Northern art, though realistic, was very placid, and, except in scenes from the Passion, quite unmarked by the sometimes painful pathos of the Italian and Spanish schools. In the Madonna pictures the only faint reminder of the tragedy for which the Child was born into the world is the rosy-cheeked apple in the tiny hand. The mother is satisfied and untroubled, the Child smiling happily, and an apple is a natural, pleasant thing to place within a baby’s hand. Rubens painted a delightful ‘Holy Family beneath an Apple Tree’[317]--a little scene of idyllic happiness; and scarcely noticeable is the pathetic suggestion of the branch of apples which Zacharias holds towards the little Christ. The shifting of theological and artistic standpoints at the Reformation in no way disturbed the Northern love of Old Testament analogies or the affection for this particular symbol, and in Germany one of its most charming developments was the Christmas tree, the evergreen tree laden with golden and silver apples, set up in every home to commemorate the birth of Christ. It is the Tree of Eden, which Christ by His birth and death transmuted into a tree of Paradise. The apple is the most usual fruit in the hand of the Infant Christ, but some Flemish painters of the early sixteenth century give Him grapes instead. The grapes symbolize the divine blood by which souls lost through Adam’s fall are redeemed. Gerard David[318] puts a cluster of white grapes in the tiny hand; Lucas van Leyden[319] white grapes also with leaves and tendrils; and in another picture Lucas van Leyden[320] places the apple and the grapes together upon the broad ledge in the foreground. In this last there is the same idea of exchange which is found more clearly expressed in the picture by Mabuse at Berlin. This substitution of the fruit of the vine for the apple of Eden seems only to be found in the Netherlands. In a very beautiful picture by Botticelli, the grapes held by the angel have a simpler meaning. They, with the corn, are the direct emblems of the body and the blood of the Saviour, and foretell the coming sacrifice of His death; the symbolism is identical with that of the embroidered vine-leaves and wheat-ears of so many modern altar frontals.[321] Very often, as upon the façade of Orvieto Cathedral, the fig-tree is taken as the Tree of Temptation, for, it might be argued, our first parents would take to make themselves garments the leaves of the tree nearest to their hand, the leaves of that same tree of whose fruit they had just eaten. ‘It is possible that the erotic significance which the fig had among the ancients was also considered in this connection,’[322] and it is probably because of its classical associations that the fig was never placed in the hand of the Infant Saviour.