The forget-me-not’s associations with love and remembrance date to the Middle Ages, and were expressed in both the Old French and Middle High German names for this pretty little flower. Left: a pot of forget-me-nots on the parapet in Bonnefont garden. Photograph by Carly Still; Right: a young woman making a chaplet of forget-me-nots on the reverse of a portrait of a young man painted by Han Suess von Kulmbach. The legend on the banderole implores that she not forget her lover. See Collections for more information about this work of art.

A medieval symbol of love and remembrance that still decorated many a Victorian valentine, the forget-me-not (Myosotis scorpioides) was already known as ne m’oubliez mye in Old French and as vergiz min niht in Middle High German. The etymological and iconographic evidence for the forget-me-not’s medieval significance is ample, but the frequently repeated story of a German knight who tossed the forget-me-nots he had picked for his lady to her as he drowned, imploring her to remember him, is of the “as legend has it” variety. Margaret Freeman, who cites the use of forget-me-not as a token of steadfastness by several fifteenth-century German love poets, speculates that the color blue, associated with fidelity in the Middle Ages, may have contributed to the flower’s meaning.

The forget-me-not was depicted with some frequency in fifteenth-century art, in both secular and religious contexts, and appears in the works of Rogier van der Weyden, Stefan Lochner, Vittore Carpaccio, and Luca Signorelli. The exiled Lancastrian Henry Bolingbroke adopted the forget-me-not as his personal emblem, retaining it when he gained the throne of England as Henry IV.

The specific name scorpioides, i.e., “scorpion-like,” was given to the plant as early as the sixteenth century because the coiled inflorescence suggests the curving tail of a scorpion. The pale pink buds turn blue as the flower opens, indicating that the plant belongs to the borage family (for another member of the borage family, see “Lungwort,” April 28, 2013). Photograph by Carly Still

The flower came to be called “forget-me-not” in English, but not before the mid-sixteenth century, when it was borrowed from the Old French. The herbalist John Gerard gave no vernacular name for the plant known to him as Myosotis scorpioides, but designated it by the book name “scorpion grass,” shared with another Mediterranean species in the bean family (Scorpiurus sulcatus), whose coiled pods resembled a scorpion’s tail (see image). (This “scorpiurus” was identified with the “skorpioides” of Dioscorides, recommended for the scorpion-smitten; De Materia Medica, Book IV, 195.)

The curved cymes of the boraginaceous forget-me-not were similarly suggestive, and the same name was applied. (The Greek botanical name of this genus of some fifty species means “mouse ear” and refers to the shape of the leaf. Myosotis scorpioides is also known as M. palustris, or swamp forget-me-not, because of its preference for wet places.)

Forget-me-nots seem to have had a purely symbolic significance; Hildegard of Bingen deems them neither hot nor cold, having no medicinal or other use, and doing more harm than good if eaten (Physica, CXXIV).

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Behling, Lottlisa. Die Planze in der Mittelalterlichen Tafelmalerei. Weimar: H. Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1957.

Freeman, Margaret B. The Unicorn Tapestries. New York: E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1956.

Grigson, Geoffrey. The Englishman’s Flora. 1955. Reprint: London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987.

Levi D’Ancona, Mirella. The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting. Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1977.

Throop, Priscilla, transl. Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998.

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This pretty yellow flower, gathered since the Middle Ages when “bringing in the May,” was known in Middle English by various names, including primerose, primerole, and cowslyppe. Photograph by Carly Still

Primula veris, literally the “first little one of spring,” was known in Middle English as prymerole and as prymerose, or “the first rose.” It was also known as cowslip, a name thought to be derived from “cow slop” or dung, perhaps because it grew in meadows and pastures where cattle grazed. The names prymerole and prymerose came from the Latin through Old French, and were shared with the cowslip’s relative, the common primrose (Primula vulgaris). As Geoffrey Grigson notes in his fascinating compendium of plant lore, The Englishman’s Flora, it can be very difficult to distinguish which of the two species is meant in early sources. Renaissance plantsmen like William Turner, John Gerard, and John Parkinson tried to clarify the confusion caused by the shared common names; as late as the eighteenth century, the great Swedish naturalist and taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus considered the cowslip, the common primrose, and the oxlip (Primula elatior; see image) to be forms of the same species.

In the last two stanzas of his early poem “The Court of Love,” Geoffrey Chaucer describes a May Day outing to the greenwood to gather green branches and fresh flowers, and the primrose is among them. The cowslip’s career as a celebratory May flower outlasted the Middle Ages: cowslips are among the flowers used to deck the Maypole in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native; and, for those we who have the good luck “to live in a cowslip country,” Gertrude Jekyll’s 1908 book Children and Gardens gave instructions for making a cowslip ball, or “tissty-tosstie,” to “bring in the May.” (For more on “bringing in the May,” see my earlier post “As I Went Out on a May Morning,” May 1, 2009). Unlike some other May-blooming plants that opened when the cuckoo sang and were linked both with sexuality and death in the Middle Ages (cuckoo-pint and early purple orchis are two examples), the cheerful, yellow-flowering cowslip seems to have been wholly positive in its associations. (For more on “cuckoo plants,” see “Adam and Eve and Arum,” May 22, 2009.) A fairy flower in Shakespeare, cowslips are invoked in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, Scene I) and in The Tempest (Act V, Scene I; multiple renderings of Ariel’s famous song have been compiled by LibriVox.)

Cowslips are as well represented in art as in literature, and are one of the spring flowers that carpet the garden floor in the famous fifteenth-century Little Garden of Paradise painted by the Upper Rhenish Master (Städel Museum). Jean Bourdichon portrayed both primroses and cowslips in the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, but the most famous rendering is probably Albrecht Dürer’s study The Tuft of Cowslips (National Gallery of Art), painted in 1526.

The Noble Boke off Cookry gives a recipe for a sweet pottage made of primerole and ground almonds; the flowerbuds were eaten in salads, and the young leaves boiled as a potherb. Cowslip also had medicinal virtues, against spiritual as well as physical ills. Hildegard of Bingen’s use of the name hymelsloszel, or “keys of heaven,” indicates that she is referring specifically to Primula veris: the fancied resemblance of the hanging flowers to a bunch of keys had pagan and Christian forms; once associated with the Norse goddess Freya, they came to be linked with the Virgin and Saint Peter:

Primrose (hymelsloszel) is hot. All its vital energy is from the sharpness of the sun. Now, certain plants are strengthened by the sun, others by the moon, and certain others by the sun and moon together. But this plant takes its strength especially from the power of the sun, whence it checks melancholy. When melancholy rises in a person, it makes him sad and agitated in his moods. It makes him pour forth words against God. Airy spirits notice this, and rush to him, and by their persuasion turn him toward insanity. This person should place primrose on his flesh, near his heart, until it warms him up. The airy spirits dread the primrose’s sun-given power and will cease their torment.

—Physica, Book CCIX

According to the fifteenth-century herbal Hortus Sanitatis, cowslips were warming and drying in action, and were good for headache and catarrh. Oil of primrose rejuvenated the elderly and alleviated sufferings associated with the pains and cold of winter. When given in wine or dropped in the ears, this oil was good for palsy, and restored the faculties of those paralyzed by apoplexy. The nodding flower heads of the cowslip were a sign of its usefulness against trembling of the limbs, as the freckled throats of the flowers were an indication of its efficacy in removing spots and pimples from the skin.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Anderson, Frank J., ed. “Herbals through 1500,” The Illustrated Bartsch, Vol. 90. New York: Abaris, 1984.

Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Freeman, Margaret B. Herbs for the Medieval Household. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997

Grieve, Maude. A Modern Herbal. 1931. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1971.

Grigson, Geoffrey. The Englishman’s Flora. 1955. Reprint: London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987.

Throop, Priscilla, transl. Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998.

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Cowslips of Jerusalem, or the true and right Lungwoorte, hath rough, hairie, & large leaves, of a browne greene colour, confusedly spotted with divers spots or droppes of white: amongst which spring up certain stalks, a span long, bearing at the top many fine flowers, growing together like the flowers of cowslips, saving that they be at the first red or purple, and sometimes blewe, and oftentimes of all these colours at once.

—John Gerard, The Herball, or General Historie of Plants, 1597

The common lungwort or pulmonaria, growing under one of the veteran quince trees in Bonnefont garden. Native to central Europe, but widely naturalized, the early blooming lungwort is a denizen of damp, deciduous woodlands and hedgerows. The characteristic silvery-white spots scattered on its leaves were a sign of its medicinal value in treating lung complaints. Lungwort was already a common garden plant by the sixteenth century and many ornamental cultivated forms are now grown. Photograph by Carly Still

The reputation of lungwort is not as ancient as that of some other medieval medicinal herbs. No mention is made of pulmonaria in the De Materia Medica of Dioscorides; Jerry Stannard, an authority on the medieval pharmacopeia, identifies the consiligo described by the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder as Pulmonaria officinalis, although others have conjectured that it was a species of hellebore. According to Pliny, roots of this herb had only recently been discovered in medicinal use among the Marsi, an ancient Italic tribe. Pliny notes that consiligo is beneficial in grave cases of tuberculosis, and is a sovereign remedy for lung trouble in livestock, even when simply placed across the animal’s ear (Historia Naturalis, XXVI.38). The characteristic spotted leaves and variable flowers of pulmonaria are beautifully depicted under that name in the Erbolario Bergamense, compiled by Master Antonio Guarnerio of Padua in 1441. The University of Padua was a center for the study of medicinal herbs, and the Orto Botanico, the first botanical garden in Europe, was established there in 1545.

Among other Latin names, pulmonaria was known in the Middle Ages as pulmo lupi, “wolf’s lung,” and lac benedictae virginis. The poetic notion that the milk of the Virgin had fallen on the leaves and spotted them white was applied to another medieval herb with mottled foliage, the milk thistle, Silybum marianum. Also called cowslips of Jerusalem or Jerusalem sage, lungwort had many local English names, such as “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” or “Josephs and Maries,” derived from the differently colored flowers found blooming on a single plant. (For more on milk thistle, see “Another Thistle,” July 26, 2008.)

The twelfth-century authoress of the Physica, Hildegard of Bingen, knew the plant as lunckwurcz:

Lungwort is cold and a bit dry and not much use to anyone. Nevertheless, one whose lung is swollen so that he coughs and can hardly draw a breath should cook lungwort in wine, and drink it frequently, on an empty stomach. He will become well.

—Physica, XXIX

Observing that sheep that feed on lungwort grow fat and healthy, without harm to their milk, Hildegarde avers that lungwort returns afflicted lungs to health because the lung has the nature of a sheep! (For more on Hildegard, see “Mutter Natur,” October 15, 2010.)

A member of the borage family, lungwort has the hairy leaves and variable flower color characteristic of the Boraginaceae. Photographs by Esme Webb

Like the coltsfoot that was the subject of my last post, lungwort’s relatives borage and comfrey contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids that are damaging to human liver tissue; there seems to be some question as to the presence of these alkaloids in Pulmonaria officinalis.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Grigson, Geoffrey. The Englishman’s Flora. 1955. Reprint: London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987.

Pliny. Natural History, Vol. VII, Books XXIV–XXVII. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1956, reprinted 1966, revised 1980.

Stannard, Jerry. Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany. Ed. Katherine Stannard and Richard Kay. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999.

Throop, Priscilla, transl. Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998.

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Coltsfoot blooming in a pot in Bonnefont garden. The scaly stems and bright yellow blossoms of this early-spring-blooming member of the daisy family emerge well before the foliage; the hoof-shaped leaves appear only after the flowers have set seed. This notoriously invasive Eurasian species is best grown in a container. Photograph by Carly Still

Tussilago farfara, known in the Middle Ages under the Latin names ungula caballina (”horse hoof”) and pes pulli (”foal’s foot”), is still called coltsfoot, ass’s foot, or bull’s foot in English, pas-de-poulain in French, pie d’asino in Italian, and hufflatich in German. These names all derive from the fancied resemblance of the young leaf to the foot of a quadruped. See an image of the plant in leaf. A slideshow of images of Tussilago farfara in all stages of growth is available at Arkive.org.

A plant of roadside verges and waste grounds in its homelands, coltsfoot readily accommodates itself to a variety of habitats. Brought to North America by early settlers as a medicinal herb of ancient standing, it was well established here by the nineteenth century. The otherwise naked margins of many roadsides in upstate New York and other parts of the northeastern U.S. and Canada are bright with coltsfoot in March/April. (The U.S.D.A. Plants Database includes a map of the range of this introduced species. For a full account of coltsfoot’s occurrence, botanical and ecological characteristics, and management, see the U.S. Forest Service Plant Database.

Detail of coltsfoot flower. Tussilago farfara is a member of the Asteraceae. This very large botanical family was formerly known as the Compositae, because the flowers are composite, consisting of small, tightly compacted disk flowers at the center, surrounded by ray flowers, or petals. Photograph by Carly Still

Despite a long life in Western herbal medicine, modern chemical analyses have shown that Tussilago contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids that have a toxic effect on human liver tissue. The sale of coltsfoot was banned in Germany for this reason, although a clonal form with undetectable levels of the damaging alkaloids, Tussilago farfara ‘Wein,’ was subsequently developed and registered.

The ancient herbalist Dioscorides remarks on the ephemeral nature of this spring-blooming plant, which he calls bechion: “. . . it doth quickly cast off both ye flower and ye stalk, whence some have thought ye herb to be without stalk and & without flower” (De Materia Medica, Book III. 126). He recommends the smoke of the dried leaves, taken in through a reed, for the treatment of dry cough; those who suffer from “Orthopnea” (breathlessness while lying down) should gape at the smoke and swallow it down for relief. Dioscorides, who knew the plant in all its phases, prescribed the use of the leaves only; his contemporary, the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder, was among those who believed coltsfoot to be without stem, flower, or seed. Pliny recommends that both the roots and the leaves of bechion, also known to him as tussilago, be burned and inhaled for cough, maintaining that a sip of raisin wine must be taken with each inhalation (Historia Naturalis, XXVI, 30).

Hildegard of Bingen asserts that coltsfoot is hot in action; she omits any discussion of its use as an antitussive, and speaks only of its value, when mixed with plantain root and mistletoe from a pear tree and taken in wine, in softening the liver of a person who has overindulged in many foods (Physica, Chapter CCXI).

According to the fifteenth-century herbal Hortus Sanitatis, coltsfoot is cold and moist in the second degree, a somewhat surprising classification for a remedy which one would expect to be warming and drying in action, given its prescription as a treatment for colds and coughs, a poultice for boils, and an aid to digestion for patients of a phlegmatic complexion. (For more on the humoral theory of medicine, and the qualities and degrees assigned to medicinal plants, see “Cool, Cooler, Coolest,” July 27, 2012.)

The sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard repeats the ancient recommendation as an inhalant, and also mentions that a decoction of the green leaves, or a syrup made from them, is good for coughs “that proceedeth from a thin rheume.” Coltsfoot leaves were included in “pectoral ales,” i.e., herbal beers brewed as cough medicines, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This famous antitussive and demulcent still had a place as a cough remedy in twentieth-century pharmacopeias. Richard Mabey, in his botanical and cultural compendium Flora Britannica, includes oral testimony by an informant with a sweet tooth who resorted to a rock candy flavored with the herb and known as coltsfoot rock (see image), because it was obtained from the chemists as a cough preparation rather than a confection, and so was not rationed in wartime.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Anderson, Frank J., ed. “Herbals through 1500,” The Illustrated Bartsch, Vol. 90. New York: Abaris, 1984.

Grieve, Maude. A Modern Herbal. 1931. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1971.

Gunther, Robert T., ed. The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, translated by John Goodyer 1655. 1934. Reprint: New York: Hafner Publishing, 1968.

Mabey, Richard. Flora Britannica. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996.

Pliny. Natural History, Vol. VII, Books XXIV–XXVII. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1956, reprinted 1966, revised 1980.

Throop, Priscilla, transl. Hildegard von Bingen’sPhysica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998.

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No mader, welde, or wood no litestre
Ne knew; the flees was of his former hewe;
Ne flesh ne wiste offence of egge or spere.
No coyn ne knew man which was fals or trewe,
No ship yet karf the wawes grene and blewe,
No marchaunt yit ne fette outlandish ware.

—Geoffrey Chaucer, The Former Age, ll. 17–22

Above, left: Dyer’s madder, a rough perennial herb native from the Eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia, grows in the bed devoted to plants used in medieval arts and crafts in Bonnefont cloister. The dried and pulverized roots of madder afforded a strong, fast red. Right: Detail from The Unicorn Defends Itself (from the Unicorn Tapestries). A range of colors—from pinks through bright reds, purplish reds, and oranges—could be achieved with madder, depending on the mordant used and the way in which the madder was combined with other colorants. (See Collections for more information about this work of art.)

The antiquity of the dyer’s craft is conveyed by Chaucer’s inclusion of the ignorance of madder, weld, and woad, the holy trinity of medieval dye plants, in his description of a period so remote and so devoid of the arts of civilization as to predate the use of knives, spears, coins, and ships. The use of madder is especially ancient, as demonstrated by this fragment of an Egyptian leather quiver in the Museum’s collection that may date to the 3rd millennium B.C.

While a number of plants in the genus Rubia have been exploited as dyestuffs, the most important of these in medieval European textile manufacture was Rubia tinctorum. This madder was introduced to Greco-Roman civilization from the East, where its use was long established. Both Dioscorides and the Roman natural historian Pliny note its economic importance as a cultivated plant; Pliny remarks that the madder plant is best known to the sordid and avaricious, because of the great profits entailed in growing it for coloring both wool and leather. He goes on to say that Italian madder is the most esteemed, although it is grown abundantly in nearly all the provinces of the Empire. In the Middle Ages, madder the Italian cities of Florence, Genoa, and Pisa were flourishing dye-trade cities; the fortunes of the great Florentine family of sculptors and ceramicists, the Della Robbia, were founded in the textile trade, and their name derives from rubia, the Italian for madder.

Above: A jar of ground madder root displayed in the garden shed; the dyestuff is prepared from the dried roots of plants that are at least two years old; the older the plant, the stronger the colorant.

Madder appears in the list of desirable plants to be cultivated on the imperial estates in the Carolingian edict De Capitulare Villis. (For more on this important document, and a list of the plants specified, visit the Wyrtig website.

Madder cultivation was well established in France in the course of the Middle Ages, although the center of madder production moved to the lowlands of Northern Europe, which was also the center for tapestry production. Standards to ensure the quality of the madder roots produced were decreed and enforced in European markets, and legal action was taken against those who supplied inferior roots or adulterated madder with other colorants. For a discussion of madder’s characteristics and a succinct history of its use in pre-modern times, see William Legget, Ancient and Medieval Dyes (p. 9–20).

Above: This twelfth-century game piece, depicting Samson wielding the jawbone of an ass against the Philistines, is made from elephant ivory colored with madder root. Although madder was of great importance in the medieval textile industry, its use was not restricted to dyeing cloth. (See Collections to learn more about this work of art.)

Alizarin, the principal colorant present in processed madder root, was the first natural pigment to be synthesized in 1868; by 1871 it was discovered that alizarin could be abstracted from coal tar. The ready availability of a cheap synthetic alizarin led to the collapse of the long-established economic market for madder, although the vibrancy of madder red, whose components include more than twenty-five other coloring agents beside alizarin, greatly exceeds that of a synthetic chemical dye. This was recognized by the nineteenth-century textile designer William Morris, who asserted that the art of dyeing depended on the use of ancient colorants like those mentioned in Pliny, and that no textiles of artistic value could be produced using contemporary commercial methods.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Cannon, John and Margaret. Dye Plants and Dyeing. Illustrated by Gretel Dalby-Quenet. Published in association with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. London: Herbert Press, 1994.

Cenciner, Robert. Madder Red: A History of luxury and trade. Richmond, England: Curzon Press, Reprinted 2001.

Freeman, Margaret B. The Unicorn Tapestries. New York: E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1956.

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Incomparably the most important yellow in medieval painting is the metal gold. Yellow pigments, however, played a significant part in the pageant of medieval technique. One of the most important services required of them was to imitate the appearance of gold. Another of their chief functions was to modify the qualities of greens, and to a less extent, of reds. Of all their uses, perhaps the least important was to represent yellow things.

—Daniel Thompson, The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting

The vegetable yellows used in medieval illumination were more readily prepared and much safer to use than mineral yellows like realgar or orpiment. Above, left: The brilliant red-orange stigmas of the autumn-blooming saffron crocus, used by medieval cooks as a colorant and a seasoning, were also exploited by illuminators. Right: Flower spikes of weld, the most ancient yellow dyestuff known. When processed as a pigment, this weedy biennial provided manuscript painters with a bright vegetable yellow.

A number of plants were exploited for coloring matter in the Middle Ages, whether to tint foodstuffs or to furnish dyes and pigments. By no means all, or even many, artist’s pigments were of vegetable origin; mineral colors were used for wall painting, where the more delicate and fugitive nature of vegetable colors was inappropriate. In book painting, a combination of vegetable and mineral colors was employed. The same plant that yielded a dye for textiles could be prepared as a pigment and used by illuminators. Several species produced a viable yellow, including weld, saffron, and celandine; as Daniel Thompson observes, these vegetable yellows served both to imitate the appearance of gold, and to modify greens and reds.

Weld (Reseda luteola) is a hardy annual or biennial herb. Native to south-central and western Europe, and widely naturalized throughout Europe, west and central Asia, and North Africa, it is thought to be the most ancient of yellow dyestuffs, utilized as early as the Neolithic period. It was preferred to all other vegetable yellows in the Middle Ages because of its relative permanency. (Weld was specified for the production of tapestries of high quality, including the Unicorn Tapestries. Nevertheless, the weld yellows and greens in medieval tapestry have proved far more fugitive than the vegetable blues and reds derived from madder (Rubia tinctorum) and woad (Isatis tinctoria).

The organic coloring matter in a dye solution could be mixed with, and chemically bound to, an inorganic base, such as chalk or clay. This preparation is known as lake; the mineral salts that bind the color to the base are called mordants. The color was precipitated out as an insoluble pigment that could be stored and ground as needed. The importance of weld as an artist’s pigment, rather than a dye, dates to the fourteenth century. A decoction of weld, made by chopping the leaves and flowering tops of the plant and steeping them in boiling water, might then be mixed with chalk and alum to create a weld lake. According to Daniel Thompson, weld lakes were used chiefly by manuscript painters, providing a bright vegetable yellow which could be substituted for the poisonous minerals known as orpiment and realgar, also used to imitate gold. (See the Eytmology Explorer website for the origins of the names orpiment and realgar.) In an appendix to The Art of Illumination devoted to technical observations on the richly illustrated Belles Heures manuscript, conservator Margaret Lawson notes that orpiment was commonly used, although recognized as problematic.

The preparation and use of pigments is described for us in manuals like Cennino Cennini’s important work, Il Libro dell’Arte (The Crafsman’s Handbook), which describes techniques founded in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century practice, although it may date to the early fifteenth century. The toxic nature of orpiment and realgar, both sulfides of arsenic, was recognized, as we see from the section of The Craftsman’s Handbook devoted to colors:

This color is an artificial one. It is made by alchemy, and it is really poisonous. And in color it is a handsome yellow more closely resembling gold than any other color. . . And this color . . . is the most refractory color to work up that there is in our profession. . . When you have got it powdered , put some clear water on it, and work it up as much as you can . . . Beware of soiling your mouth with it, lest you suffer personal injury. (On the Character of A Yellow Called Orpiment. Chapter XLVII)

Realgar was known to be even more dangerous:

This color is really poisonous. We do not use it, except sometimes on panel. . . There is no keeping company with it . . . It has to be ground a great deal with clear water. And look out for yourself. (On the Character of a Yellow which is called Realgar. Chapter XLVIII)

Two other vegetable yellows grown at The Cloisters were used as gold substitutes in the Middle Ages: saffron (Crocus sativus) and the greater celandine (Chelidonium majus). Long prized for its fragrance and savor as well as its color, saffron has been cultivated since ancient times and no longer exists in its wild form. The dried red-orange stigmas of the pale lilac flowers yield the spice. Saffron crocus blooms not in spring but in autumn, and the narrow grassy leaves continue to grow throughout the winter. The corms should be planted in well-drained soil in a warm, sunny location, preferably in late summer. Whether for culinary or artistic purposes, the thread-like stigmas should be picked out by hand as soon as the flowers open and dried immediately in the sun or a gentle heat, before being stored in the dark, in an airtight container. Some sixty thousand flowers are required to render an ounce of pure saffron. Only a few threads were necessary to yield a dish of color. (For more on celandine, see “Swallow Wort,” May 6, 2011.)

Both saffron and celandine yielded their color readily and were simpler to prepare than a weld lake. Either saffron threads or the bright orange latex expressed from the broken stems of celandine could be mixed with egg yolk and painted over powdered silver or tin to achieve the effect of gold. Of the two, saffron was the more important colorant in medieval book painting, although it was known to lose color over time when exposed to air. A pinch of the dried stamens of the saffron crocus were infused in a dish of glair (the white of an egg), which was beaten to a froth and left to stand. A “clothlet” soaked in saffron might also be dried and put into a dish with gum arabic, a resin derived from several species of acacia. While the transparent yellow tincture which resulted was sometimes used to enrich other colors—a very creditable grass green could be achieved by mixing saffron with verdigris—it was sometimes used alone for ornamental pen flourishes around colored initials or panels, and for golden glazes or highlights.

For more on medieval book arts, see both the blog and the print publication that accompanied the 2010 exhibition Art of Illumination.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:
Cannon, John and Margaret. Dye Plants and Dyeing. Illustrated by Gretel Dalby-Quenet. Published in association with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. London: Herbert Press, 1994.

Cennini, Cennino Andrea. The Craftsman’s Handbook “Il Libro dell’Arte”. Translated by Daniel V. Thompson, Jr. Reprint of 1933 Yale University Press edition. New York: Dover, 1954.

Husband, Timothy B. The Art of Illumination. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.

Thompson, Daniel V. The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting. With a forward by Bernard Berenson. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1956.

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The magpie in the leafless tree that spreads above the patriarchs and the bramble growing at the shackled feet of Man appear in a single scene from the magnificent allegorical tapestry Christ is Born as Man’s Redeemer (Episode from The Story of the Redemption of Man) on display at The Cloisters. Both the bird and the bush may be interpreted as symbolic expressions of Man’s fallen condition, which can yet be redeemed—the overarching theme of the series of ten hangings to which this work belongs.

Although the testimony of medieval bestiaries, sermons, allegories, and other sources encourage us to assign symbolic values to birds, plants, and animals, they are not always meant to bear a special meaning, and a very considerable range of meanings might be assigned to the same beast or plant. Sometimes exaggerated size or prominent placement is a clue that we are meant to pay special attention, but the possible significance of a natural symbol depends very much on the context of the individual work of art. I’d like to look at the magpie and the bramble shown above in the thematic context of human frailty, reconciliation, and redemption found in this tapestry.

The black-billed magpie (Pica pica) is a Eurasian species common in Europe and Britain. Before the seventeenth century, the bird was known simply as a “pie” or “pye,” from pie, the Old French rendering of the Latin pica, the feminine form of the name for woodpecker (see etymology), although magpies are corvids and are more closely related to crows, jackdaws, and jays than to woodpeckers. The English adjective “pied” or “piebald,” applied to particolored animals, is derived from the striking black-and-white plumage of the magpie. (The name for a baked dish with a pastry crust may ultimately have the same avian origin; see a related post on the blog The Salt).

Ancient and medieval natural historians were struck by the similarity of the magpie’s chatter to human speech (see, for example, The Natural History of Pliny), and the bird enjoyed a reputation for intelligence—an estimation borne out by modern research—but the character of the medieval magpie was as mixed as its plumage. The bird’s cleverness and its thieving habits were not altogether admirable; by the fifteenth century, a sly or wily person was called a “pye.” William Harrison, in the 1587 edition of his Description of England, tells a story of a chaplain, himself “the wiliest pye of all,” who persuades his patroness that the noisy magpies that pester her are not birds but souls in purgatory, clamoring for release. In a separate discussion of the birds of England, Harrison classes the magpie as an “unclean” bird, along with ravens and crows. According to the Continuum Encyclopedia of Animals in Art the magpie is associated with death in Western art, and appears as a “gallows bird” in the work of Northern painters like Pieter Bruegel the Elder (e.g., The Magpie on the Gallows) and Hieronymus Bosch. The magpie in Bosch’s Prodigal Son has been interpreted as an emblem of the prodigal’s soul, representing the phases of his conversion. The dual nature of the magpie, manifest in its black-and-white coloration, was also associated with frailty and inconstancy.

Magpies are frequently depicted in medieval art. In this detail from the left-hand panel of the Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece), a magpie perches high on the stepped gable above the entry to the courtyard of the Virgin’s house. (For a gallery of magpie images from medieval manuscripts, visit the Medieval Bestiary.)

I take the thorny bush at the feet of Man, which might look like a small-flowered wild rose at first blush, to be another member of the rose family, the common bramble or blackberry, Rubus fruticosus, with immature fruit. The unripe red “berry” of the bramble, actually a cluster of little drupelets, turns black as the fruit matures. (The ARKIVE website features a gallery of images of the common bramble in all its stages of growth, and a time-lapse video of the formidable speed with which it grows.) According to Genesis 3:17–18, thorns and thistles first came into the world when the ground was cursed after the fall of Adam and Eve. Thorny plants are often associated with error, sin, and the fallen state of humankind in medieval art. The black-fruited bramble was also associated with death. For another example of a thorny plant in an allegorical context of human frailty, also in The Cloisters collection, see Old Age Drives the Stag out of a Lake and the Hounds Heat, Grief, Cold, Anxiety, Age, and Heaviness Pursue Him, in which the stag representing Mankind leaps toward a large rosebush armed with formidable thorns.

For more information on the identification of plants in medieval tapestry, see
“Name That Plant” (January 28, 2011) and “Name That Plant, Continued” (February 5, 2011).

For further investigations into natural symbols in medieval tapestry, please join me at The Cloisters this Sunday, February 3, for “Birds, Beasts, and Flowers.” We’ll meet in the Main Hall at noon and spend an hour in the galleries. The program will repeat at 2:00 p.m. For more on gallery talks, programs, and events at the Museum, see Events at the Cloisters.

—Deirdre Larkin

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Above, left: The holiday decorations at The Cloisters are made by hand from plants linked with the celebration of Christmastide in the Middle Ages. A sheaf of wheat—an allusion to the eucharistic symbolism of the “altar-manger” and the transformation of the Christ Child into the bread of the Mass—stands near the altar frontal in Langon Chapel. Right: In the central panel of Gerard David’s triptych Nativity with Donors and Saints Jerome and Leonard, the wheat ears that fill the manger and spill from the sheaf in the foreground are shown in meticulous detail.

A strong link was made between wheat and the Nativity early in the history of Christian exegesis, based on the symbolism of the Eucharist. The identification was founded in the interpretation of such scriptural passages as John 6:41, in which Jesus identifies himself as “the bread come down from heaven.” In his homily on the Nativity, Homilia VIII in die Natalis Domini, the sixth-century Doctor of the Church, Saint Gregory the Great, translated “Bethlehem” as “house of bread” and expounded the transformation of the Christ Child from hay into wheat. These interpretations—as well as the practice of placing consecrated bread in the relic of the Holy Crib installed at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore and the liturgical manger plays that originated there and were revived and popularized by Saint Francis of Assisi—emphasized the sacramental aspect of the birth of Christ. The pictorial tradition of showing the infant Jesus lying on a heap of grain is found in representations of the Nativity from the end of the fifteenth century. As Maryan Ainsworth notes, the composition of the central panel in Gerard David’s early sixteenth-century triptych, in which Mary and Joseph adore the Christ Child, owes something to the Nativity by Hugo van Der Goes (see image) in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, painted about 1480. For a list of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian paintings with similar iconography, see Mirella D’Ancona Levi.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Ainsworth, Maryan W. Gerard David: Purity of Vision in an Age of Transition. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998.

Levi D’Ancona, Mirella. The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting. Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1977.

Schiller, Gertrud. Iconography of Christian Art. Translated by Janet Seligman. Vol. 1. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1971.

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Left: A wallflower in Bonnefont garden shows a cheerful yellow in late November. Wallflowers require a cold period to bloom, and generally flower in spring. Our plants were started indoors from seed and planted out in the garden this summer; the autumn chill spurred them into bloom. Right: Detail of a wallflower blooming above a hunter’s head in The Hunters Enter the Woods (from the Unicorn Tapestries).

The stalks of the Wall floure are full of green branches, the leaves are long, narrowe, smooth, slippery, of a blackish greene colour, and lesser than the leaves of stocke Gillofloures. The floures are small, yellow, very sweete of smell, and made of foure little leaves; which being past, there succeed long slender cods, in which is contained flat reddish seed. The whole plant is shrubby, of a wooddie substance, and can easily endure the colde of winter.

—John Gerard, “Of wall-Floures, or yellow Stocke-Gillo-floures,” Chap. 119, The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plants, 1633

The sweetly perfumed common wallflower (Erysimum cheiri) belongs to the mustard family, or Brassicaceae, along with such pungent vegetables as cabbage and horseradish. It is in no way related to the sweet violet, Viola odorata, or to the spicy-smelling clove pink (Dianthus caryophyllus), but it bore ancient and medieval names associated with both, to the confusion of plant and garden historians. The name “violet” was applied to more than one sweet-smelling species by the ancients; the French girofle and the English “gillyflower” given to the pink derived from the Latin name for clove, but in England a number of fragrant garden flowers in the mustard family, including stock (Matthiola incana), dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis), and wallflower, were all known as “stock gilliflowers.” John Harvey, an authority on medieval plants and gardens, identified the sweet-smelling kheiri mentioned in medieval Islamic sources with this same group of closely related plants. The fourteenth-century Dominican friar and horticulturist Henry Daniel didn’t regard the yellow wallflower, a native of Southern Europe, as a well-known plant in England, although he admired it and thought it easy to grow. While Daniel notes that the plant was called keyrus by the Saracens, it was known to him as Viola major, or “great violet.”

The Greek herbalist Dioscorides had discussed several plant forms under the single name of “Leukion,” or “white violet.” He noted that there were white, yellowish, blue, and purplish varieties of leukion, and that the yellowish variety was best for medicinal use. Medieval herbalists followed Dioscorides in regarding all these forms as varieties of a single plant, but Renaissance botanists and plantsmen like William Turner and John Gerard distinguished between the white or purplish-flowering “stock gilliflowers” and the yellow-flowering “cheiry,” or wallflower, in their reading of Dioscorides.

The history of the common English name “wallflower” is less convoluted: Gerard says that the wallflower grows on brick and stone walls, in the corners of churchyards everywhere, and on rubbish heaps and other stony places, flowering all year long, but especially in winter.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Anderson, Frank J., ed. “Herbals through 1500,” The Illustrated Bartsch, Vol. 90. New York: Abaris, 1984.

Gerard, John. The Herbal or General History of Plants. The Complete 1633 Edition as Revised and Enlarged by Thomas Johnson. New York: Dover, 1975.

Gunther, Robert T., ed. The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, translated by John Goodyer 1655. 1934. Reprint: New York: Hafner Publishing, 1968.

Harvey, John H. “Gilliflower and Carnation.” Garden History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1978), pp. 46-5

____Medieval Gardens. Beaverton, Oregon: Timber Press, 1981

Turner, William. The Names of Herbes, A.D. 1548. Edited by James Britten. London: N. Trübner & Co., 1881.

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Afternoon sun shining on the quince in Bonnefont cloister garden, which weathered last week’s “super storm” without damage. The Venetian wellhead at the center of the garden has been provided with a wooden shelter to protect it from the elements; the cover will be removed in the spring.  Photograph by Carly Still

The veteran quince and espaliered pear in Bonnefont garden, the pollarded crab apples in Cuxa cloister, the lady apple orchard, and the mature oaks and hollies outside the Museum walls have all come safely through the storms of the past two weeks, despite considerable damage in Fort Tryon Park.

On Halloween morning, staff were relieved to see that the gardens had come through unscathed. In the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, violent storms and the consequent destruction of crops were among the events attributed to the malice of witches. For a translation of the ninth-century bishop Agobard of Lyon’s rebuttal of the superstitious attribution of hail and thunder to human agency, visit the Medieval Sourcebook on the University of South Alabama website.

—Deirdre Larkin

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