The symbol of the Flemish painters which particularly appealed to the Spanish was the iris, which grew small and wild upon their own hills, and with a freer, heavier growth in the palace gardens, whose admirable water-works had been planned and executed by the despised Moors. They adopted the iris as the royal lily of the Virgin, the attribute of the Queen of Heaven, as the _lilium candidum_ was the attribute of the Maid of Nazareth. The iris, therefore, was deemed particularly suitable as a detail in that most favourite Spanish devotional representation of the Virgin, an ‘Immaculate Conception.’ The Virgin, represented as the woman ‘clothed with the sun and the moon beneath her feet,’ is usually attended by child angels who carry roses, lilies, palm and olive. The purple iris is generally added, and sometimes the white lily is omitted and the iris only given. The Spaniards, therefore, attached the same idea of royalty to the iris as did the Flemings, but transferred the attributes from the royal Son to the crowned Mother, for in Spain it is not found as the attribute or the emblem of the Infant Christ. Later, the whole Catholic Church seems to have accepted both the iris and the lily, and the mosaic altar-frontals of St Peter’s in Rome bear a design in which the rose, the lily and the iris are united. V THE ROSE Roses, among the Romans, were the symbol of victory, of triumphant love, of the pride and pomp of life, and were by long association as pagan as the lily is sacred. The Madonna lily (_lilium candidum_) was the flower of the Virgin and of the virgin saints; the rose was the flower of Venus. ‘And on hire hed, full semmly for to see A rose gerlond fressh and wel smelling.’[51] In the ‘Triumph of Venus,’ by Cosimo Tura,[52] the goddess, who is in truth a modest-looking lady, fully draped and firmly girdled, wears a crown of roses, red and white. Beneath her cockle-shell is another picture,[53] the sea is ‘sucking in one by one the falling roses, each severe in outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little as Botticelli’s roses always are.’[54]