Except as the forbidden fruit the fig is not found in Italian or Flemish ecclesiastical art, but in Germany there appears to have been no prejudice against it. It is painted frequently in the Madonna pictures. A small fig-tree overshadows the cot of the Infant Christ in a picture by Matthias Grünewald;[323] Hans Burgkmair[324] paints it with the rose, the iris, the columbine and other attributes of the Virgin; Hans Holbein[325] the Younger sets his Saint Ursula against a fig-tree; and it is the only growing thing introduced in his best-known work, the beautiful Madonna of the Bürgomeister Meyer.[326] These fig-trees, unlike the barren fig-tree of Scripture, always bear fruit and appear to be the symbols of a holy life rich with the fruits of the Spirit. XXI THE GOURD In the works of Crivelli, who painted in the cities of the Marches between 1468 and 1493, the apple repeatedly occurs with a gourd laid close beside it. In the ‘Annunciation’[327] they are together upon the foreground’s edge. In ‘The Infant Christ giving the Keys to Saint Peter’[328] the apple lies on the ground and the gourd is suspended on the right hand of the throne. In the triptych in the Brera they hang forward prominently from the wreath above the Madonna’s head. They are again suspended, singly, each side of the head of Saint Giacomo della Marca[329] (sometimes taken to be Saint Bernadine), toning with the colour scheme, which has all the subdued richness of old Cordova leather; and exactly the same apple and gourd lie on a ledge before the ‘Madonna with the Child’ by Francia,[330] and have the identical position in an ‘Enthroned Madonna’ by Lorenzo da San Severino.[331] As the grouping of these two fruits is so insistently repeated there is reason to think that it was no chance arrangement. The painter seems to attach some definite meaning to their juxtaposition, and since not Crivelli only, but also Francia and Lorenzo da San Severino, place them together, and well forward in the picture where the eye cannot miss them, they are apparently recognized symbols, not the whim of a single painter.