THE CHILD WITH THE POMEGRANATE SURROUNDED BY ANGELS WITH LILIES AND ROSE-GARLANDS
(Uffizi Gallery, Florence)
Walter Pater writes: ‘The mystical fruit, which because of the multitude of its seeds was to the Romans a symbol of fecundity ... to the middle age became a symbol of the fruitful earth itself; and then of that other seed sown in the dark underworld; and at last of the whole hidden region, which Dante visited.... Botticelli putting it into the childish hands of Him, who, if men went down into hell, is there also.’
So, as the symbol of the life on the other side of death, the pomegranate is exceedingly well placed when given to the writer of the Divina Commedia, and it is even more appropriate in the hand of the incarnate Godhead—He who holds our future destinies in the hollow of His palm.
But it is difficult to ascertain if this was really the thought in the minds of the Florentine artists.
Mrs Jameson considers the pomegranate to be the symbol of immortality, or, showing the seeds, of hope in eternity.
But it would scarcely be the symbol of immortality in the Infant Saviour’s hand, since the symbol so placed is never His exclusive attribute, but the indication of some relationship with humanity. But showing the seeds—and the seeds are usually shown—it might be the symbol of a hope in eternity which He gives to man, the parallel lying in the unexpected sweetness of the fruit within the hard rind.
But possibly the authority followed by the masters of the ‘Quattrocento,’ or by those churchmen who gave them their commissions, was Gregory the Great, for he says: ‘The pomegranate is the emblem of congregations because of its many seeds: also emblem of the Christian Church because of the inner unity of countless seeds in one and the same fruit.
Following this interpretation, the pomegranate, when carried by Dante or any other being of mortal birth, would indicate his faith in the Holy Catholic Church.
In Northern art the pomegranate is very rare. The Flemish artists ignore it, and those few German artists who paint it are those who had come under Italian influence. And it does not seem entirely clear whether those German artists who, like Hans Burgkmair,[339] paint it in the Infant Christ’s hand, give to the Southern fruit the Southern significance, or if for them it becomes the fruit of Eden in the hand of the second Adam.