VIIGARLANDS OF ROSES

‘Letus crown ourselves with rose-buds,’80cried the revellers in the Book of Wisdom, and at Roman feasts host and guests alike wore roses on their hair or in garlands round their necks.

So in the heavenly mansions, where life is a perpetual feast, unfading roses crown the elect. Wreaths of roses are the symbol of heavenly joy and are worn alike by angels and by the human souls who have entered bliss.

An early Christian prisoner dreamt that he was already in Heaven:

‘Towards us ran one of the twin children who, three days before, had been decapitated with their mother. A wreath of vermilion roses encircled his neck and in his right hand he held a green and fresh palm.’81

Beneath Byzantine influence the rosy wreaths turned to crowns of jewels, and in the period between Constantine and Justinian crowns were considered strictly necessary for the guests at the heavenly feasts. But when the King of Heaven Himself was present all reverently uncrowned, and it is with their crowns in their hands that the twelve apostles stand, and the four-and-twenty elders in the mosaics of Rome and Ravenna. In the Neapolitan mosaics in the Chapel of Santa Restituta eight figures, apparently of martyrs, hold large crowns resembling a victor’s wreath, and the graceful virgin saints on the wall of S. Apollinare Nuova each carries her wreath.

The tall, grand angels of the mosaics have neither wreaths nor garlands. They have gained no crown because no strife has ever troubled their serenity. They stand tall and straight, haloed, with spear-like wands in their hands.

After the twelfth century, however, the apostles and martyrs no longer carry the crown of victory, but it is the angels who wear wreaths, usually wreaths of roses, which are the symbolof heavenly joy. And, alas! what a lowering in type there was from the grand, dignified beings who guard the throne of Mary, on the wall of S. Apollinare Nuova, to the childish, peeping, rose-crowned little attendants which crowd behind her chair in pictures of the Sienese, Umbrian and early Florentine schools. The archangels still keep some dignity, but the sweet little doll-like creatures, rose-crowned and golden-winged, of Fra Angelico seem an inadequate representation of the hosts of Heaven.

But a magnificent strong-limbed angel of the Byzantine type would have overshadowed the slight, transparent-fleshed Madonna whose physique showed traces of the asceticism which went towards the making of a saint. So the angels, denied grand and vigorous frames, were decked with dainty robes and crowns of roses. Paul Bourget writes:

‘Ce double et contradictoire Idéal, celui d’une extase monastique conquise dans le martyre des sens et celui d’une beauté qui parle au sens, semble avoir co-existé dans le Péruginet dans les peintres qui l’ont précédé ou accompagné, particulièrement dans Benedetto Bonfigli, dans Eusebio da San Giorgio, dans Giannicola Manni et quelques autres dont la Pinacothèque de Pérouse enferme les œuvres. Ce rêve complexe a son symbole dans les anges de Bonfigli, couronnés de roses, comme les impies dont parle l’Ecriture “Couronnons-nous de roses avant qu’elles ne soient flétries,” comme les convives aussi des banquets paiens “Respirons les roses tant qu’elles ressemblent à tes joues. Embrassons tes joues tant qu’elles ressemblent à tes roses.” Mais ces pauvres anges aux cheveux fleuris tiennent dans leurs mains les instruments de la Passion du Sauveur, et une pitié douloureuse noie de rouge leurs douces prunelles où roulent de grosses larmes.’82

But blissful souls as well as angels wear roses. In the Paradise of Simone Martini,83Saint Peter with his key has opened the gate of Heaven and two angels standing by crown with roses each soul as it enters.

And more particularly those souls are crownedwho in their earthly life could rejoice in their faith even when overwhelmed with troubles. Symbol of holy joy is the crown of roses which Saint Cecilia wears. Her legend, like other legends of the Early Church, is both more poetic and more allegorical than those which originated in later times.

Saint Cecilia lived in virginity with her husband Valerian, who, through love of her, became a Christian and was baptized.

‘And returning home he found Cecilia in her chamber conversing with a glittering angel ... and he held in his hand two crowns of roses and lilies, and he gave one of them to Cecilia and the other to Valerian.

‘And on the morrow, when Tibertius came to salute his sister-in-law Cecilia, he perceived an excellent odour of lilies and roses, and asked her, wondering, whence she had untimely roses in the winter season.’ (That is, whence came her holy joy during the season of persecution.) ‘And Valerian answered that God had sent them crowns of roses and lilies but that he could not see them till his eyes were opened and his body purified’ (by baptism).

Then follows the account of the conversion of Tibertius and the deaths of all three martyrs.

The ‘Second Nonne’ told the legend of the saint very prettily to the Canterbury pilgrims:

‘Thou with thy gerlond wrought of rose and lilieThee, mene I, maid and martir Seint Cecilie.’

‘Thou with thy gerlond wrought of rose and lilie

Thee, mene I, maid and martir Seint Cecilie.’

And her story appears to have been popular, though strangely enough she has never ranked in popularity with Saint Margaret, Saint Catharine of Alexandria, or Saint Barbara, notwithstanding that her story is certainly better authenticated than theirs, the historical details of her martyrdom having been proved beyond dispute. But she is essentially a Roman saint, her body lying in Trastevere on practically the spot where she suffered martyrdom under Marcus Aurelius, and with the strange jealousy of Italian cities she was almost ignored by Siena, Florence and Venice till Raphael, Roman in all his sympathies, painted the fine picture now in Bologna. In this picture, where she appears as the patroness of Music, she has no roses, but Luini84dresses her head charmingly with white roses and anemones.

More fortunate than Saint Cecilia, Saint Dorothea is beloved in almost all Christian countries, for coming from Cappadocia there could be neither vauntings nor heart-burnings on her account in the Christian cities of Europe. She too wears the roses of her legend.

‘Send me then some roses from the Paradise of your Christ,’ scoffed the noble youth, Theophilus, as she passed to execution. At the moment of death an angel appeared with three roses and three apples. ‘Take them to Theophilus,’ said the saint, and Theophilus, believing, died a martyr.85

Saint Dorothea is usually painted with both apples and roses, symbols of the good works of a Christian life and of the holy joy even in the hour of death, which, reported to Theophilus, astonished and finally converted him. She is very popular both in the Low Countries and in Germany. There is a charming triptych at Palermo, the best picture Sicily possesses, attributed usually to Mabuse. On one wing Saint Dorothea is depicted seated on the ground with her lap full of red and white roses, a quaint,compact little figure, not a slender Italian maiden, supported by angelic visions, already half in Heaven, but of the sturdy Flemish type, who, having with clear brain calculated the cost, sets herself with stoicism to endure the pain which would be rewarded by the martyr’s crown of unfading roses.

Curiously enough, the Virgin’s crown is usually of gold and precious stones, though in one of Velasquez’s rare religious pictures, ‘The Coronation of the Virgin,’86God the Father places upon her head a wreath of red and white rose blooms. In the best period of Italian art the Virgin wears no crown except at a ‘Coronation,’ when most often it is of gold. In Germany the crowns are large and heavily jewelled, and in the Netherlands a jewelled fillet was very generally placed upon her hair. A notable and beautiful exception to these fillet-like coronets is the magnificent symbolical crown of jewels and fresh flowers which she wears as Queen of Heaven in Hubert van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the Lamb.’87It was only in late art, that is, after the sixteenth century, that representationsof Mary with the Child in her arms, as Queen of Heaven, or as ‘La Purissima,’ became common. Previously she had been painted as a human mother with the sorrows of her motherhood still upon her. As the mother, the greatest of whose seven sorrows has not yet come, she would not yet carry the rose crown which symbolized joy, even though it were heavenly joy, and by the time religious sentiment demanded representations of Christ’s mother, risen to glory, all sorrow past, the Church had decided to depict her as the woman ‘clothed with the sun and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’

Akin to the wreaths of roses worn by angels and saints are the hedges and rose-trellises of Paradise.

Dante pictures Heaven as one great and marvellous rose-bloom:

‘How wide the leavesExtended to the utmost, of this rose;88...... which in bright expansivenessLays forth its gradual blooming, redolentOf praises to the never wintering sun.’89

‘How wide the leaves

Extended to the utmost, of this rose;88

...... which in bright expansiveness

Lays forth its gradual blooming, redolent

Of praises to the never wintering sun.’89

But the artists of the Church have usually depictedHeaven not as a rose but as a rose-garden; and as a second and more perfect Eden rather than as the Holy City, the stupendous piece of jeweller’s work described in the Revelation of Saint John. A few Flemish and German artists have attempted to realize the jasper wall, the ‘pure gold like unto clear glass,’ and the ‘foundations garnished with all manner of precious stones,’ but for the majority of artists on both sides of the Alps Heaven was a paradise, a garden. The prophet Esdras describes it in detail:

‘Twelve trees laden with divers fruits,

‘And as many fountains flowing with milk and honey, and seven mighty mountains, whereupon there grow roses and lilies.’90

The ByzantineGuide to Painting91directs that Paradise be depicted as ‘surrounded by a wall of crystal and pure gold, adorned with trees filled with bright birds,’ so combining both visions of the home of the blessed.

But Western art usually paints Heaven simply as a garden with twelve or six fruit trees,little fertile mounts, and grass thick with flowers, among which lilies and roses predominate.

The celestial meadow of Hubert van Eyck92has grouped trees as in a park and bushes covered with roses, and there are roses on bushes and trellises, crowns of roses and roses woven into swinging garlands in that most alluring of all painted paradises set by Benozzo Gozzoli upon the walls of the Palazzo Riccardi.93‘Roses and pomegranates, their leaves drawn to the last rib and vein, twine themselves in fair and perfect order about delicate trellises; broad stone-pines and tall cypresses overshadow them; bright birds hover here and there in the serene sky; and groups of angels glide and float through the glades of an entangled forest.’94

It is a paradise after the own heart of a Medici, in which no monotony, no boredom need be apprehended, full of gay and witty folk and the most gorgeous angels that were ever seen.

The roses of Paradise must not be confused with the rose hedge or trellis so often placed behind the Virgin by the early German schools.These hedges indicate the ‘Hortus Conclusus’ and identify the Virgin with the bride of the Canticles by recalling the verse, ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse.’ This enclosure is sometimes fenced merely by a row of flowers, sometimes by a fortress-wall, and is often an elaborate garden. An early instance by a master of the Middle Rhine,95dating from about 1420, gives eighteen recognizable species of flowers and ten varieties of birds. The Madonna sits reading beneath a tree. One saint gathers cherries and another draws water from a fountain. Saint George, Saint Michael and a young man chat beneath a tree, and a pretty young saint with flowers in her hair teaches the little Christ to play the psaltery. Other gardens contain no flowers but the various objects used as similes of the Virgin—the Tower of Ivory, the Closed Door, the Sealed Fountain, etc. Very often there is merely a trellis with roses climbing up it, and the flowers which express the virtues of Mary, the lily, violet and strawberry, grow at her feet. The thorns on the roses are carefully drawn, even accentuated, illustratingthe verse, ‘As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters;’96but in spite of the thorns the general significance of these roses also is joy and delight.

In the Netherlands, where theologians occupied themselves less with this second chapter of the Song of Solomon, Madonnas seten plein airare scarcely found. The van Eycks and Memling inaugurated the fashion of arranging their devotional groups in chapel-like niches, or in the aisle of some large church. Any garden there is seen in glimpses between pillars or through windows, and has no mystical meaning.

Stefano da ZevioPhoto AndersonTHE ‘ENCLOSED GARDEN’ OF THE VIRGIN(Royal Museum, Verona)

Stefano da Zevio

Photo Anderson

THE ‘ENCLOSED GARDEN’ OF THE VIRGIN

(Royal Museum, Verona)

In the work of Botticelli and his school we again see enclosed gardens of roses, but these are rather gardens of adoration, for in the centre the Virgin kneels before the divine Infant. As in all Adorations the symbolism refers to the Child, and these roses symbolize the Divine Love which sent Him to this earth, and are not the attributes of Mary or an indication of the joy in Heaven. A truehortus conclususof Italian origin is that of Stefano da Zevio orda Verona.97The Virgin, with the Child upon her knee, sits upon the ground in a carefully walled in garden, of which the only other human occupant is Saint Catharine, who strings a crown of roses. The garden is full of birds and bird-like angels, and in one corner is the ‘sealed fountain’ of the Canticles.

As a general rule, roses massed together, in garlands, in baskets, or thickly growing, are the symbols of heavenly joys, and single roses are the symbols of divine love. But there is one single rose which is also the symbol of joy—it is the golden rose which is the gift of the Popes. Durandus writes: ‘So also on the Sunday, Lœtare Jerusalem, the Roman Pontiff beareth a mitre, beautified with the orfrey, on account of the joy which the golden rose signifieth, but on account of the time being one of sadness, he weareth black vestments.98

‘St Leon is seen upon thechâsseof Charlemagne99with the golden rose in his right hand. The golden rose being the image of Heaven, according to the Liturgy, it became, in the handsof the Pope, the equivalent of a benediction. One remarks that, in the epoch of which we speak, the very poetical rite of the golden rose, most ancient in the Church, had just acquired a new celebrity. The sending of the symbolical flower had replaced, in the Roman court, that of the keys of confession, and Innocent III had just consecrated a discourse to explain its mysterious signification.’100

The sending of the golden rose was a very old custom, dating at least from the time of Gregory the Great. The rose was solemnly blessed by the Pope on the fourth Sunday in Lent and sent by him to some sovereign, church or community. Urban V first made the ceremony annual about 1366.

This rose, symbol of the Church’s blessing, was often a thing of beauty and fine workmanship. Stefano del Cambio describes that one which was sent in his time to Florence.

‘On Easter Sunday morning, the 2nd of April 1419, Pope Martin V, after having performed Mass, gave the golden rose to our magnificent Signoria, in remembrance of the honourspaid him by the Florentine people.... Our Signoria then returned to their palace with all the court of Cardinals and Prelates and the afore-said rose bush, which was a golden branch with leaves of fine gold. On it were nine roses, and a little bud on top of the nine, which contained spices, myrrh and balsam.’101

Sometimes the ‘rose’ was a whole rose bush about two feet high and covered with leaves and flowers. Two such bushes, one thornless, the gift of Pope Alexander VII, and the other, with long sharp thorns, though curved harmlessly downward, presented by Pius II, are still treasured by grateful Siena.

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