He spoke plainly to the painters from his pulpit. The beauty of the Divinity, of the Virgin and the Saints was the beauty of holiness, not of outward adornment of fine raiment, gold and jewels, and ‘the beauty of man or woman in so far as it approaches to the primal beauty, so is it great and more perfect.’[227] We read of the Virgin that by her great beauty the men who saw her were astonished (stupefatti). ... ‘Do you believe that she went about in the manner in which you paint her? I say to you that she went dressed as a poor woman!’[228] But he who taught for choice beneath the damask rose in the centre of his cloister admitted roses and lilies where he denounced rubies and pearls. Flowers alone survived as emblems or as votive decoration even after the puritanical current towards the ideal set in motion by the great Dominican became merged in the over-sweeping wave of classicism--and even those late artists who dispensed with every other convention for the expression of the abstract, placed a lily in the angel Gabriel’s hand. Modern art has adopted the tradition and in the ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ of Rossetti[229] the wingless angel carries a stalk of lilies. There is also a white lily embroidered upon the strip of material which is stretched upon an embroidery frame at the foot of Mary’s bed. The angel brings the lily to the Virgin in recognition of her perfect purity, the transcendent quality by which alone she found favour with God. Through it tremendous honour came upon her, and by the marvellous nature of that honour she was eternally bound to her virginity. ‘Mary Virgin, ever a Virgin.’ In a very charming picture by Filippo Lippi,[230] Mary, with bent head, and fully understanding the grave significance of the gift, reverently accepts the lily which the angel Gabriel places in her hand. In another Annunciation by Filippo Lippi,[231] a second angel, peeping through the entry behind Gabriel, also carries a lily, but it is a fancy which seems to have no particular significance and rather impairs the dignity of the subject. So constantly did painters and sculptors of the Annunciation place a lily in the archangel Gabriel’s hand that it gradually became his special attribute, which he wore, as a knight did his crest, to distinguish him from other angels and archangels.