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, though there 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 suited to 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,’[351] finding 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,’[353] they are no more a symbol than is the carpet beneath her feet, for an almost identical wreath, held in place by the same small _putti_, is above the throne in Gerard David’s ‘Judgment of Cambyses,’[354] while one which is very similar hangs above the enthroned ‘Emperor Sigis mondo,’[355] incised 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. [Illustration: _The Sacred Heart (19th Century--German)_]