But the lilies in these pictures do not refer to the immaculate purity of the Virgin Mother, but represent the souls of ‘angels, confessors and virgins.’ The legends which the _Legenda Aurea_ contains were collected by Jacobus de Voragine during the last half of the thirteenth century, while the lily was still the flower of virgin martyrs and was not yet the Madonna’s lily. He gives the following account of the burial of the Virgin: ‘The Lord commanded the Apostles that they should carry the body into the valley of Jehoshaphat and place it in a new tomb that had been dug there, and watch three days beside it, till He should return. ‘And straightway there surrounded her flowers of roses, which are the blessèd company of martyrs; and lilies of the valley, which are the bands of angels, confessors and virgins.’ But the _Byzantine Guide to Painting_, in the paragraph entitled ‘How to represent the Assumption of the Divine Mother,’ directs that in the lower part of the picture there should be ‘an open and empty tomb.’ There was therefore divergence of opinion, and the Church apparently left the artist free. Jacobus de Voragine seems to have collected the many floating legends of the Virgin, and with that poetic judgment which was the peculiar gift of his generation, to have preserved those forms particularly marked by sweetness or distinction of incident. But some even of his own countrymen apparently preferred the legend in its balder form, for the astonished Apostles surround a bare and empty tomb. Beyond the Alps, where the _Legenda Aurea_ never had much influence, the tomb is almost invariably empty, and indeed all three subjects are rare in the North, though the death of the Virgin is frequently represented. The majority of Italian painters, however, gladly seized the pretty detail, and the Virgin’s tomb is usually flower-filled. But the painters of the high Renaissance did not keep strictly to the symbolism of the legend. There is a beautiful fresco by Sodoma,[266] in which the Virgin, dignified and lovely, ascends from a tomb brimming over with roses, and from among them springs one mystic lily. Raphael,[267] too, gives a single lily rising from among the roses, and both he and Sodoma seem to have adopted the later fashion of considering the lily as exclusively the Virgin Mary’s flower, and instead of serried lilies, representing bands of angels and virgin saints, they paint one only flower, emblem of the Queen of Virgins rising to Heaven attended by the glowing souls of martyrs. Botticelli,[268] on the other hand, has left the roses and painted lilies only, lilies crowded together in such a mass of loveliness that the mourners seem blinded even to the gorgeous bow of angels in the sky and to the greater wonder in the opening heavens high above.