In 1475 the ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ by Hugo van der Goes was brought to Florence by Tommaso Portinari, for the Chapel of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Its technique excited the greatest interest among the artists of Italy, and the vase of columbine in the foreground may have first drawn their attention to this symbol. Cosimo Rosselli, perhaps the last of the Florentine symbolists, painted it among the daisies, strawberries and jasmine-shaped flower in the ‘Madonna with the Child and SS. Peter and James,’[108] commissioned in 1492. After the fifteenth century it is fairly frequent in Italian art. Two of the most charming of the Madonna pictures now in the Brera, ‘The Virgin and Child with the Lamb,’ by Sodoma, and ‘The Virgin of the Rose-hedge,’ by Luini, both introduce the columbine. But the Italian artists use it vaguely, as the flower of the dove, the flower in some degree sacred to the Holy Ghost, and lost sight of the original connection with the seven Gifts of the Spirit. Luini, who is careless with his symbolism, though painting flowers exquisitely, uses the columbine also as an accessory in the famous portrait known as ‘La Colombina,’[109] but here, of course, it is simply a graceful flower in the hand of a fine woman. It is most unusual to find any flower used symbolically in scenes representing the Passion of our Lord. Should plants or shrubs be there, it is merely as an indication that the place of Crucifixion was beyond the walls, and that the place of burial was a garden. They have no special meanings as symbols. An exception is the ‘Entombment’[110] of Hans Schüchlin of Ulm. From a rock in the foreground springs a plant of columbine with three drooping flowers. On a smaller plant at the side are four more blossoms, making up the mystic seven. There are only these columbines and a little short grass. On the step of the tomb lies the crown of thorns which has fallen from the head of the dead Saviour as the disciples lower His body to the grave. The seven blooms of the columbine appear again in the Thomas-altar[111] by the master of the Bartholomew-altar, who painted during the first twenty years of the sixteenth century. It is a disagreeable picture, the types poor and the action of the doubting Thomas, as he thrusts his hand into the Saviour’s wound, distinctly brutal. But all round the feet of the risen Saviour lie flowers scattered on the broad stone step. There are again the seven heads of the columbine, snapped off short and showing scarcely any stalk; there are the violets of humility and the daisy, often seen with the violet as the symbol of perfect innocence in Adorations of the Infant Christ, but rare when He is represented as a grown man. There is also the strawberry flower but not the fruit. After the sixteenth century the columbine seems to have dropped from Christian symbolism, and in modern religious art it has no place. IX THE OLIVE