'In altum mittis radices humilitatis'. A Study of Marian Images in touch with Nature

Abstract

Certain Marian iconographic subjects have proved to be especially propitious to the representations of the Virgin in relation with some natural elements. The Mother of God is, often, in direct contact with the land in numerous images of the Virgin of Humility and in a garden, surrounded with flowers, in the Virgin of the Rose Garden; whereas, after her Assumption, lilies and roses bloom in the empty sepulcher. In all these cases, as we can figure out from their iconographic study, based on the Patristic and theological sources, the nature is an analogy of the virtues of the Virgin, but not always. In some images of the Scala Salutis, the ground allows to fix Mary in her human condition, unlike Christ, with whom she shares space. In conclusión, the high number of images where the nature, for any reason, is associated with the Mother of God, are not even neither casual or anecdotal, but a product of a complex visual rhetoric.