XXIVFRUIT IN GARLANDS
Fruitin general signifies ‘the fruits of the Spirit—joy, peace and love.’ And therefore the painters of Northern Italy wove peach and plum, apples and grapes into heavy garlands, which they looped above the place where the Holy Child sat enthroned upon His mother’s knee, or they laid fresh, ripe fruit upon the step where the Virgin’s feet were resting.
The wreath of fruit, when festooned behind or below a saint, was more particularly a symbol of the good works of the righteous; when looped above his head, it is a festal wreath equalling the victor’s crown. Such a wreath is that of mingled fruit and flowers above the head of Mantegna’s ‘Triumphant Saint George.’348
But the fruit in many of the devotional pictures of the earlier Venetian masters wouldseem, like the rose gardens of Florence, to be partly votive. They wished to give of their best, and the cool fruit which came in high-piled boats to the gardenless city among the lagoons seemed infinitely precious to them—more precious, for they were a practical race of traders, than the fragile blossoms of ephemeral flowers. Besides, except for pinks, which, judging from various pictures, grew then as now in pots along the balconies, flowers to serve as models were rare in Venice.
Garlands of fruit, excellently modelled but somewhat wanting in softness and bloom, are especially remarkable in the work of the pupils of Squarcione, who taught in Padua during the last half of the fifteenth century. This famous School of Art is known to have been well furnished with ancient marbles of Greek and Roman origin, and it is to be supposed that there the pupils acquired a love for the classical festooned wreath. Mantegna’s wreaths, and those in the earlier work of Crivelli, are firmly bound and formal. But later, Crivelli laid classicism aside, painting fruit with a freedom and profusion which is quite his own, thoughthere is ever the feeling that it is sculptured and coloured stone, not soft and perfumed fruit-flesh. He, in one picture, paints fruit decoratively, bound with its foliage into a sort of bower for the Virgin, places it symbolically in the hand of the Infant Christ, and also lays it as a votive offering at the Virgin’s feet.349
In a picture by Giorgio Schiavone, another pupil of Squarcione, odd little angels offer dishes of fruit to the Infant Christ.350
But, except in Northern Italy, fruit in garlands was more used in decoration than in devotional pictures. Magnificent wreaths of carved stone fruit and foliage droop on either side of the great circular windows of Siena Cathedral; there are heavy painted wreaths of it beneath the figures of the Apostles in the chapel of the Vatican decorated by Fra Angelico; and the Della Robbias enclosed some of their most lovely works, with apples, pears, lemons, pine-cones and pomegranates, growing stiffly and beautifully into a symmetrical border. Fruit-forms were, indeed, infinitely better suitedto the Della Robbia medium than were the delicate petals of flowers.
The Florentines, too, often placed their Madonnas in elaborate wooden frames of carved and gilded fruit—remembering perhaps the epithet of Saint Bernard, who styled the Virgin Mary ‘the sublime fruit of the earth,’351finding in her the fulfilment of the prophecy:
‘In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely.’352
But many of these garlands of fruit, or of mixed fruit and flowers, are entirely decorative with no hidden meaning. They were a very usual festal decoration in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and when swung above the head of Memling’s ‘Enthroned Madonna,’353they are no more a symbol than is the carpet beneath her feet, for an almost identical wreath, held in place by the same smallputti, is above the throne in Gerard David’s ‘Judgment of Cambyses,’354while one which is very similarhangs above the enthroned ‘Emperor Sigis mondo,’355incised upon the pavement of Siena Cathedral. These wreaths distinguish the throne as being more than an ordinary seat, but, beyond vaguely indicating pomp and splendour, they have no special meaning.
The Sacred Heart (19th Century—German)
The Sacred Heart (19th Century—German)