Curiously enough, the Virgin’s crown is usually of gold and precious stones, though in one of Velasquez’s rare religious pictures, ‘The Coronation of the Virgin,’[86] God the Father places upon her head a wreath of red and white rose blooms. In the best period of Italian art the Virgin wears no crown except at a ‘Coronation,’ when most often it is of gold. In Germany the crowns are large and heavily jewelled, and in the Netherlands a jewelled fillet was very generally placed upon her hair. A notable and beautiful exception to these fillet-like coronets is the magnificent symbolical crown of jewels and fresh flowers which she wears as Queen of Heaven in Hubert van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the Lamb.’[87] It was only in late art, that is, after the sixteenth century, that representations of Mary with the Child in her arms, as Queen of Heaven, or as ‘La Purissima,’ became common. Previously she had been painted as a human mother with the sorrows of her motherhood still upon her. As the mother, the greatest of whose seven sorrows has not yet come, she would not yet carry the rose crown which symbolized joy, even though it were heavenly joy, and by the time religious sentiment demanded representations of Christ’s mother, risen to glory, all sorrow past, the Church had decided to depict her as the woman ‘clothed with the sun and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’ Akin to the wreaths of roses worn by angels and saints are the hedges and rose-trellises of Paradise. Dante pictures Heaven as one great and marvellous rose-bloom: ‘How wide the leaves Extended to the utmost, of this rose;[88] ...... which in bright expansiveness Lays forth its gradual blooming, redolent Of praises to the never wintering sun.’[89] But the artists of the Church have usually depicted Heaven not as a rose but as a rose-garden; and as a second and more perfect Eden rather than as the Holy City, the stupendous piece of jeweller’s work described in the Revelation of Saint John. A few Flemish and German artists have attempted to realize the jasper wall, the ‘pure gold like unto clear glass,’ and the ‘foundations garnished with all manner of precious stones,’ but for the majority of artists on both sides of the Alps Heaven was a paradise, a garden. The prophet Esdras describes it in detail: ‘Twelve trees laden with divers fruits, ‘And as many fountains flowing with milk and honey, and seven mighty mountains, whereupon there grow roses and lilies.’[90] The Byzantine _Guide to Painting_[91] directs that Paradise be depicted as ‘surrounded by a wall of crystal and pure gold, adorned with trees filled with bright birds,’ so combining both visions of the home of the blessed. But Western art usually paints Heaven simply as a garden with twelve or six fruit trees, little fertile mounts, and grass thick with flowers, among which lilies and roses predominate.