The most characteristic treatment of the lily, as the lily of the Annunciation, was to place it in a pot or vase. About the year 1291, Cavallini, the mosaicist, was in Rome decorating the Church of S. Maria in Trastevere, and beneath the great centre mosaic of the apse he placed a series of scenes from the life of the Virgin. In the Annunciation the Virgin is seated on a marble throne, which has broad, table-like arms. On one arm there is a dish, apparently of fruit, and on the other a vase filled with lilies. The vase may or may not have been placed there definitely as a symbol, but as a detail--in vulgar English phraseology--it caught on. We find it on the famous carved candlestick of Gaeta,[189] worked by an unknown contemporary of Niccola d’Apulia. It appears on an embroidered book-cover of English work[190] attributed to the end of the thirteenth century, and is cleverly squared out of the chequered background of a Netherlandish music-book[191] of 1330. The vase of lilies soon became a more or less elaborate detail in numerous illuminations, carvings and paintings. The earliest of the Flemish masters, Jan van Eyck,[192] Roger van der Weyden[193] and the Master of Flémalle,[194] make use of it. It was particularly popular in Florence. The Florentines loved the Annunciation as a subject and were charmed by the easy, graceful symbolism of the lilies. They were also, doubtless, deeply gratified, as citizens and as churchmen, to identify the lily, their city’s badge, as the flower of the Virgin. In Spain, even before there was any native school of painting, the vase of lilies passed from being a detail to be an almost essential factor in every representation of the Annunciation, and early in the fifteenth century we find it standing detached as the special and distinguishing attribute of the Virgin. In the insignia of the Order of the Lily of Aragon, founded in 1410 by Ferdinand, Duke of Pegnafiel, the chain was composed of alternate griffins and pots of three lilies, and Ford mentions that when the Regent Fernando recovered Antequera from the Moors he gave the city for arms the badge of his military order, which was _La Terraza_, ‘the vase,’ the pot of lilies of the Virgin.[195] The symbol of the vase had come to the Netherlands and Germany while they were still pictorially inarticulate; but when they at length found means of expression, the Germans slowly, the Flemings in a splendid burst with the van Eycks, it was their earliest and their favourite symbol. Memling places it also beside his enthroned Madonnas, and it is never omitted from an Annunciation except on the occasions, comparatively rare in the North, when Gabriel holds a branch of lilies in his hand instead of the herald’s wand. Then there is no vase, for there is no necessity to repeat the symbol.