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. In scenes representing different events in the life of Christ, trees of pomegranates are occasionally introduced. Giovanni di Paolo sets the ‘Nativity’[340] in an orchard of pomegranates, and in a Florentine picture of the fourteenth century[341] the newly-risen Christ is surrounded by palms, pomegranates and flowers. These pomegranates, however, do not seem to be used attributively but merely to give some slight geographical indication. Bethlehem was an Eastern city; the tomb of Christ was in an Eastern garden. The pomegranate is also, theoretically, the emblem of the Virgin. ‘In the symbolism of the cult of Mary, the ripe pomegranate, because of its pleasant fragrance and its numerous seeds, represents her beauty and many virtues, but the gradually-developing fruit refers to her life.’[342] ‘The pomegranate with its crowned top is her as queen, and typifies also hope and fruitfulness, the “Virginitas fecunda” of the octave of Christmas.’[343] Jeremy Taylor, in a beautiful passage, describes Mary as the pomegranate tree and Christ as the fruit. ‘When the Holy Virgin now perceived that the expectation of the nations was arrived at the very doors of revelation and entrance into the world, she brought forth the _Holy Jesus_, who, like light through a transparent glass, past through, or a ripe pomegranate from a fruitful tree, fell to the earth, without doing violence to its nurse and parent.’ In art, however, the pomegranate is very seldom used as the attribute of the Virgin. Occasionally the Florentine masters ornament the Virgin’s throne with knobs which more or less resemble the fruit, and Flemish artists, Memling in particular, place behind her a brocaded panel of the well-known pomegranate design. But these pomegranate knobs were a very usual detail in carved work, and the pomegranate pattern, which still persists, was a standard design of the silk-weavers of France and Italy. The fruit itself is not used by the older masters. Even Crivelli, who lavishes fruit of almost every sort upon his slender, long-figured Madonnas, leaves the pomegranate aside. In modern work, Podesti, in his vast fresco of the Immaculate Conception,[344] has placed a large single pomegranate upon a book arranged prominently in the foreground. It is the symbol, apparently, of the fruitfulness of the Virgin.