear repeatedly in pictures which represent the garden of Heaven; they grow in the ‘Enclosed Garden’ of the Madonna, and surround the Infant Christ when He is laid upon the ground to receive adoration. They are the rose and the lily, and also the violet, the pink and the strawberry, the last with fruit and flowers together. The symbolists are unanimous in ascribing humility to the violet; the pink or carnation, which is usually introduced when there are no roses, is, like the rose, the flower of divine love; the strawberry with fruit and flower represents the good works of the righteous, or the fruits of the spirit.