Tea at Trianon: Virgin of the Rose Bower

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 2, 2026

Virgin of the Rose Bower

The enclosed garden: “Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee.”

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

The painting by Stefan Lochner is among the most concentrated visual expressions of the western iconographic prototype we call the “hortus conclusus”. The phrase is drawn from the Bible’s Song of Songs that begins, “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse…” It has always functioned in Christian spiritual theology as a Marian title, signifying virginity, purity and the inviolate womb in which the Incarnation took place.
In the later Middle Ages, the hortus conclusus prototype was increasingly visualised using the forms of fashionable private pleasure gardens familiar to the aristocracy and urban elite. This convergence allowed Marian images to appropriate the language of cultivated leisure: enclosure, refinement, ordered nature, while reorienting it toward chastity, contemplation and sacred presence.
Our word “paradise” derives from the Old Persian pairidaeza, meaning an enclosed garden or walled park, a term that entered Greek as paradeisos and then Latin as paradisus. Originally denoting royal pleasure gardens, the word was adopted in the Septuagint to translate the Garden of Eden, permanently linking enclosure, order, and cultivated beauty with the biblical vision of divine dwelling. (Read more.)