Part 6

‘A fair olive tree in a pleasant field.’[128]

Botticelli painted a beautiful ‘Madonna of the Olives’ for the Church of S. Spirito. Vasari writes of it: ‘In S. Spirito in Florence he has painted a picture for the Chapel of the Bardi which is carefully executed and well finished, where there are some olives and palms painted with great love.’[129] In another picture by Botticelli[130] angels hold above the Virgin’s head a lightly-framed crown of gold which is decorated with fresh sprays of lily, palm and olive.

The most popular of modern Italian representations of the Virgin and Child is very justly that painted by Niccolò Barabino[131] and entitled ‘_Quasi Oliva Speciosa in Campis_.’ Large branches of olive, painted also ‘with great love,’ are placed about the feet of the sweet-faced Mother, who peeps through her heavy white veil, and they almost hide the fruit of temptation which lies on the ground beneath.

One of the _putti_ which fly round the feet of the Madonna in a Spanish ‘Immaculate Conception’ usually carries a branch of olive, and that, too, bears the same meaning. As an olive tree in a pleasant field she brings peace and consolation to mankind. She is the ‘Mater Consolatrix.’

Sodoma painted a stately figure of Saint Victor,[132] with sword and palm, and the little rose-crowned child-angel who supports his shield holds above it a branch of olive, symbol of the peace which to a Christian warrior should be the end of victory.

The same idea dominates the ‘Judith’[133] of Botticelli. The slayer of her country’s enemy returns thoughtfully home, satisfied but not exultant. In her right hand is her sword, carried low; upright, in her left, a branch of olive. Though her deed was bloody, she had brought peace to the land.

Flemish art neglects the olive, and except in the drawings of Martin Schöngauer,[134] whose grave gentle Gabriels wear olive crowns, it is seldom seen in Germany. The reason is easy to guess. The olive tree not growing in the North, the painters would be at a loss to find a branch from which to draw, and the people, unacquainted with the leaf, would scarcely recognize its hidden message of peace. In France it is seen less rarely. On the sculptured portal of the Cathedral of Amiens there is a curious rendering of the parable of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins. A withered olive tree, without fruit or leaves, grows by the side of the foolish maidens, and a healthy olive tree, laden with fruit and ready with abundance of oil, is beside those maidens who were wise.

But on the whole the olive is an Italian, and more particularly a Sienese, symbol, though Botticelli also loved the silvery leaves. In his magnificent ‘Pallas taming the Centaur,’[135] painted for Lorenzo de’ Medici, to commemorate his diplomatic victory over the King of Naples and the League in 1480, olive encircles the head of the lovely goddess and is wreathed about her dress. The surface meaning of the picture is that, by the arts of peace taught them by the beneficent goddess, men were enabled to overcome the savagery of nature, typified by the centaur. But it also shows, allegorically, how the wise statesmanship of Lorenzo (with whose badge, rings interlaced, the gown of Pallas is ‘semé’) guided the war-loving League, here figured as the centaur, into the ways of Peace.

X

THORNS

Thorns and thorn branches signify in general grief and tribulation, the word tribulation itself being derived from a Latin root signifying thistles or briars. But, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, thorn bushes signify the minor sins, and growing briars or brambles those greater ones, ‘quæ pungunt conscientiam propriam,’ etc.

He is supported in his opinion by Saint Anselm, and both saints explain in this sense the words of Saint Paul, who wrote to the Hebrews:

‘That which beareth thorns and briars is rejected and is nigh unto cursing, whose end is to be burned.’

The crown of thorns with which jesting soldiers crowned the Christ was in itself an emblem, or at least a parody, of an emperor’s festal rose-crown. According to _The History of the Crown of Thorns of the Holy One_,[136] the first crown with which Jesus Christ was crowned was made of white-thorn and was removed before the Crucifixion and replaced by a second _de juncis marinis_.

But in the great majority of scenes from the Passion the crown is merely formed of large thorns without any attempt to realize any particular natural growth. In Germany, where Entombments and Pietàs were more often painted than in other countries, the crown is frequently green, in allusion, it is suggested, to the words: ‘If these things be done in the green wood, what shall be done in the dry?’

In these pictures the crown of thorns, if not still upon the Saviour’s head, is usually placed very prominently in the foreground, marking to some extent the divinity of the dead Christ, for, since life had fled, there could be no halo.

In Northern art the crown of thorns remains always unchanged, the symbol of Christ’s sufferings, but in at least one Italian Pietà,[137] the dry prickles round the dead Christ’s brow have bloomed with delicate white briar-roses--an exquisite figure of Love’s triumph over Pain.

Sometimes, in pathetic forecast, the Child Christ has the crown of thorns hung on His tiny wrist[138] or plays with it as with a toy, and in a very charming picture,[139] with less poignant and more pleasing symbolism, a waiting child-angel stands by with a wreath of the blue sea-holly.

In Spain the Christian faith was stern. Faith and suffering were more closely allied than faith and joy. They had no ‘jesters of the Lord,’ and their saints glorified God by self-inflicted pain rather than by acts of mercy. So their Christ in childhood was not a smiling, unconscious _bambino_, but a sad-faced child who wounds Himself with the rose-twigs which He twists into a crown. The rose-thorn tears His flesh but the roses lie beside Him and round His feet, for His griefs and sufferings were the outcome of His divine love. Both Zurburan[140] and Alonzo Cano[141] painted fine pictures on this theme.

There is a ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ by Hans Burgkmair,[142] painted in 1507, where beneath a cross-surmounted imperial crown Christ wears the Crown of Thorns. In several of the French fifteenth-century miniatures of the Trinity in Glory, God the Son still wears the Crown of Thorns, but this combination of the two crowns is rare. It was, however, in reverent remembrance of the thorn-crowned King of the Jews that the Crusader, Godfrey de Bouillon, twisted a thorn-branch round his coronet when he was crowned King of Jerusalem. His bronze statue, wearing this double crown, stands with those of the other Christian kings guarding the tomb of Maximilian in Innsbruck Cathedral.

Among modern symbolists, Holman Hunt has used thorns with finest effect. In his ‘Light of the World’ the Saviour wears again the double crown, the thorns which symbolize His sufferings intertwisted with the golden crown of His divinity. He stands with the lantern, which is the light of His Gospel, before the closed door of the human heart, a door all overgrown and blocked by the weeds and briars which are the symbols of sin and things evil. There is the poisonous hemlock, the ivy which kills the tree that it embraces, thorns denoting the lesser sins, and the brambles which are the emblems of the greater ones. According to Raban Maur the bramble is also an emblem of the riches which destroy the soul.

In several modern pictures of ‘The Good Shepherd’ Christ is depicted as rescuing a lamb caught by its wool in the briars of the wilderness. The lamb, of course, is the emblem of an erring soul, and the briars represent those sins which hold it back from answering the Shepherd’s call.

In connection with the saints, the Crown of Thorns is not used symbolically, except when placed upon the head of Saint Catharine of Siena,[143] to indicate her austerities. According to the legend, Christ in a vision offered her a crown of roses or a crown of thorns and she chose the thorns. When it is carried by Saint Louis of France it is to recall the fact that it was he who brought to France, as her most precious relic, the Holy Crown itself.

The tonsure was originally instituted to keep fresh in the memory the Saviour’s Crown of Thorns. And in the ‘Paradise’ of Fra Angelico[144] the monks are crowned with roses. Thus the emblem reverted to the original symbol. The Crown of Thorns was the parody of the rose-crown, symbol of rejoicing; the tonsure the reverent imitation of the thorny wreath, and angels at the entrance of Paradise change the tonsure for a wreath of roses.

In early German art the Virgin is often found seated in a garden of which each flower has its significance. Behind and around her there is usually a sort of trellis or bower covered with roses. The roses have very pronounced thorns, and the thorns are accentuated to recall that Mary is the lily and the bride of the Canticles, the ‘Lily among thorns.’ In an Assumption of Seghers[145] one of the attendant _putti_ flies towards her with a single lily enclosed in branches covered with long-spiked thorns.

On the other hand, when the rose is the direct emblem, not the attribute of the Madonna, it has no thorns, for then it illustrates her title, ‘_rosa sine spina_.’

The Roman Breviary likens the Virgin to the burning thorn bush in which Jehovah revealed Himself to Moses and the simile was cited by Bishop Proclus in a Mary-sermon preached in the fifth century. Though enwrapped in the all-consuming flame of divine love, she yet remains unharmed. It is only in German art that this simile has been pictorially translated. German artists were familiar with the idea through Conrad von Würtzburg’s apostrophe to the Virgin:

‘In the thorn bush on the bare field Moses, the hero of God Saw in a glow of bright fire The birth of our Saviour foreshadowed. In the blast of the flame It remained unaltered As if neither leaf nor twig Perceived the death-giving blaze. In this we may recognize The full magnificence of thy maidenhood.’[146]

And we find this burning Thorn Bush with the Ivory Tower, the Sealed Fountain, the Fleece of Gideon and other emblems of the Virgin, in the fifteenth-century renderings of the _Hortus Inclusus_ and in the background of the essentially German allegory of the Incarnation, known as the ‘Hunting of the Unicorn.’ There are some fine embroideries and tapestries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Bavarian National Museum,[147] in which the burning thorn bush, with the other symbols of the Virgin’s purity, are worked with most careful detail.

The burning bush, not particularly a thorn bush, but the ‘bush’ of our Authorized Version, is now the chosen emblem of the Church of Scotland.

There were neither thorns nor thistles in Eden. It was not till the day when Adam fell that God laid a curse upon the ground: ‘Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.’ Therefore thorns and thistles are in general the symbols of sin and death. A little German woodcut expresses eternal death with gruesome completeness: a skull, with the apple of damnation between its bare jaws, has round its brow a wreath of twisted thorns.

XI

THE PALM

The Romans took palms for their symbol of Victory. There is a sarcophagus in the Vatican on which is carved a Roman conqueror with captive barbarians kneeling before him, and the winged Victory who crowns him with laurel holds a palm in her left hand.

Simon Maccabees, after he had taken the Tower of Jerusalem, entered it ‘with thanksgiving, and branches of palm trees and with harps.’[148] And the seers of Scripture saw palms in heaven: ‘A great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds and people, and tongues, stood before the throne and before the Lamb clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands.’[149] ‘These be they that have put off the mortal clothing and put on the immortal, and have confessed the name of God; now are they crowned and receive palms.’[150]

Palms were therefore the meed of martyrdom, the symbol of the martyrs’ victory over death.

‘... The angel said God liketh thy request, And bothe with the palme of martirdome, Ye shallen come unto His blissful rest.’[151]

During the first three centuries of Christianity Christian art concerned itself almost exclusively with the events recounted in the Old and New Testaments and the Apocryphal Gospels. ‘But during the fourth century artists began to represent the acts of the martyrs, at the bidding of Saint Basil, who called to his aid illustrious painters of athletic combats, to paint with resplendent colours the martyr Barlaam, the crowned athlete, whom he found himself unable adequately to describe.... A fresco came to light in 1887, under the Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo on the Celian Hill, which shows three Christians being put to death beneath the rule of Julian the Apostate, kneeling with eyes bound and hands tied behind their backs. This may be considered as the first representation of a martyrdom....’[152]

Sixtus III (432–440), as is shown by the inscription which is read above the principal door of Santa Maria Maggiore, had had the instruments of their martyrdom painted only beneath the feet of the martyrs.

‘Ecce tui testes uteri sibi proemia portant Sub pedibusque jacet passio cuique sua. Ferrum, flamma, ferae, fluvius, sævumque venenum Tot tamen has mortes una corona manet.’[153]

Thus in the fourth century there were representations of martyrdoms, and in the fifth century single figures of the martyrs more or less idealized, but they apparently carried the crown of victory, ‘the crown of their high calling,’ not the palm. But though the crown was generally used, the palm of the primitive Christian Church was not forgotten, for, as Cassiodorus, writing at the beginning of the sixth century, points out, it was palms which, in the eyes of the people, indicated those strong athletes who were victorious, and advocates their use as a religious symbol.

Palms at this period seem to have been used as an emblem of the public games themselves. On the consular diptyches, the double tablets of ivory which a consul had carved to commemorate his entry into office, it was customary to put palms beneath the figure of the consul, among the bags of money and other objects that were supposed to represent the benefits which would accrue to the populace beneath his rule.

It was probably this secular use of the palm which excluded it from the symbolism of the Church during the early centuries, for it is palm trees not palm branches which are found in the early mosaics, notably those of S. Apollinare Nuova in Ravenna, where palm trees alternate with the figures round the frieze, and palm trees, according to St Ambrose, were not the symbol of victory but the emblem of the righteous man, ‘for its roots are upon the earth but its head is lifted towards the heavens.’

But by the thirteenth century the public games had dropped from Italian social life, and religious art reverted once more to the palm branch of the catacombs as the symbol of a martyr’s triumph over death. Durandus, writing about the year 1286, unites the different renderings of the palm’s significance. He says: ‘Martyrs are painted with the instruments of their torture and sometimes with palms, which signify victory, according to that saying:

‘“The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree; as a palm tree flourishes, so his memory shall be preserved.”’[154]

After the Renaissance martyrs were very generally depicted with palms, either in place of, or in addition to, the instruments of their martyrdom. They varied in size and shape, from the tiny closed palm no longer than a human hand, used by Cimabue,[155] to the magnificent pedestal of palm branches on which Carpaccio has set his ‘Saint Ursula in Glory.’[156] Saint Christopher, the giant saint, in consideration of his size, was always allowed a whole palm tree as his staff, but a whole palm tree, or the tiniest scrap of its foliage, carried exactly the same meaning.

The palm is also given occasionally to several saints who have not suffered a violent death, but have been conspicuous for their victory over pain and temptation; for instance, Saint Francis, Saint Catharine of Siena and Saint Clare.

Even in the Catacombs two palms are sometimes placed crossways, not on the tombs of martyrs only, but on other Christian tombs, to signify the victory of the cross. For life as a declared Christian in the early days of the faith was sufficiently difficult and perilous, even if it did not end in death at the hands of the executioner. In the same way the pilgrim who had overcome difficulties and encountered possible death on a journey of piety to the holy sepulchre was permitted to take the name of palmer when he ‘brings home his staff enwreathed with palm.’[157]

Meanwhile palms never fell into disuse as a secular symbol. When they appear on the seals and coins of emperors and kings they indicate entirely worldly power and authority, and it is not in recognition of sainthood that the winged genius presents Henri IV with palm and wreath of laurel in the fine allegorical picture of his ‘Entry into Paris after the Battle of Ivry.’[158]

In a hymn of Saint Augustine, Jesus Christ is designated the ‘Palma bellatorum,’ but, perhaps by reason of its pagan origin, and also because it has never been exclusively a religious symbol, Christ as the conqueror of sin and death is seldom depicted with the palm of victory. In a few devotional Crucifixions palms are placed crossways above the Saviour’s head, and very rarely it is seen in the hand of the newly-risen Christ. He almost invariably carries instead the banner of the Resurrection with a scarlet cross upon a white ground. In one of the rare representations[159] where He holds a palm He holds also the banner in His other hand, and it is striking how the adding of the lesser symbol to the greater, an error the early masters carefully avoided, detracts from the dignity of the figure.

In the four canonical gospels, palms as a symbol are only mentioned once, the occasion being the entry of Jesus Christ ‘riding lowly upon an ass’ into Jerusalem before the feast of the Passover.

‘They ... took branches of palm trees and went forth to meet Him, and cried Hosanna!’

It was a respect paid to a reigning sovereign and would support the accusation of the Jews that He sought to make Himself a king.

The entry into Jerusalem is not an incident in the life of Christ which is used for devotional contemplation, though it occurred usually in the series of scenes from the life of Christ which were frequent in pre-Renaissance art, executed in carved wood, ivory and marble; and in the hands of the villagers of the Mount of Olives the palms signified, of course, simply triumph, for they had not yet gained the full Christian meaning of victory through the Cross.

In representations of the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, the palms are merely a historical detail, but it is a true symbol, in defiance of the probable fact, when the Saviour Himself is represented carrying the palm, as in the _Biblia Pauperum_ of 1440.[160] It is then purely a symbol of His triumph over sin and death.

In this same edition of the _Biblia Pauperum_ the palm is also, strangely enough, placed in the hand of Christ in the Ecce Homo; the ‘reed in His right hand’ set there in mockery, changed to the victor’s palm.

Occasionally the palm is given to the angel Gabriel when he comes from Heaven to announce the Saviour’s approaching birth. ‘Ave’ is his salutation to the Virgin, and in Roman fashion, as in salutation to a queen, he kneels with a lifted palm.

Spinello Aretino paints Gabriel with the palm. In his Annunciation at Arezzo[161] the angel is first seen above, flying with the palm from before God’s throne. Below he kneels, the palm in his hand, before the Virgin. Ambrogio Lorenzetti[162] and others follow the same tradition, but the palm was soon superseded in Siena by the olive and elsewhere by the lily, which was adopted by painters of all nations as the flower of the Annunciation.

The _Legenda Aurea_ of Jacobus de Voragine gives an account of the death and burial of the Virgin. The legend is said to be an invention of the Gnostics, and there is reason to believe of Lencius in the second century.[163]

Shortly before the Virgin’s death the angel Gabriel again appeared to her, and ‘he gave her a branch of palm from Paradise which he commanded should be borne before her bier.’

This branch of palm was clearly the symbol of victory over sin, since she had passed a full lifetime in perfect sinlessness and her surpassing sorrows had entitled her to the reward of martyrdom.

The Legend continues:

‘And the palm shone which he had left behind with great clearness; it was green like a natural branch and its leaves shimmered like the morning star.’ The palm, therefore, is distinguished from the palms of the martyrs by being encircled with stars. A Sienese artist paints seven,[164] the sacred number, corresponding with the Virgin’s sorrows; other artists give twelve, foreshadowing that there should be upon her head ‘a crown of twelve stars.’

Usually, in Italian pictures of the death or ‘Dormition’ of the Virgin, an angel, or Saint John the Evangelist, appears at her bedside carrying the palm. Northern art was almost entirely uninfluenced by the details given by Jacobus de Voragine of the Virgin’s death and burial, and though in Germany ‘The Death of the Virgin’ is a very favourite subject, the palm is never introduced. Saint John frequently, however, holds a lighted taper, and some form of the starry palm tradition may have drifted northwards, for the master of the Sterzing Altar[165] paints a cluster of star-shaped flowers in the hand of Saint John, who bends over the inanimate form of the Virgin.

Her body was carried by divine command to the valley of Jehoshaphat, ‘and John bare the palm branch in front of it.’

This scene, too, belongs to Italian art, and usually makes a beautiful processional group. Saint John, with the privilege of a son, walks before the bier. Duccio di Buoninsegna[166] paints him with the closed narrow palm of a martyr. In the charming little long-shaped picture by Fra Angelico[167] the palm has its fan-shaped leaves spread wide and it shines as if it were of gold.

In the ‘Immaculate Conception’ of the Spanish school one of the attendant _putti_ usually carries a palm. This may be the palm of victory over sin and death, or, following another authority, it may be a symbol of the Immaculate Conception, since it bears fruit at the same moment at which it flowers.[168]

According to Dr Anselm Salzer, O.S.B., ‘The palm, when referring to Mary, is a figure of her victory over the world and its temptations, of her everlasting virtue, of her sovereignty in heaven, of the protection that she offers to mankind, of her triumphant motherhood and of the beauty of her soul.’[169]

XII

THE ACANTHUS

One plant, the acanthus, which was very much used by pre-Renaissance artists, seems to have dropped later from the flora of symbolism.