But on the whole the olive is an Italian, and more particularly a Sienese, symbol, though Botticelli also loved the silvery leaves. In his magnificent ‘Pallas taming the Centaur,’[135] painted for Lorenzo de’ Medici, to commemorate his diplomatic victory over the King of Naples and the League in 1480, olive encircles the head of the lovely goddess and is wreathed about her dress. The surface meaning of the picture is that, by the arts of peace taught them by the beneficent goddess, men were enabled to overcome the savagery of nature, typified by the centaur. But it also shows, allegorically, how the wise statesmanship of Lorenzo (with whose badge, rings interlaced, the gown of Pallas is ‘semé’) guided the war-loving League, here figured as the centaur, into the ways of Peace. X THORNS Thorns and thorn branches signify in general grief and tribulation, the word tribulation itself being derived from a Latin root signifying thistles or briars. But, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, thorn bushes signify the minor sins, and growing briars or brambles those greater ones, ‘quæ pungunt conscientiam propriam,’ etc. He is supported in his opinion by Saint Anselm, and both saints explain in this sense the words of Saint Paul, who wrote to the Hebrews: ‘That which beareth thorns and briars is rejected and is nigh unto cursing, whose end is to be burned.’ The crown of thorns with which jesting soldiers crowned the Christ was in itself an emblem, or at least a parody, of an emperor’s festal rose-crown. According to _The History of the Crown of Thorns of the Holy One_,[136] the first crown with which Jesus Christ was crowned was made of white-thorn and was removed before the Crucifixion and replaced by a second _de juncis marinis_. But in the great majority of scenes from the Passion the crown is merely formed of large thorns without any attempt to realize any particular natural growth. In Germany, where Entombments and Pietàs were more often painted than in other countries, the crown is frequently green, in allusion, it is suggested, to the words: ‘If these things be done in the green wood, what shall be done in the dry?’ In these pictures the crown of thorns, if not still upon the Saviour’s head, is usually placed very prominently in the foreground, marking to some extent the divinity of the dead Christ, for, since life had fled, there could be no halo. In Northern art the crown of thorns remains always unchanged, the symbol of Christ’s sufferings, but in at least one Italian Pietà,[137] the dry prickles round the dead Christ’s brow have bloomed with delicate white briar-roses--an exquisite figure of Love’s triumph over Pain. Sometimes, in pathetic forecast, the Child Christ has the crown of thorns hung on His tiny wrist[138] or plays with it as with a toy, and in a very charming picture,[139] with less poignant and more pleasing symbolism, a waiting child-angel stands by with a wreath of the blue sea-holly.