40 FLORAL SYMBOLISM 



the sincerity and earnestness of those painters 

 who had preceded Raphael. The originator of 

 the movement, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, adopted 

 in his early work not only the simphcity of type 

 and the exceedingly careful finish of the primi- 

 tives, but borrowed also their system of sym- 

 bolism. His followers, however, and in par- 

 ticular Holman Hunt, broke away from the old 

 traditions of religious art, painting allegorical 

 subjects suggested by Christ's parables and say- 

 ings rather than the scenes of His birth and 

 Passion on which the dogmas of the Church were 

 founded, and with the traditional subjects they 

 left aside also the traditional symbols. 



The greatest of modern English mystical 

 painters, George Frederick Watts, uses flowers 

 as details, and apparently as symbols. But their 

 exact meanings are obscure and apparently not 

 those attributed to them by the great masters of 

 past centuries. 



