But even before the end of the fifteenth century flowers began to be used for their own sake and not for their hidden meaning. Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Dürer painted just what flower or weed they chose, simply for its form or colour. In the sixteenth century flowers were often used merely as decoration, and later, with the exception of the rose, the lily, the olive branch and the palm, they lost all meaning. Carlo Maratta in the seventeenth century painted a figure of the Virgin[9] encircled by a heavy wreath of every sort of flower--daffodils, gentians, anemones, tulips, edelweiss, roses and lilies, all mixed together. In England, about the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a revival of interest in mystical and symbolical art. The Preraphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848, whose object was to bring back to modern art the sincerity and earnestness of those painters who had preceded Raphael. The originator of the movement, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, adopted in his early work not only the simplicity of type and the exceedingly careful finish of the primitives, but borrowed also their system of symbolism. His followers, however, and in particular Holman Hunt, broke away from the old traditions of religious art, painting allegorical subjects suggested by Christ’s parables and sayings rather than the scenes of His birth and Passion on which the dogmas of the Church were founded, and with the traditional subjects they left aside also the traditional symbols. The greatest of modern English mystical painters, George Frederick Watts, uses flowers as details, and apparently as symbols. But their exact meanings are obscure and apparently not those attributed to them by the great masters of past centuries. [Illustration: THE BADGE OF THE ORDER OF THE LILY OF NAVARRE] [Illustration: _Photo Alinari_ THE FLOWERS OF HEAVEN Mosaic of the 13th century (Baptistry, Florence)] III THE LILY Gioacchino di Fiore, the mystical theologian who founded the community of ‘The Flower,’ and who is held by some to be the spiritual father of Saint Francis, writing in the last decade of the twelfth century, divided the life of humanity into three periods. In the first, during the reign of the Father, men lived under the rule of the law; in the second, reigned over by the Son, men live beneath the rule of grace; in the third the Spirit shall reign and men shall live in the plenitude of love. The first saw the shining of the stars; the second sees the whitening of the dawn; the third will behold the glory of the day. The first produced nettles; the second gives roses; the third will be the age of lilies. Thus as daylight to dawn or starlight, and as love to grace and fear, were lilies to every other flower or weed, and since the twelfth century, in Christian art, lilies have had precedence of every other growing thing.